And the Effect of the Internet Is….

Posted on October 27, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |

I’m a big fan of Henry Jenkins, the MIT professor who writes about convergence culture but today addresses what happens in a participatory culture with skills like media literacy (picked up here also at Terra Nova).

Henry gave me a quote some months back even when he couldn’t be sure was I writing for a paper or for the blog - I went through a phase of not saying which to see who would respond if they would just be quoted on a blog.

Two years ago I wrote about how computers affect the brain - if computers remember for us we don’t need to use the hippocampus, the part of the brain that stores information…. so what do you do with an idle hippocampus? The article also looked at how relinquishing memory tasks means we also downgrade memorials. Individual memory and social memory are integral to each other. I’m always looking out for signs that other parts of the brain-behaviour continuum are changing.

So says Henry in a participatory culture people, kids mainly, tend not to identify the origins of information. Information is amorphous and it’s out there. They don’t ask: can I verify it? And if they were to make that step they wouldn’t take the next one: how? How can I trace the origins of information and judge its value?

WHy that’s interesting to me is print makes information abstract and concrete at teh same time. It’s abstracted from any individual institution - it may be the Chruch writes something but once its in the general domain it doesn’t own that information. But it’s concrete in the sense that we can hold it in our hands. Cyber information seems to become wholly abstract. Henry’s post covers some tricks and tips for teachers to help kids understand origins and value.

I’m not sure it’ll work - history shows that informatin takes on different characteristics and we adapt our behaviour to that, rather than controlling how it evolves.

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