Reactions to Digital Nation: Jame Paul Gee

The show comes across at times as Baby-Boomers whining about digital culture. Any powerful technology is neither good nor bad. It depends on how it is used. It can be used for good, bad, or neutral purposes (and, too, people can differ about what is good or bad). It is not that there are not dangers in digital culture. But these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part. For example, there are points in the film where people seem to imply that school would be a reflective, meditative, highly literate place if only it weren't for digital media, but yet many schools are without either digital media or highly reflective literacy practices. In fact, many kids turn to digital media because school offers them so little deep, engaging, and critical thinking.

Furthermore, the dangers of digital media need to be understood in relation to the potentials digital media have for good. For example, it is not really that helpful to say multitaskers are less good than focused thinkers. It is even worse to pre-theoretically equate multitasking with distraction. Rather, we need to know which approach (multi or single tasking) is best for or called for in different contexts. When is one required and not the other, when is one dangerous and not the other? There are complex situations and tasks that require multitasking. There are situations--like many a lecture in college--that are so slow and pointless at times that they invite "distraction". However, let me say that being able today to juxtapose different perspectives and flexibly switch among them and integrate them is an important skill in research and work. It is not the typical multitasking, but, nonetheless, a skill which is supported more and more by digital tools for problems that are too complex for a single focused narrow view. To take another example: addiction to games. Being told that a bunch of people are addicted is not all that helpful. Even worse is equating lots of time in and of itself to addiction. Why are they addicted? All for the same reasons? What else is going in their lives and cultures? What skills are they picking up if any? Is their massive time-on-task leading to anything or not? What percentage of players are addicted in any harmful sense?

The show makes much of the supposed loss of reflective contemplation of books. Before printing, when books were handwritten (and no spaces were left between words), people in the West read out loud, meditated on the sound and meaning slowly, and read the same book over and over again. Since books were hard to produce, people did not produce or read books on "trivial" topics. These readers would find what we see today as reflective and contemplative as a quick one-time read of often trivial material that was really not revisited enough and read slowly enough to be truly understood and appropriately valued. They might have produced a show saying how unreflective today's Baby Boomer readers are. We Baby Boomers would rightly respond that we did not have time to read things over and over, read widely, and in any case used reading for a lot more purposes--all good things, but the old timers would probably still be unimpressed. And yes there is a loss to not reading out loud and meditating on sound and meaning anymore.

Books--just like digital media--are not unmitigatedly good. Infinitely more people have engaged in murder and mayhem because of the Bible and the Koran than have ever done so because of digital media. And so far no one thinks God produced a game, but lots of people think he produced a book. Books can make people smarter or dumber--they can expose them to the world or hide reality from them. So any real understanding of them would have to be nuanced and contextual. For books we have long learned to ignore their power for bad. For digital media we are predisposed--at least if we are Baby Boomers--to look for the dangers.

There is also an important issue missed by the show and that is the question of how people from different social and economic groups use and benefit (or not) from digital media. I guess it is not surprising that American TV does not much deal with class issues, but there is little doubt that digital media are leveraged by some families to great benefit for their children in school as part of a larger learning and literacy ecology that includes digital media and print. Other families use digital media in quite different ways. Indeed, there are many different uses with many different outcomes--my simple dichotomy really will not do, but it raises the issue of equity and outcomes for diverse people in our society (and, indeed, world).

The film is indeed thought provoking. Its power is in being by and large an "etic" (outside) view of other people's new cultures. It is less good at giving a real feel for what those new cultures and their concomitant practices mean to young people today from the inside.