A "faux-cial" media fable

In the year King Berners-Lee brought empires and territories and islands and mountains together, I saw a new tree of good and evil flower. A thousand new stars sparkled in the night sky, and trickling streams of gold turned into rivers.

The people lauded the King for reaching out to those in far away lands, connecting them so they could help everyone in dominions everywhere to flourish. Ideas were shared, genius expanded, and the greatest questioners, mystics, poets, prophets, and philosophers strolled through this new shrinking world. Other Elders, Monarchs, Chiefs, and Priests sent the King fellowships, honours, and doctorates from distant lands. Days were no longer needed to reach one another – hours, minutes, seconds!

I saw the King embrace this new world with joy and hope. “We can all be better”, he declaimed, “together”. Mists of possibility watered ten thousand research seedlings, the crops of which could feed the starving, quench thirst of the parched, and heal the sick; elsewhere, tyrants squirmed.

When the millenium bug died from its own irrelevance, a new world emerged. New magicians sporting teeth of blue freed us from tethering cords, and the discs that made tapes obsolete were themselves made obsolete by 0s and 1s found in an apple. I saw a black-skivvied prophet build, and open, a door to a new realm. To the list of connected philosophers, poets, and scientists could now be added…everybody. My hand could touch the hand of a million people, some of whom I know.

Then I saw that charlatans also live in the microspaces, and good people sour like spoiling fruit.

Artifice proliferated. Anonymity emboldened barbarians. I became Narcissus, and so did you, and we told each other, and showed each other, and praised each other, and condemned each other, and ignored each other, and cut each other off on a whim.

New tools of joy also became weapons of hate. I saw that 400K “likes” didn’t guarantee me a safe place to share my soul.

Prophets arose to confront us. Grey, disconnected zombies now drift along in a stream of isolation, floating past each other, sensationalising the meaninglessness that is the offspring of the charlatans’ inventions, said one. Addiction, transience, fa?ade, and imprisonment are the wages we’ve earned, said another.

The King was saddened by what had become of his creation.

Undeterred, he fights on.

In the next few weeks, most Year 12 students across Australia will finish their studies, ahead of final examinations. For all but a small number, this will end thirteen years of formal schooling. As the fable highlights, it’s been quite a time to be alive!

facebook was a one year old infant when many of our graduating students were born, and still only accessible to those on elite university campuses in the United States; it’s also worth remembering its initial purpose was the rather ignoble and shallow sorting of the dating desirability of fellow students! In the same year, YouTube was launched.

The iPhone then came along in the year of their third birthday, followed by the great cataclysm: facebook arrived as an iPhone app. Two soon-to-be ubiquitous and powerful technologies hooked up. How might life have been different if Apple said “not” instead of “hot” to facebook?

Then…most of them started Kindergarten…the same year that Instagram started! Imagine these bristling, bustling, soon-to-be-adults-and-able-to-vote Year 12 graduates as five-year-olds – what innocence, freshness, joyfulness, playfulness, energy, life, and society! Social stigmatism and judgement seemed a long way off. Yet too many of those same children have grown to become a generation beset with anxiety and insecurity. The power, and consequence, of the technology seems somewhat a mixed blessing.

To what extent has the embrace of technology in education contributed to this, and what might we do in response? Sweden, at a national level, is cutting back. And for all the positives about mobile phones in schools, there are those who see the negatives – what do we make of this? And let’s not get started on the ongoing discussion about what we should do with AI!

It can be easy to apportion blame to the technology itself, but this reflection looks beyond this na?ve simplicity to ask what role we educators play. What example do I set for my students, or my family and friends? How present, or distracted, am I? How much enthusiasm do I show for the how of technology while avoiding answering the challenge of why?

These questions approached me when walking the dogs at the beach last week (hence the photo). How gratifying to see others and bid them a “good morning” face-to-face, directly, with no filter, and to feel the sand underfoot, to smell the salty air, and the wind on my face. And not a “selfie” in sight.

The videos linked to the earlier “disconnected zombies” and “wages we’ve earned” are extraordinary ironies – as is this newsletter – do please check them out. They rely on the very culture and platforms they inhabit to spread their critique. Perhaps, though, they also reflect a similar desire Berners-Lee maintains for these technologies to be used for good. Time will tell.

This insight, heard many years ago, speaks loudly to the moment: “we often overestimate the amount of change that happens in two years, and underestimate the amount of change that happens in ten years”.