Message from canaise

[Anonymous]

The film THE WAY HOME is one I've used in conjunction with AVALON. In both films technology is show as unhelpful to true communication. The pace in the prior is slow, lovely, like nature itself, unfolding like a flower. In AVALON the television is an ever present entity and the film ends with what was once a loving, large and close extended immigrant family, disintegrated into two people eating on TV trays, living in suburbia and lonely. It's a metaphor for our time. It's the cell phone and TV now.

When I asked my freshmen to write an essay on the impact of television on family communication, one student told me that she had left her essay on the kitchen table and that her dad had read it. He had not realized that his family didn't or rarely ate together. She missed this. He instituted a family meal two times a week with TV off. Another student told me that she had become aware that her dad only gave her an audience during a commercial.

Here's something to think about. We are asked to post lots of responses here, but how many of us are reading other people's work? We're madly getting our requirements taken care of. So, is there greater or lesser communication and what is the quality of that communication?

An observation: As Clayton was lecturing, many were online, swishing into outer space, not mentally present in the room. I'm not judging, just observing. If you're not "here" for your teacher, do you get what's being communicated? Or, since we will be given a copy of the lecture, are we multi-tasking because we must keep up with the frantic forward momentum of bits and bites of information being thrown at us from every direction? So, I ask you, "Is this communication? Is this the dissemination of knowledge?" Is it possible to ask students to stop, look and listen? Can we ask them for full, unadulterated attention? I see many of us don't look at each other anymore. We speak while our eyes are glued to a screen

Two books written long ago are THE PLUG IN DRUG and THE GLASS TIT. Both outdated now, I'm sure, but they detail the physiological effects on the brain and nervous system of being plugged into this virtual reality. I've no doubt that the brains of my young classmates are faster and physiologically different from mine.