Accommodation and the New Media Mind
A Guest Post by Christopher Smit, associate professor of media studies at Calvin College and author of The Exile of Britney Spears.
The continued success of any institution of higher education has always been tethered to its willingness to be flexible, expandable, and ruthlessly committed to students. As budgets shrink, student demographics shift, and debates about what constitutes “liberal arts education” heat up, this is now, perhaps more than ever, the case. Tried and true formulas are being challenged by new economic, technological, and cultural changes. And when I look around at the faces of my colleagues, I see a bit of panic.
A good deal of our contemporary unease seems to originate from successful books like The Shallows by Nicolas Carr in which it is argued that the digital age is negatively affecting the brain arrangements of our students. Carr’s book claims that the silent generation has been the victim of a cross cultural dumbing down; the vast amounts of surface communication offered by social networking, Google, blogs, etc., has left no room for depth of thought. Bad news for a generation that seems more interested in speed than it is in quality. The new media mind, as it were, is a direct threat to higher educational goals like contemplation, well tendered analysis, or depth of any intellectual kind.
