So you’re sitting in the library in the middle of winter, wearing a stiff dress shirt and downing black coffee, with the window panes beside you hazy with condensation, and a dim black sky beyond them. And you’re highlighting banal bits of data, information, commentary from some great tome of a book, and you’re wading through the soporific sludge of some arcane field of academic study, with nothing besides an index and a contents page to help you navigate. You’ve been here all day. There’s crumpled paper all around. Your bed seems miles and hours away.
This is my idea of all student life before, approximately, 2010. With a degree of hyperbole, I admit. But it’s no secret that given the rapid development in technology over the last few decades, there’s such a gulf between the then and the now that the then is all but incomprehensible. How impossible it seems for people to have navigated the world without instant access to directions, transport, or local information. L.P. Hartley said that ‘the past is a foreign country.’ Well, good luck finding your way around.
I bring this up as a defence of our digital age in a time when its merits are being questioned. Recently, an outage affecting the company Cloudflare brought down websites including X, Spotify, and Zoom. Although, in a small positive, it also took out ChatGPT. Every cloud, et cetera. One website relying on Cloudflare is Taylor & Francis, publisher of numerous academic journals. We therefore have to confront the likelihood that tools we rely on as students may become unavailable at random.
Some might suppose that we need a whole-hearted return to analogue studying – amid a pushback against technology in academia altogether. Some lecturers, for example, have taken to banning laptops from lectures. If this sounds wise to you, perhaps you also believe that everything sounds better on vinyl, and humanity took a turn for the worse just after the invention of the wheel. Opposable thumbs – they were the real original sin, right?
Digital learning is second-rate in only one manner: I’m not as engaged by a book on a screen than one that I’m holding. But this is remedied by the simple act of reading a physical book while employing other resources in tandem when necessary. The instinct against modern technology in totality belies its benefits and, frankly, seems curmudgeonly and reactionary.
Are we really litigating the academic utility of modern technology? The services we now use allow for far greater access to academic resources: research papers are a button-click away, rather than two bus rides and the tiresome task of scouring the library shelves. It’s simply much easier than the slog that would otherwise greet us.
Meanwhile, in a modern workplace, digital literacy is to be cherished – especially if competing for a job against the sort of person who can’t fathom the intricacies of, say, turning off the flashlight on their phone. How do you expect to maintain that literacy without putting it to use?
And a couple of hours with one website unavailable – is that much different than prior to technology’s advent? Libraries, study buildings: these can close as well. Inconvenience was always here. It’s just that recently it’s had a software update.
Some balance with more traditional learning wouldn’t harm anyone. Buying a paperback doesn’t mean blocking out Gmail. I see no issue with students opting for analogue options where it suits. But let’s not pretend things haven’t gotten better since the laptop overtook the notepad. No, reading a book won’t make you a Luddite. But becoming a Luddite won’t bring you enlightenment.
Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
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Analogue nostalgia won’t save academia: a defence of the digital age
So you’re sitting in the library in the middle of winter, wearing a stiff dress shirt and downing black coffee, with the window panes beside you hazy with condensation, and a dim black sky beyond them. And you’re highlighting banal bits of data, information, commentary from some great tome of a book, and you’re wading through the soporific sludge of some arcane field of academic study, with nothing besides an index and a contents page to help you navigate. You’ve been here all day. There’s crumpled paper all around. Your bed seems miles and hours away.
This is my idea of all student life before, approximately, 2010. With a degree of hyperbole, I admit. But it’s no secret that given the rapid development in technology over the last few decades, there’s such a gulf between the then and the now that the then is all but incomprehensible. How impossible it seems for people to have navigated the world without instant access to directions, transport, or local information. L.P. Hartley said that ‘the past is a foreign country.’ Well, good luck finding your way around.
I bring this up as a defence of our digital age in a time when its merits are being questioned. Recently, an outage affecting the company Cloudflare brought down websites including X, Spotify, and Zoom. Although, in a small positive, it also took out ChatGPT. Every cloud, et cetera. One website relying on Cloudflare is Taylor & Francis, publisher of numerous academic journals. We therefore have to confront the likelihood that tools we rely on as students may become unavailable at random.
Some might suppose that we need a whole-hearted return to analogue studying – amid a pushback against technology in academia altogether. Some lecturers, for example, have taken to banning laptops from lectures. If this sounds wise to you, perhaps you also believe that everything sounds better on vinyl, and humanity took a turn for the worse just after the invention of the wheel. Opposable thumbs – they were the real original sin, right?
Digital learning is second-rate in only one manner: I’m not as engaged by a book on a screen than one that I’m holding. But this is remedied by the simple act of reading a physical book while employing other resources in tandem when necessary. The instinct against modern technology in totality belies its benefits and, frankly, seems curmudgeonly and reactionary.
Are we really litigating the academic utility of modern technology? The services we now use allow for far greater access to academic resources: research papers are a button-click away, rather than two bus rides and the tiresome task of scouring the library shelves. It’s simply much easier than the slog that would otherwise greet us.
Meanwhile, in a modern workplace, digital literacy is to be cherished – especially if competing for a job against the sort of person who can’t fathom the intricacies of, say, turning off the flashlight on their phone. How do you expect to maintain that literacy without putting it to use?
And a couple of hours with one website unavailable – is that much different than prior to technology’s advent? Libraries, study buildings: these can close as well. Inconvenience was always here. It’s just that recently it’s had a software update.
Some balance with more traditional learning wouldn’t harm anyone. Buying a paperback doesn’t mean blocking out Gmail. I see no issue with students opting for analogue options where it suits. But let’s not pretend things haven’t gotten better since the laptop overtook the notepad. No, reading a book won’t make you a Luddite. But becoming a Luddite won’t bring you enlightenment.
Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
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