> Alan writes...
>
...
> The medium of the internet redefines the private/public distinction,
> redefines the meaning of memory and archive, redefines the meaning of
> collaboration in a public space, and so on.
> ...
> Also the effect of the internet on our notion of communication, on our
> sense of identity, on our participation in public life, and on our
> consciousness is not a static thing, but an evolving and changing force that
> affects the subject, which affects the process, which comes back to redefine
> the subject. It took hundreds of years for the paradigms engendered by the
> printing press to subsume our ideation about communication, knowledge,
> intelligence, consciousness. (See Ong's work.) Something similiar is
> happening with the computer/internet mediium. It would be a real education
> for your students for you to explore some of these issues with them rather
> than assuming or feeling frustrated that they don't "already know."
>
> Joanna
>
> I agree with some much of this, though I'm not sure that I assumed they
already knew how to do this stuff or that my frustration comes from the fact
that they don't. I think my frustration is with my inability to get, at all
quickly, to the point where I now feel I have a sense of the depth of the
gulf between us on this front. And it gets weird, some students - no
matter how invested in texting and Facebook - express a deep-seated,
almost-constitutional resistance to even the idea of using web resources (I
use drop.io a lot) to distribute readings, to using a blog for interactive
student-to-student exchanges of information/interpretation, to editing a
shared Google Doc, etc. It is an altogether different kind of emotion work
than I ever expected to have to engage in within my pedagogy...
technophobia, and it appears to have a vast array of sources and
expressions...
What's so telling and useful about your note is the first snippet I included above... teaching sociology means exploding their hyper-private, isolationist and xenophobic individualism which, in many cases, means starting by introducing the difference between public and private life, individual and collaborative effort, etc... before it can even be made a problem, much less re-structured for/with them.