In most cultures of the North and the South we are witnessing a variety of traditions, life styles and learning activities coexisting with new technologies of communication. Telephones and satellite technology can be found in remote villages in Gambia along with conventional forms of architecture and village life. Large battery driven stereos can be heard in the villages of Senegal even as traditional musicians continue to practice musical styles which are centuries old. In India the intersection of village life with television is recreating the way communities and their members normally interact. This, even as all of the religious ceremonies which have been the foundation of rural existence in India continue to be practiced with fervour and intensity.
In South Africa community radio and television coexist in the townships with ceremonial forms of expression which hearken back to a history long repressed under apartheid. In the United States advanced internet based communications technologies are used for traditional messages about religion, politics and culture. Religious fundamentalism is being driven by this convergence, on the one hand an archaic form of communalism and on the other hand a radical right wing movement. At the same time, new cyberspace communities are appearing in Europe and North America testing the very ideaof community even as the cities which they originate from are being transformed.
From an historical point of view these points of intersection are sedimented, building upon each other in what I would like to describe as a living archeology. The electronic converges with and diverges from information, knowledge and communication. The elasticity of this archeology means that its layers are undergoing continual change. There are no simple vantage points from which the process can be viewed. In fact, point ofview, the very basis of subjectivity is no longer bounded by a transparent geography with clear markers and destinations.
Some policymakers find this situation dangerous and erosive. Others, in government and education blame the conflicts of tradition and technology for all the contradictions which now beset us. I would argue that we are participating in an explosion of diversity and complexity which is bringing all of the richness of everyday life into view. We are entering a golden age of access and exchange. It is not an accident that fibre optic lines are being carved into the landscape of Thailand or that satellite technology is being introduced into the jungles of Indonesia. It is not an accident because the channels of information which are being created will drive economies of the future, will promote the linkages which will determine trade patterns and investment, and will also be the foundation for the intersection of traditional and new cultures. For example, teachers in remote villages in Indonesia for whom librairies have at best been a dream for the future will now be able to use cellular technologies to connect to the Internet. They may not have the books, but they will have a digitized cornucopia of material which will approximate a vast encyclopedia. This has dramatic implications not only for the exchange of ideas and knowledge, but for access. We are witnessing a redefinition of access as a concept and as a practice. This will mean that policymakers in the fields of development and educators hoping to use internet based technologies in Southern countries will have to redefine both their own use of information and the role of learners. It also means that we are witnessing the creation of a new field of research into the effects of computer mediated learning within cultural and political contexts that just a short time ago would not have been the site for these processes.
How then does learning, teaching, the exchange of information and knowledge fit into this highly charged environment? How will this change the role of community activists and educators in the field? I would like to propose that part of the answer lies with technologies which empower those who use them. Another part of the answer lies with the mix between the traditional and the new. Knowledge has always been defined by its owners and purveyors. To varying degrees this process continues with a variety of monopolies now vying for control of broadcast technologies worldwide. However, the internet has changed the parameters of this power struggle because it will be virtually impossible to recreate the internet as a mass medium with centralized forms of control. It is precisely this dispersion which opens up the potential for educators and for learners because to varying degrees it suggests that activities of linkage will empower people in unpredictable ways. The cartography will never be a simple one to draw. The World Wide Web as it name suggests will complicate communications and the transmission of information as well as learning and teaching.
It matters little that the World Wide Web will soon be available in North America through cable networks. Efforts to transform the Web into a traditional broadcast medium will not succeed because gatekeeping is not what the process is about. Rather, and most importantly, the highly local forms of creation which now sustain the Web are about small groups of people communicating with each other either because they have to or because they want to. It is about informal methods of learning and exchange which are not restricted by conventional pressures of distribution but are dependent upon the needs of the people who make use of networks because they want to learn.
The shift that I am talking about then, this explosion of diversity is a move towards the needs of learners and with that comes a different conception of community. Learning for life or a life of learning has always been the everyday life of individuals from all parts of the world. It has been the move towards formality through schooling which has often interfered with tradition and the growth and development of legitimate and useful forms of local and transnational knowledge. The most difficult aspect of these developments is the rather loose way in which community both as a term and as a concept is applied to learning processes. On the one hand, networked technologies suggest the dissolution of traditional boundaries between communities under the guise of a universalist, global economic and cultural order. On the other hand, locality, uniqueness, tradition and history come into play as foundations for a healthy community. It may be the case however, that networked technologies are about the recreation of "locality" as a concept and as a lived experience. We may be witnessing the nascent moments of an historic change in which "bricolage" will allow communities to define themselves ina much more fluid manner than they ever have. ("Bricolage" as a concept describes a process of mixing and matching, choosing ideas and practices which fit with the historical moment. For example, communities in any part of the world can now decide which sources of information are more important to them than others. Official channels of information become just one part of many possible sites for the exchange of ideas. The bricoleur is empowered by this diversity and is able to control more of the political and cultural agenda.) As "bricoleurs" community members will be able to choose at will, borrowing what they need from other communities, incorporating experiences and knowledge from anonymous neighbours, redefining and refining their relationships with each other as they discover many different ways of learning.
This learning will have to take place within the network and outside. It will have to appropriate conventional discourses, conventional strategies of exchange with new languages based on digitization. We have yet to understand what the digital process is doing to our language, to our talking, writing and listening, to our ways of seeing and understanding the world around us. We do know that every phase of technological change in the twentieth century has altered if not transformed our expectations about the future. We are now in a position to test if the potentially empowering aspects of networked technologies will achieve a democratic vision for learning while at the same time enhancing the community's ability to redevelop itself. In order for democracy to grow in areas where it is under attack or in areas where political power lies with an entrenched elite, we will have to approach the creation of pedagogical materials for the internet from a radically different perspective.
There are four significant aspects to this new approach which will affect the cultural and political context for setting policy in the areas of communications and education: the intellectual framework within which we think about ideas, history and critical analysis; the physical reality of daily life including the interaction of our bodies with virtual spaces; the spiritual values which so many individuals and cultures find important and which should always be included in our overall understanding of both formal and informal learning contexts; the pedagogical needs to be seen as through a broader lens so that we can recognize not only how people learn, but how many different ways there are to learn (from traditional cultural forms to popular cultural expression).
Late twentieth century culture has converged with education and
education has converged with computerized technologies. The results
are layered onto each other in what I have described above as
a living archeology. There is no top or bottom to these many layers.
Rather, we are both viewers of and participants in the sedimentation
process. The challenge will be to get a cut out view of the ways
in which the layers interact. This will be a challenge which many
cultures will have to face even as they struggle with networked
technologies to find some way of plugging in. It is also a challenge
which policymakers in all fields will have to confront if they
are to make any sense of the shifting terrain of social and cultural
development which the world is now entering into.
(I am grateful to Deborah Shackleton of Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design for her help in defining some of the priorities of this argument.)
Homepage: http://www.eciad.bc.ca/~rburnett/