The Medium is the Problem

Lately I have been having a number of conversations about computers, or more specifically, about how computers have not lived up to some perceived promise. The most often cited example is a simple observation that email has become a chore, or is filled with mostly useless spam that must be searched and discarded in order to get to the "real work" or the "real messages." I think this observation is a symptom of a larger problem and is of note for educators who are using the computer as a teaching tool. I do not yet know what to do about it, but I would like to try to explain one aspect of it here.

Way back when, at the dawn of time, when we all watched the same few channels on broadcast television and listened to vinyl records on record players that reproduced every scratch and bit of dust, there was an observer of media named Marshall McLuhan. He has often been reduced to the simplistic quote "the medium is the message." Although he wrote years before the development of the personal computer, his observations have direct bearing on what I am seeing in my own life, and in the reaction of other people to electronic learning.

I should add some additional history here – I started having computer conversations on discussion boards hosted on CompuServe in the early 1990's. At the time there was a real sense of wonder among the members of the on-line community that we had the ability to converse across distance and time, and I think it is a tribute to the depth of some of those discussions that I still have some of the archives. The one persistent memory I have of this time was looking forward to seeing what was in my email box in the morning and communicating, learning from and sharing with the on-line community. I do not do that anymore - that sense of wonder faded along with the sense of community and shared experience in a flood of unwanted and unpleasant emails, some delivered as part of a list, others just arriving in a broad wash of irrelevance.

There are a number of concepts that McLuhan brought into the language beyond the phrase most associated with him; the idea of media as an extension of man, the idea of hot and cold media, the idea that the medium changes the message. These do have relevance to electronic educators, but the one that I find myself returning to frequently of late to explain the decline of email is his concept of a "break boundary." This is the idea that as a new medium grows it gains users and attention, spreading within the confines of its initial definition until it reaches a break boundary, the point at which the system "suddenly changes into another or passes some point of no return in its dynamic processes." This is expressed differently by the question, "what does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?" In the case of email it because very clear, it became an unwieldy chore, worse at preventing communication than the void it sought to fill. I think that the people (and I include myself here) who are complaining about email are experiencing this boundary/reversal first hand.

But so what? What does this have to do with e-learning?

There is a history of teaching with technology written by Reiser (part 1 links are available from http://www.citeulike.org/user/ablam/article/2946040 - part 2 I leave to your creative research skills) that describes the march of technology into, and out of, our classrooms. The basic theme, starting with lantern slides and continued thru every wave of technology from film strips and radio, to film and television, repeats with depressing regularity. The new technology is heralded as the solution to all our problems and is embraced enthusiastically. After several years it becomes apparent that it was not quite what we had hoped and it starts to be pushed aside. Soon, early adopters discover a new technology that promises to be the solution to all our problems. Repeat the loop.

Although I have focused on email, that is because it is the most common element among computer users. When I think of electronic learning, I see and hear lot of discussion about the next wave of teaching tools. Those discussions center on what are generally described as collaborative or Web 2.0 tools. What I see when I look at many of them is an attempt to bypass the problems or perceived limitations of the previous technology. What I am also seeing is that the cycle is shortening – email became instant messaging, but that soon had too much noise on the channel. Soon came tweeting, which seems to try to avoid the noise by remaining terse and pithy, but which runs the risk of immediately degenerating to a channel of nothing but noise (see the Verizon commercial about people sending tweets of "I am on the porch"- it is already a joke).

As I think of training, and the role of technology in training, I think we risk spending a great deal of time, money and energy to go nowhere in particular. It seems that before we fully understand, embrace and use a technology, we become bored by it and move on to the next one with exciting new bells and cool sounding whistles. The goal is not technology, it is communication.

R