Twitterive: Prologue
A listing of all of my Tweets, as few of them as there are, can be found at my Twitter page. The theme that will run throughout my Twitterive is inspired by my own dislike of Twitter, and that is discomfort in a particular place as a whole. I am part of a generation that is supposed to be entirely at home on the Internet and with technology, but society has begun advancing at such a pace that some systems, such as academia, are finding it impossible to advance at an equal pace. Such programs then try feebly to will themselves back into the minds of a public that had already moved forward. In doing so, such systems move us backward and hinder our further advancement, rather than aid it and facilitate it as they would have us believe.
Along with discomfort, there is also a degree of fear and anxiety to this evolution of the role technology plays in our lives. This narrative, then, will attempt to follow my time in an aging educational system that is striving to keep itself relevant in the technological age. Starting with my Freshman year at college and following the general course of my time at Rowan University until now, the Twitterive will give a glimpse into my perspective of how my generation is facing, despite our status as digital natives, difficulties in adapting to a world that is having too much trouble keeping up with the times. A antiquated system hopelessly lost in a modern era has begun to try and catch up, but is doing so in all the wrong ways.
Along with discomfort, there is also a degree of fear and anxiety to this evolution of the role technology plays in our lives. This narrative, then, will attempt to follow my time in an aging educational system that is striving to keep itself relevant in the technological age. Starting with my Freshman year at college and following the general course of my time at Rowan University until now, the Twitterive will give a glimpse into my perspective of how my generation is facing, despite our status as digital natives, difficulties in adapting to a world that is having too much trouble keeping up with the times. A antiquated system hopelessly lost in a modern era has begun to try and catch up, but is doing so in all the wrong ways.
Too Cool For School: Academia and the Boxing-Out of the Digital Native
What I found at college would indeed be something very different from what I had expected. I would enter college and within mere weeks, I had sat through five different classes. Five different experiences that, although the subjects weren't similar at all, the overarching message of how to achieve in them was. I had words thrown at me, one's I'm very familiar with but they seemed foreign and forced coming out of the mouths of professors and adjuncts. These people had no clue what they were talking about. They knew what technology was and they recognized its almost immeasurable power to change people's lives and enhance our educations, but they had no idea how we were using it. They were placing emphasis on all the wrong technologies and somewhere along the way, in the midst of all their modernization and progressive thinking, they forgot about what was important. For three years now I've had professors speak words at me, and while in the course of lecture it might make sense, a lot of the time it plays out in my head a lot like this:
And to me that's scary. It's intimidating and it's wrong. Seemingly lost in a world in which technology has taken over, scholars and academics have turned to this idea of technology as an unstoppable and impossible to understand force of nature. These people aren't digital immigrants and I've only had a handful of professors who can claim to be; the youngest ones, still not possibly as capable around technology as myself and my peers. It's painful sitting in a class and watching anybody older than myself struggle with a computer, or speakers, or a projector, because I know that given a few minutes I could probably master the technology and have the knowledge stored away for an indefinite amount of time. I know I can use technology and I do use it. Every day I use Facebook and my computer and my phone and e-mail and it's all so simple to me because I'm adaptable and I've grown up with these types of ideas. But the way academia approaches technology is so basic and offensive to people who really do understand it. Professors give students something that looks like this (left):
When really we're predisposed to fully understand the complexities of the other (right). College has proven to be just like that, for me at least. I've been given plane safety manuals when you could probably plop me down behind the controls of the metaphorical plane and I could most likely fly the damn thing, if not at least land it somewhere safely. Twitter is the most abused of these technologies because as long as I've been at Rowan it's been heralded as this game-changer. It's the new blogging, it's better than YouTube, it's the way of the future, but to people of my generation, it's the way of a few years ago. Twitter is old now. Facebook is even old, everything we use is old simply because we haven't found something better and just because academia has started using it while it's on its way out with us, it thinks it's caught up. Professors think that they can tell the future, that they can read into the vast implications that Twitter and similar technologies have, but in my own personal experience, it's been that these things effect our writing in the most minute ways. If Twitter is going to effect my writing, it's going to do so on a subconscious level and if you'd like to take a look at the academic, societal, or shcolarly implications of that then by all means teach me. But don't ask me to Tweet and write. Rather prompt me to Tweet, write, Tweet some more, write, and look back on the process. Don't make them seem symbiotic because they're not. One will not wither and die without the other contrary to what appears to be popular opinion amongst a majority of professors.
