Edited by Anna Orridge, Thursday, 13 Aug 2015, 11:30
"Yet alongside this conventional system a quite different form of politics is emerging, with a quite different structure... It is governed by what Martin Luther King, in a very different context, called "the fierce urgency of now”. It recognises that today's voters are the children of the digital Big Bang, bombarded with an unprecedented blitz of information, data and noise.
They exist in bubbles of digital mayhem, less bothered by the future and the past than by getting through life moment to moment. Their universe is defined by the immediate and the deafening data stream."
If this writer is correct, and the digital world has hurled us into a constant present, unheeding of the lessons of the past or the consequences of our actions in the future, what implications does this have for education? Should we, as practitioners, bend with the prevailing wind and exploit these mayfly, skimming tendencies? Or should we encourage learners to resist and dig deep? I'm not sure that it is as simple as D'Ancona suggests. Just because we are bombarded with information, it does not mean that we have lost our ability to critically distinguish the wheat from the chaff. We need to help our learners to hone their sifting skills and to surf the 'digital mayhem'.
The information blitz
"Yet alongside this conventional system a quite different form of politics is emerging, with a quite different structure... It is governed by what Martin Luther King, in a very different context, called "the fierce urgency of now”. It recognises that today's voters are the children of the digital Big Bang, bombarded with an unprecedented blitz of information, data and noise. They exist in bubbles of digital mayhem, less bothered by the future and the past than by getting through life moment to moment. Their universe is defined by the immediate and the deafening data stream."
(Matthew D'Ancona. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/09/jeremy-corbyn-donald-trump)
If this writer is correct, and the digital world has hurled us into a constant present, unheeding of the lessons of the past or the consequences of our actions in the future, what implications does this have for education? Should we, as practitioners, bend with the prevailing wind and exploit these mayfly, skimming tendencies? Or should we encourage learners to resist and dig deep?
I'm not sure that it is as simple as D'Ancona suggests. Just because we are bombarded with information, it does not mean that we have lost our ability to critically distinguish the wheat from the chaff. We need to help our learners to hone their sifting skills and to surf the 'digital mayhem'.