Homo Zappiens ?
Not quite sure what to say. The excerpt below is from a heady, dense and delicious piece by Stephen Downes, speaking at a conference in Australia, about what elearning is today, and what it could be given the link-defined ways of cognitive navigation through information on the Web. Astonishing.
This, after watching David Weinberger’s address to librarians at the Library of Congress earlier today (I’ve already linked to it tice, so I won’t go for the hat trick).
I wonder if all this input will change my brain waves as I sleep tonight.
And if language is the metaphor, then language itself is the problem. For everything that language is – static, linear, structured, ordered, hierarchal – the internet isn’t. We are locked in language. We are locked into the structure of language, the ordered, neat idea that language represents, the management, the organization, language as plan, language as structure, language as order, the world made neat, and tidy – the world made dull, uniform, and largely artificial. We must leave language behind, and forge our way toward something new.
21:00 Leaving Language
When I say that we must leave language behind, I mean it quite literally. Language must be replaced, is in the process of being replaced, by a mélange of multimedia, of a chaotic mixture of text and symbols, audio and video, of words and images, topics and theses, concepts and criticisms, not neatly stacked into rows and distributed through an orderly process of content management, but blasted aimlessly into the environment, a wall of sound and sensation, not written but presented, not read but perceived.
The idea is as audacious as it is breathtaking. But it is happening today. You have probably heard of the concept of the digital immigrant and the digital native. The idea that the digital native, one who was born with today’s electronic technology, one who got his or her first mobile phone before his or her first pencil (if they got a pencil at all), one who is part of, as some characterize it, the “MTV generation.” The digital native, we are told, operates at “twitch speed,” multitasks, and – quite literally – thinks not in an orderly progression of thought but in multiple parallel threads, associating seemingly at random, communicating not so much through sentences and paragraphs as through a barrage of images and (something like) text.
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