Culture

Last night I was sitting at the kitchen table eating ice cream with my family and I began a conversation with my dad about technology.  My dad is a computer hardware engineer and knows quite a bit about technology and creating soundboards and all sorts of stuff that I don’t understand, but it took him a good 3 months to figure out how to sufficiently text on his Galaxy 5S. He is one that tends to glorify the “good ol’ days” and looks fondly back on the times before all of his children were constantly plugged in. On Father’s Day, my dad was frustrated because he came into the living room on his special day and six out of six people were looking at six different screens. Laptops, cell phones, tablets, etc. Family time has been demolished, in his opinion, and it because of all these stupid devices! I was a bit nervous to open up this can of worms with my dad because I knew he had strong opinions on the matter, but I wanted to hear him out and understand why he believes the increased technology is bad.

The conversation that followed was insightful. I discussed the articles I’d read for class with him and referenced Digital Nation. We discussed how in Digital Nation they do a test on task switching and what the research is showing. My dad’s greatest concern is that there is an effect on the ability for the future generation to be creative because of all the distractions. He was explaining to me that there is process (obviously I don’t have any research on this because my dad just told me) that when someone is looking to create a new product or idea their brain needs at least 25 minutes to take the idea and piece the WHOLE product together in their mind. When a distraction comes it wipes the slate clean and they are back to rebuilding the full idea. The unanticipated issue is that each time we rebuild the idea in our mind we do it a little differently from the first time around and this is why our final products have more “bugs.” I was fascinated by this point and I believe to some extent it is a valid argument. We also had a deep conversation about the change in culture. I explained to my dad that we (I consider myself a digital native) truly believe that we are more effective when we are switching between tasks. I brought in this idea of a shift in culture, that our brains are learning in different ways and that we don’t even know what it is like any other way. I feel like the strongest point to be made is that this switch in culture, brain activity, and value focus has happened throughout all of history. This is not a new pattern, but it is following the exact pattern that human history has always followed.

Yes. There are human values and culture norms that I think are important to hold onto. I listed my opinion in my word cloud. Technology doesn’t necessarily diminish these values, but it does have an impact on how we define these values. We still value privacy, yet we allow Facebook to be an exception. Technology enables us to spend family time in different ways (skyping across the country, snap chatting with your boyfriend in Colorado, etc.). Technology shifts the way we socialize because it gives us different ways to communicate. We can communicate over broad expanses and reach out to many people at the same time, or we can still have a personal skype call or send a video through Pinterest messaging system. The way I see it is that we have more options on how we choose to communicate with those around us.

If you ask any teacher, they will tell you that technology has affected the culture of student bullying and harassment, but once again, this is not a new thing. Technology is not creating all of these world problems, but it is just transforming the current problems! We are experiencing this transfer of culture primarily in a horizontal direction, but that does not mean this is a bad thing. The bottom line, is that as teacher leaders in a digital age we must take the opportunity to embrace the cultural shift, accept that there will be those who do not want to accept the change, and do our best to diligently teach our students how to be polite citizens in this digital world. We are the leaders of this cultural shift because we are invested. We are involved in the conversation and we can see both sides of the argument. So, we must reach out and strengthen the values of society, yet give technology the “in” that it needs to continue to move progress forward. The shift in culture is not bad, it is just different.

Resources: 

http://video.pbs.org/video/1402987791/