Today I began the second round of three conferences that I’ll hit in a two week time span this fall. However, in contrast to the standard conference fare, which usually involves hopping a plane to some metropolis in another time zone, I had only to walk across campus to join the New Media Consortium Symposium. That’s not because the NMC Symposium was being held on my very own campus. Rather, I joined 2 other individuals in the Academy of Teaching and Learning as we partook of the event together in Second Life.
Source: nmc.org
The experience was at first somewhat disorienting. I arrived ahead of schedule for Gardner Campbell’s keynote address and, as a result, caught the end of an interactive session. At one side of the screen, there was a live chat going on between the audience members and the speaker. The speaker’s avatar circled the arena, orating, posing questions, responding to comments coming across on the live chat. The avatars of the other participants were variously sprinkled about. With so much to pay attention to, I wasn’t sure where to direct.
By the time Gardner took the virtual podium, I was better-adjusted and certainly eager to focus on his words. His talk, “Two Painters, One Poet, and Some Sweet Soul Music” covered a subject about which I’ve heard him speak on multiple occasions, though never quite in this way– the fundamental fears and anxieties related to computers and education. In particular, he set out to explore two types of fear: fear of making and fear of connecting. In poetic succession, Gardner related a series of illustrations (starting with the myths of Prometheus and Icarus, moving on to romantic love and the broken heart) arguing that every instance of making and human capability carries with it fear. In romantic love, we dare, we risk the broken heart and all its externalities because we yearn for connection. And when the connection is broken or unrequited, we get sick, nauseous. Our fear of making and connecting is in some respects a fear of being human because we become most fully human in interaction with each other. So on some level, we fear computers because they are avenues of creation and connection, because we fear our own humanity.
Earlier, in anticipation of his talk and explication of its name, Gardner wrote:
The one poet I mean is Robert Browning, and the two painters are Andrea del Sarto and Filippo Lippi, each of whom is portrayed in a dramatic monologue by Browning. One of the things I hope to explore is how these two artists, as imagined by Browning, vividly inhabit two contradictory attitudes toward art, risk, nature, love, and, oh, the meaning of life in relation to those things. A far cry from technology, unless one considers art a technology, which I most certainly do. And even if that seems a stretch to you, I think you’ll find that these two poets’ attitudes toward art and vocation map quite interestingly onto attitudes toward information and communication technologies–or computers more generally–at this stage of the game.
In his talk, Gardner went on to explore the tension between the creative drive as experienced by del Sarto and Lippi in recognition of the fact that the human capacity to create is fearful. For del Sarto the thing that most empowered him as an artist (creativity), was the thing most robbed him. He was “looking for the perfect management system.” Yet Lippi saw our powers of creation not as snares, but as bridges that can honor the unseen world through what is seen. Lippi created art that restored the world to him. The computer, the internet would frighten del Sarto because he fears love and connection. For Lippi, the converse.
And so, said Gardner, if we fear that our machines will explode and take us with them (reference to Star Trek episode), then perhaps we can learn that thunder and lightning are sometimes also signs of a mighty love (Otis Redding – Knock on Wood). With this, he introduced the last portion of his talk in which he let play clips of music that sang his themes and moved his audience (I, for one, was definitely dancing in my seat). If we fear that computers erase our identities, perhaps we can become more aware of authentic encounter. We must think of our networked conversations as a kind of music. What if the internet has got a good beat and you really can dance to it? (Arthur Conley – Sweet Soul Music) What if we don’t run from the potential heartbreak but we seek out the possibility of connection, whether it is love or heartbreak? What if we let computers empower us to connect? What if we simply acknowledge how unpredictable and risky it is to be fully human? Must we then think about how difficult it is that computers amplify all the uncertainties, and challenges of being fully human? What if we make one pledge– the one pledge that truly matters, that networked computing has truly enabled us to do? (Stand By Me) No one can tell us that the outcome will be happy; no one can offer guarantees except that it will be an awesome ride.
I only hope my paraphrasing does justice to his magnificent closing. A wonderful talk. A wonderful use of music to tap the emotional component behind it.