006. Old World Rules in a New Frontier?

While reading a 2007 piece by Broidy about her experiences with bringing a more subjective, critical view of information into the LIS instructional setting,  my mind snagged on this particular paragraph: “[We] wanted the students to understand and grapple with two opposing perspectives on what shifts in modes of communication and the transfer of information actually mean …  Sampaio and Aragon divide the theoretical universe between modern and postmostmodern, arguing that the modernist perspective posits that new information technologies are merely extensions of traditional print and speech media and as such do not require any alteration in how we think about or analyze them. McLuhan was right then; he’s right now. The opposing postmodern view is that the Internet, with all its potentials and pitfalls, represents entirely new modes of communication and opens the door to hitherto unforeseen forms of social interaction.”

While this observation was really just a side-note in the larger structure of Broidy’s essay, the idea took a hold of me with that startling strength that only totally novel ideas can really muster up at this point during summer school. In Libr559, as in other courses I’ve taken that focus solely or tangentially on the internet, I tend to have the bright, excited, unthinking passion of a zealot. I myself have experienced the internet as a world of creativity, boundlessness, instant gratification, insight, connection, and epiphany; this world of text and imagery and sound distilled down to pure jolts of sensation and then re-connected to form complex semantic patterns; the ability to communicate through an ever-evolving pastiche of post-modern disassembled pop-culture; the ability to leave your fingerprints, however dim, on the world of information and education and entertainment and cultural significance; all of it charms me deeply. I don’t hesitate to point out how much the internet has meant to me, individually. Since I turned sixteen and discovered the internet in earnest, I’ve never been able to say, in any earnestness, that I want to go back to a different time or era, because this cusp of weird, thrilling, fast-moving creativity feels exactly right to me.

All that being said, I have blind spots. I pretend the internet is a whole-new-world, rife with potential for social change; I pretend we all have the ability and, equally as importantly, the URGE to become new people, to transcend gender or ethnicity or socioeconomic strata or physical appearance or or or … you get the idea. I ignore my own implicit privilege: my access to computers, my access to an internet connection, my free time to learn and use new technologies. I also ignore the limitations of the medium itself. Connection, collaboration, and connectivity have all been pushed to the forefront by the digital world, but after all, we are still communicating via text primarily, and less predominantly, via image, sound, video. Is the online world really a whole new frontier or just a continuation of an ongoing trend, still vulnerable to all the biases and burdens of our preexisting world, only made perhaps more dangerous by the implicit opinion of individuals such as myself who overlook gaps in usage and assume, too naively, too insularly, that everyone has equal opportunities online. Our pre-existing comfort with the mediums that converge together on the internet is a benefit in many ways, but it’s important to recognize the limitations that the internet brings along with its burgeoning potential for a democratic landscape.