At the beginning of January, I wrote about my daily habit of waking up early and scrolling through my Facebook and Twitter feeds in order to get into “a critically reflective (troubling/troubled) space.” I’m calling this practice, “the troubling hour.” I’m still doing this almost every day, but I haven’t been posting about it.
I’d like to do a better job of documenting this habit. But how? I’m not sure yet; for now, I’ll just offer up a few past ideas, articles, and quotations that have made me curious and critically reflective.
25 January 2016
On January 25th, I found Fear of Screens by Nathan Jurgenson. He offers a great critique of Sherry Turkle’s latest book, Reclaiming Conversation. I read/skimmed her book not too long ago and tried to write about it, but I felt such an overwhelming sense that it was riling me up in unhelpful ways, that I abandoned my post—it’s festering as a draft on the dashboard of this blog as I write these words.
Speaking of drafts, I found the following quotation from Jurgenson’s article in another draft post:
This oversimplification pre-empts her critique, so that she asks not what technology (including language itself) affords or discourages, and how and under what circumstances, but “what do we forget when we talk through machines?” This slanted question elides the issue of how communication is always mediated by power, space, bodies, language, architecture, and other factors as well as by the particular medium through which it occurs. To prescribe one form of media — to privilege speaking over writing over texting — would require deep description and analysis of the context: who is speaking, to what ends, and why. Turkle too often assumes screen-mediated communication comes in only one flavor, which cannot grasp the complexities of our always augmented sociality, to say nothing of how screens are differently used by those with different abilities.
Yes! I’m so glad that Jurgenson wrote this…especially so I didn’t have to. This above quotation articulates a lot of why I am bothered by Turkle. And so does this passage that challenges the privileging of IRL (in real life) conversations:
Each time we say “IRL,” “face-to-face,” or “in person” to mean connection without screens, we frame what is “real” or who is a person in terms of their geographic proximity rather than other aspects of closeness — variables like attention, empathy, affect, erotics, all of which can be experienced at a distance. We should not conceptually preclude or discount all the ways intimacy, passion, love, joy, pleasure, closeness, pain, suffering, evil and all the visceral actualities of existence pass through the screen. “Face to face” should mean more than breathing the same air.
And this passage that troubles our need to be mindful of how/when we are connected:
The false sense that your health and humanity are at stake in when and how you look at your screen suggests that we are already too “mindful” about how we are connected. We have too many self-conscious rituals of disconnection. If being mindful means being preoccupied with a phony sense of balance and moderation, anchoring oneself to a fictitious “real” identity, and judging constantly who is normal and who is broken, then we may need something more mindless.
I want to spend some more time with this idea of being too mindful of our practices and of over-scrutinizing them. Even as I promote documenting habits and paying attention to/critically reflecting on them, I’m aware of how unhealthy over-scrutiny can be. I’ve experienced it in my own life and I’m currently bearing witness to its painful effects on my daughter.
9 February 2016
Yesterday, I read The Self-Obliterating Professor by Doug Anderson. In it, Anderson argues that the best teachers train and inspire students in ways that make them (the teacher) no longer necessary. Early on in the essay, Anderson quotes Thomas Davidson who once famously remarked:
The sooner a teacher makes himself useless the better. It is a great fault with some teachers that they may remain always necessary. I do not wish to count among these, but hope to be obliterated.
I like this idea of inspiring/training students to not need the teacher (it’s a nice contrast to Mark Bauerlein’s arrogant argument for students as disciplines in What’s the Point of a Professor?), but I’m extremely wary of calling for the obliteration of the professor.
Obliterate? To remove or destroy all traces. To efface. Expunge. This violent language may be useful for combatting the arrogance of some professors, especially those who fit Lorde’s mythical norm—white, male, tenured, heterosexual, Christian—and who are guaranteed status because of their ability to fit that norm, but what does obliteration do to many (now the majority?) professors whose status (and authority in the classroom and job security in the academy) is tenuous?
I have more to say about these questions. Perhaps I’ll incorporate my thoughts into my undisciplined teaching portfolio?