Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher

Someone once told me that the way to find out what a society worships is by searching for the highest building and to find out where people dress the fanciest.  In the classical Greece, it was in their temples and their gymnasiums.  In Rome, it was the Coliseum - a sign of their obsession with violence and sadism, mixed with effeciency and entertainment.  In the middle ages, it was church; with towering cathedrals and priests with expensive vestments.  During the Enlightenment, it was the republic.  Government buildings were dominant and lawmakers dressed nicer than anyone else.  In the industrial age, it was the factories with towering smoke stacks and men like Carnegie and Rockefeller wearing the fancy pants.  Then, as we shifted to a more corporate America, the sky scrapers and business suits demonstrated our worship of money. It is, perhaps, a sign that, even after tragedy of Babel, humanity still wants to reach the furthest heights possible.

In the digital age, we worship technology and ourselves.  It seems bizarre, but the tallest structure is not a structure, but a satellite.  We have thousands rotating around the globe, proving that we can be above the clouds, breaking the realm of what seems humany possible.  In terms of dressing the fanciest, people pour time and attention into their digital selves.  It might be okay to go corporate casual, to be apathetic about politics, to find smoke stacks unimpressive and to build churches in abandoned strip malls, but it is not okay to be too casual about our digital selves. People feel the need to send bulletins telling everyone that the "need" to comment on pictures.

We live in an age of self-branding.  People Google themselves to see where they fall on the list.  I check my blog to see the number of readers.  We thrive on the comments the way, in former days, we would have thrived on a compliment about a house, a car or a business suit.  Failing to update a myspace profile can be like failing to change clothes or failing to ever redecorate a house.  Social networking, blogging and discussion boards can become a narcissistic world where people begin to believe that the world really cares about their cat or what they ate for dinner, simply because it is floating around cyberspace.  We have made ourselves mini-celebrities. 

So, as I think about technology integration, I am trying to figure out how to carve out a social conscience in a myspace world.  Our class website and class blog, the murals, the community service - all of those are a start, I think.  Hanging out at lunch and before and after school seem to be another option.  The more human contact we have, the more we realize that the digital world is much more artificial.

Yet, I wonder if it is a losing battle.  Pimped out myspace pages are much more enticing than really getting to know one another.  Coffee with a friend cannot be quantified like a friend list.  Compliments just aren't as permanent and public as facebook wall.