My sons and I are from different worlds.
When I was young, I read books and watched television. There were some books that everyone (or so I thought) read, and some “events” on television that everyone (I believed) experienced. When I was very young, the film “The Wizard of Oz” was played on television every year. The memory serves me well as a place marker for a time I felt the country where I lived had a common culture, and a finite set of shared experiences that were essentially universal. It wasn’t literally true, of course, but at one point in my life, everyone I knew could sing along to, “If I Only Had A Brain.”
My sons don’t have any patience with the kind of hazy memory I hold related to the broadcasts of “Oz.” Too many times for me to count, I have described a partial bit of knowledge, and within a minute or two, my 13-year-old has found the missing pieces in a quick online search.
My sons don’t have any real sense of the kind of shared experiences I had as a child. When a new television series based on the Batman character premiered, I asked my 11-year-old to watch it with me. He said he would rather catch it later online. And when he does, he may watch it over and over — something that is perfectly natural for him to do, but to me seems an odd investment of time. Not only does it diminish the special quality of the unique event; it takes time away from the potential new experiences he is giving up.
The generational differences in the way we encounter information — and in this context I include experiences like listening to music and watching movies — are significant in framing the way we think about information. In fact, the reality that we go to the same source for mindless entertainment that we access for research for a term paper also frames the way we think about information.
Experiencing information is less precious if it is an experience we can have at will, on our own schedule, without raising our eyes from our tiny screens. When filling in the gaps is easy, there is less opportunity to reflect on why we need the information in the first place. There is some virtue, it seems to me, in having to work for it, and sometimes having to wait for it.
But I approach this from my own cultural context. Anyone born in this century, and probably also the last decade of the 20th century, is likely to be able to find information in great detail with casual and refined ease. It is less clear they will be able to use this information effectively.
Schools have a role in teaching about the nature of information, the ways to distinguish between information in terms of quality and reliability, and the ways to use information to reach original conclusions that have merit and significance. Schools should be operating in the same world as their students.
