Why Waterbug

After blogging for a few months, its about time for me to explain and flesh out the Waterbug metaphor.

This blog began as a supplement to a presentation I made at a college in-service. When I decided to continue it as my own professional, sometimes personal, blog, I wanted a theme to my ruminations. I was, and continue to be, both intrigued and wary of the creep of media and technology into my life and American culture. This ambivalence would be the frame of my thought box.

I once attended a conference on educational technology where a presenter described her quick movement from topic to topic as "waterbugging." The image of a spindly-legged insect rowing the water, barley overcoming the pull of current and wind, stuck with me. It seemed like an apt metaphor for my mental state as I struggled to balance my attention among the endless streams of information related to media policy and community technology (I was Chair of small community media center), distance education and politics, while failing to give wife and two young children the attention they deserved and needed. I had a need to be expert but was overwhelmed, to use Todd Gitlin's metaphor from Media Unlimited, by the Torrent.

Isn't managing competition for one's attention the fundamental challenge of the digitally connected world? I thought Ulises Ali Mejias framed it well in his post on folksonomies in which he points out how tags and social bookmarking are measures of human attention to data. Quoting Simon, in Colin Lankshear's and Michele Knobel's, New Literacies he writes:

Attention economics establishes that what information consumes is "the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it"

Overabundance indeed.

Back to the bug.

I have felt like a waterbug, experiencing many things on the surface but few deeply. This, I believe, is the dark side of the digital age. I feel a strong tension -- a surface tension -- between the torrent of digital communication and the directly experienced space and time I occupy. Do I want all this information? Is it really enrichinhg my life? If I fall through the surface tension into the depths, will I experience a baptism or drowning?

There is powerful potential for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to educate, create and express one's (many) identities, and to envigorate a desperately needed civic life. But after a decade of the Internet's presence in our daily life, is the world a better place? For every cultural bridge crossed or life saving or transforming information exchanged, there is an act of online predation, fraud and vandalism. For every expert learner there is another expert terrorist. A screen gets attention, while a proximate human being fades into the background.

I am wary of the religious fervor for technology. I sense a strain of utopianism in the zeal for the connected citizen and learner. The net may be "noosphere" of Christian mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin described in The Phenomenon of Man who believed evolution is on a course toward consciousness. This is a compelling vision, but every light casts a shadow.

When I worked in public television, back in a time when I never imagined being something like an instructional designer for online learning, I produced a program on a state funded agency that assisted k-12 schools in learning and using instructional technology. We visited a suburban second grade classroom where the students were creating electronic storyboards of the classic elementary school science experiment: how a seed becomes a flower. But as I looked around the room, there were no seeds in cups, only laptops with children trying to arrange pixels to look like seeds, roots and stems. What's wrong with this picture? In creating a simulation of life, are these kids missing the actual experience of life? Given our looming environmental crises, which is more important?

Even David Warlick, the champion of a meaningful education through technology, has succumbed to irrational exuberance for ed tech. He writes in Interactive Educator about his teenaged children and their friends playing video games:

Suddenly, I heard the booming voices of five or more
teenaged boys. Dashing into the TV room, I was surprised
to see only my son and his friend. However, they had
connected speakers to the game system so they could
participate in the ongoing team conversation as they
planned how they were going to approach their task.
There was the occasional joke and teenage razz.

It occurred to me how different my generation’s infor-
mation experience was from our children’s. My wife and I
were merely consuming information. My son, on the
other hand, was interacting with the content. As a result,
he was controlling the plot of the experience and collabo-
rating with other players to accomplish a larger goal and
enjoy fellowship with friends. As I walked back into my
office, I continued to listen, trying to figure out if I was
hearing people playing at work or working at play.

Interacting with content? Isn't this play? My children reach the same level of creative excitement with a cardboard box. I think it is the play that matters. What matters is the social navigation that children experience that help them develop who they are, who to trust, how to engage the world. Some of this can happen "on-line" but I am not sure the level and consequences of on-line social negotiation are the same. You can't simply leave the chat room or log off in the physical world.

But clearly I am no Luddite. There is no going back. Moving forward, I have much to reconcile in my mind. I am sounding a bit l like Neil Postman, but I know we do not have to "amuse ourselves to death." We can play our way to understanding. And I guess that is what Waterbugging is all about.

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