Pocket-Box
The vast majority of Americans, at least aged twelve and older, are plugged into the world in a fashion no earlier generation experienced. We, almost all of us, have more computing power in our pockets than broke the Enigma code, developed the atomic bomb, sent the Apollo rockets to the moon, or controlled the Space Shuttles. And that power is linked to the rest of the world, for many of us, literally twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Christmas, Passover, Ramadan and Diwali (yep, I had to Google that).
All of that connection empowers us in many ways. When a technical question arises: “Who is that Senator from Louisiana”, or “What goes into a Low Country Boil,” we no longer rush to the books or the library. We literally (verbally) ask our pocket-boxes, and instantly it reaches out across space and time to gain the answer. My Dad in his later years used my Mom as his “external hard drive”. His own memory was “corrupted” by strokes; there were years that no longer were “accessible”, so she served as his “backup” for names, dates, and events he knew he should have.
Now, for a lot of us, there’s a pocket-box to serve that role.
Education
Ask a middle or high school teacher what the most distracting thing is in their classroom, and invariably they “call out” the pocket-box. Every student seems to be “texting with Mom” all the time. And while Mom isn’t always at the other end of that conversation, it’s true often enough to raise a whole different question.
The pocket-box is a leash as well as a gateway. The Ronald Reagan line, “Trust but verify” is the mantra for parents today. Their child is a close as a text, anytime, day or night. And if they fail to answer, “Find Phone” will give an exact location to their decimal geo-position. But that child will still take their phone with them, even to an illicit party. Leaving it at home is less likely than forgetting to put on pants.
That distracting “box” has changed education. What in my era was “Get out your slide-rule” (a device for solving mathematical equations that didn’t require batteries) and then became “Get out your calculator (HP-85 or Bowmar “Brain”),”, now is “Get out your phone”. And that honest teaching phrase, “I don’t know that answer, could someone research that for us?” is now answered in under thirty seconds. It becomes a race of “pocket-boxes”; digital dexterity tested rather than research prowess.
Adaptation
Teaching has adapted. Notes on a chalkboard (those don’t exist, someone might be allergic to the dust) are only in the movies, and usually in black and white. The dry erase boards are gone too, with electronic “Smart Boards” the common tool. Even “powerpoints” are “way old school”. Since finding facts and performing functions are absolutely accessible, education has become what we once called “group work”, now termed “collaborative learning”. Everyone works together, pooling their resources to accomplish whatever task is assigned. It enforces socialization, in an era where electronic connectivity perversely creates increased personal isolation. No one needs a computer, it’s in their pocket.
One Score
We all know the Lincolnian phrase, “Four score and seven years ago…”, eighty-seven years. But it was less than one score, twenty years, from chalkboards to smart boards. Our society is moving literally at the speed of light. Information good or bad, false or true, religiously uplifting or sexually explicit, is completely accessible and totally unrestrained in everyone’s pocket, from children to old men.
It’s the era we hardly dreamed of in the 1950’s and 60’s; far beyond Dick Tracy’s wrist radio or the HAL 9000 computer. But all that accessibility does not guarantee veracity. A lie can travel just as fast as the truth, perhaps even faster. In our “post-truth” world, the “facts” are determined more by how many people “agree” that they’re true, rather than the actual accuracy. It’s the ultimate “democracy”: “the people” decide “truth”, true or not. And that choice determines who else they “listen” to on their pocket-box. Their version of “truth” reverberates and is reinforced. The volume and quantity of repetition is constantly providing “verification”, right or wrong.
Crowd Source
In our world the truth is “crowd sourced”. And we restrict our “crowd” to the truths we want to hear. So all of that accessibility, all of the networking, or as the previous generation called it, “world-wide webbing”, puts us right back where we were. We listen to who we listen to, we ignore the information we don’t want to hear. What used to be “I don’t know” has now become “I don’t want to know”. But the result is still the same.
What happens from here? Maybe we need to ask Facebook. I’m sure they will provide the answer.
It will be whatever answer we want to hear.
