“The fixity of language in print itself also imbued print with the kind of trust that we might recognize today: if an idea is printed down and a particular word or idea is presented in a singular way, then that must be the definitive form of the idea intended by the author.” (Pg. 53)
This was the final week of readings for this quarter and it was rather bittersweet, while I am very excited to move into my next quarter ILC, I felt a connection to some of these texts that I felt like I haven’t gotten in any of my other Evergreen studies. Finishing this chapter of Skim, Dive, Surface was such a good way to round out this quarter and lead into the next one, as it explores the ways in which we have progress throughout time as learners, archivists, and holders of knowledge as a species.
The second half of this chapter moves away from the idea of how we absorbed and reflect upon knowledge based on the way we consume it, and focuses more on the ways in which we collect and sift through the mountains of knowledge that we have acquired over time. My takeaways were that this chapter demonstrates why we must embrace digital reading as the way of the future, the further we progress down the human timeline the more knowledge collective knowledge we have to store and organize. As a species that values and builds hierarchies on the collection and retention of knowledge, we have to have an organized system to share it.
One of the headings that struck me was entitled “A Fear of Losing Authority: Will Reading Technologies Prevent Us from Understanding What Information Is Authoritative”. The section itself was about the struggle of assuring credibility among a flood of information, and how the introduction of the press and household book ownership contributed to the idea that the information in books was fixed factually. While I would have to go back and look at my notes from Winter and Spring, I did a brief reading on the Guttenberg Parenthesis that feels like it may be even more relevant to my work now. And while this is a noteworthy concept, I actually found myself thinking of this mentioned heading further in the chapter.
“Once education became compulsory for children in the nineteenth-century Western world, the chief obligation for schools was to discipline and manage the swarms of children who needed to be in classroom spaces. Ideas were dangerous and classrooms were spaces to help students manage dangerous information and to cultivate obedience toward instructors and institutions of authority.” (Pg. 61)
Breaking down this passage is revealing. Schools were overwhelmed in many ways it seemed, not only were they seeing an influx of students, but they were also at an influx of knowledge and had to assign the best way to organize and store it. Their top priority had to be creating a system that could hold more learners than they had ever been, as well as managing their learning and behavior. The suggestion that ideas are dangerous is not a new one, but I was surprised to see it so brazenly typed out (that is one of the things I love about this book, the writing catches you off guard in a way that invokes so many questions).
But it is truly the last part of the passage that brought up so much for me. “classrooms were spaces to help students manage dangerous information and to cultivate obedience toward instructors and institutions of authority” Alone this seems to have more to do with questions of our education system, but when you consider removing the barriers of written text literature, and instead replacing it with online reading and digital annotation such as what we do with Hypothes.is, it all falls into place a little more. If we wish to change our education system from one that teaches us who the authority is and how we should treat it, we need to learn in a way that allows us access to more than what is assigned to us, and to share our ideas regardless of those who fear their danger.
Next week will be spent working on a summary of the reading from this quarter, writing my evals, and completing my ILC proposal for next quarter.