new media

I listened to an interview on CBC the other day with David H Wilson, a writer who points out that anxiety about changing technology is most often connected to a fear of aging.

The argument goes something like this: most technological advances are created by the young, not because they're smarter or have more time, but because their ideas about themselves & their world are still fluid. They're in the map-making phase, they're exploring.

As you add years & experience to the mix, your maps get more solid. If you've paid attention, you will have a pretty good idea how to predict what's ahead because you've developed models about how things work. Even the wildest & most experimental thinkers are more firmly planted because they have more experience--which makes their theories more textured and useful, but also more solid.

New technologies, & all the ways they shift our engagement with others & the world, challenge those theories because our models no longer fit so well. Not only are we asked to learn new skills, but we have  to endure that uncomfortable friction between what we are experiencing & our expectations about how things work. According to Wilson, whenever you start a sentence with "When I was young..." (substitute: your age, learning about, in school, etc), you're about to make an excuse.

Now that's a challenging statement!

I'm venturing into new territory here in the blog zone, I'm pretty sure it will rewrite a bunch of things I thought I knew. I'm glad to have your company...