why crackbook?
Music: David Bowie: Reality (2003)
Recently an older friend asked if he should bother with singing on to Facebook. My first response was "no," that he did enough social networking without a screen. I said that it is little more than a way to procrastinate. I said that I keep my facebook page open when I'm doing something distasteful (like grading, or trying to write something that just won't come) in the hopes someone will want to "chat" (thanks, Matt, by the way). While I enjoy spending time on Facebook, I cannot say it is productive for much. Ok, so we can organize political groups, I'll admit that. But most of the time, nothing productive is achieved (oh, the hours I spent attacking someone's zombie will never be returned to me).
Just before I hit "send," however, I remembered two things. First, I remembered Katherine Hayles' talk here at UT a couple of years ago on changing modes of literacy. She argued that we need to change-up our pedagogy to incorporate more screens and examples. Although almost all research on "multi-tasking" demonstrates that one oscillates among attention targets (there is no such thing as simultaneously engaged attention targets), folks in younger generations think and process information differently than my generation. These folks are capable of switching how they attend to targets rapidly. This implicates a vast yet thin epistemological schema: a little is understood about a lot of things. The schema developed and nurtured in the academy for centuries is increasingly specialized and deep. Hayles seems to be predicting, Paul Virilio style, a coming crash. Let us dub this the "coming classroom crash," the moment when our student's brains have been completely integrated into multi-mediated dispositions such that they are incapable of learning the old, Sunday school way (open book, read, discuss).
Second, I remembered an NPR story from a few days ago about the resignation of Google, Inc., executive Eric Schmidt from Apple's board. Schmidt resigned after increasing scrutiny by FTC, but really, he would have eventually done it anyway because of the tension between Google and Apple. This tension has everything to do with Hayles' discussion of changing modes of consciousness and thought. Aside from getting snubbed by Apple for an iPhone application it developed, Google has also announced its intentions to develop a rival OS called "Chrome," which will utilize the browser as a locus for software. In other words, Google and Apple disagree about how the computing experience should be: Apple believes in the "old school" way of having applications ride on top of the OS, while Google thinks the Facebook model is the better way to go. In Facebook you have all kinds of applications running in the browser at the same time, status and chats and games and so forth.
So, before telling my friend to wave off Facebook, I said that it may be important to be on the dang thing because it gives one a sense of how his or her students are thinking; it may very well provide one a sense of how to modify teaching. For example, during lecture one might show an outline and lecture traditionally, switch to close reading for a while, then visit a webpage, then so a video, back to lecture, and so forth. I'm going to try to facebook my teaching in the fall for my Celebrity Culture course by doing this sort of multi-attention target approach. Perhaps if I do this, in class students will attend more studiously to the classroom and less to, well, Facebook.