What's strange and more distrubing than the forced use of technology that schools are imposing on students is the blissful ignorance that they approach the situation with. They claim to be helping students progress academically when really the use of technology within the classroom is simply a hindrance. It gets in the way of what would otherwise be a functional and progressive environment that really would be conducive to learning. But rather a source that doesn't fully understand technology nor the impact it has on the everyday lives of students is claiming that it does; it places itself at the head of a classroom, gets on a soapbox and proclaims that technology is the future and that we have to do this and that in this way and that way in order to succeed. But we already know this. The digital native is already completely aware of this when you've got the relics of a previous generation trying to stay relevant and current, it almost sounds like they are trying to be some sort of dystopian prophets. Like they're trying to tell the future that they're already living in and that they want so badly to control every element of because it's what they're used to being able to do.
Now what does that mean? What does a bunch of words thrown together to form a song mean? It's a proclamation of society. It's the idea that our culture is so obsessed with bettering itself and making itself functional that we're putting so much emphasis on technology to do it. We're forgetting that human beings are an essential component, that we're not only the ones who made the technology but also that we're the ones who continue to use it. It's become such an ingrained part in our everyday lives, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It can be good if we let it.
This idea that technology can influence writing is easily acceptable, but college shouldn't force it on us. As a student, I'm on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and all of the social networking sites like them every day. I'm on the when I wake up in the morning, when I work, and before I go to bed. They are my comfort zone because I'm a digital native. I understand how they work and given just a little bit of thought I begin to also understand how they make me work. If nothing else, college has taught me that writing cannot be made to be influenced and worked upon by technology but rather that it exists as a product of it in our everyday lives.
Twitter is a poison. It's gotten into the heads of society and celebrities and professors who think that it's the greatest thing in the world. It's sharing useless information and personal facts that the world doesn't need to know. But it's fast. And it's simple. And people do it. So just like every other technology, colleges have begun thinking that it's useful and they've started using it as a learning tool, but I can't accept that. I can't accept that 160 characters is the future of writing. I love words and description and to rob an audience of that just because they've adapted a short attention span doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do. I can't stand Twitter and I can't bear the thought that it's become this model for contemporary writing and that modern thought has to stem from something like it. My tweets are barely even tweets, but rather forced ideas, things that I had to put on the page because I was being evaluated by how well I used it and how much I was able to learn from my said use of it. A digital native was being judged based on how he used a technology that it took him all of five minutes to master. And just because I didn't prefer it to regular writing, I was an abnormality in the college circuit. So I tweeted to seem normal and to seem functional and to pass a course or two, but I won't do it anymore. I'll delete my Twitter or rather forget that it ever existed at all, and I would hope that rather than suffer from that, my writing would instead improve and become more dynamic because I made the choice to step away from technology and use my brain for a change.
This idea that technology can influence writing is easily acceptable, but college shouldn't force it on us. As a student, I'm on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and all of the social networking sites like them every day. I'm on the when I wake up in the morning, when I work, and before I go to bed. They are my comfort zone because I'm a digital native. I understand how they work and given just a little bit of thought I begin to also understand how they make me work. If nothing else, college has taught me that writing cannot be made to be influenced and worked upon by technology but rather that it exists as a product of it in our everyday lives.
Twitter is a poison. It's gotten into the heads of society and celebrities and professors who think that it's the greatest thing in the world. It's sharing useless information and personal facts that the world doesn't need to know. But it's fast. And it's simple. And people do it. So just like every other technology, colleges have begun thinking that it's useful and they've started using it as a learning tool, but I can't accept that. I can't accept that 160 characters is the future of writing. I love words and description and to rob an audience of that just because they've adapted a short attention span doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do. I can't stand Twitter and I can't bear the thought that it's become this model for contemporary writing and that modern thought has to stem from something like it. My tweets are barely even tweets, but rather forced ideas, things that I had to put on the page because I was being evaluated by how well I used it and how much I was able to learn from my said use of it. A digital native was being judged based on how he used a technology that it took him all of five minutes to master. And just because I didn't prefer it to regular writing, I was an abnormality in the college circuit. So I tweeted to seem normal and to seem functional and to pass a course or two, but I won't do it anymore. I'll delete my Twitter or rather forget that it ever existed at all, and I would hope that rather than suffer from that, my writing would instead improve and become more dynamic because I made the choice to step away from technology and use my brain for a change.