The pandemic has put many of us on edge. The precipice of what was pre- and what will be post-pandemic “life” has become the present, past, and future all at once. I have always been mindful of time as early as I can remember. My father tried hard to make good Christians out of his three sons, including a good Protestant ethic of timeliness. While I learned a great deal of the liturgy, Bible, and acts of service, I also learned a lot more about the clock. Prayer? God doesn’t talk to me. Being on time for church? That was the real challenge of our piety. The rest of the week’s attention to God consisted of being mocked by Pittsburgh Catholics for being Episcopalian, not eating dinner until dad said “grace,” and as an admonishment to my brothers and me when fighting: “Christian-Brothers!” When I learned our last name is closely related to the theological study of “end times,” I couldn’t help but laugh. Speaking of Christianity…
One of my earliest memories as a child was Christmas morning 1986, the unwrapping of an Atari 2600 with my two older brothers. Later, in the late 80s and early 90s, goober moments of going to neighbors and friends houses to get my hands on NES and SNES controllers that were absent in my house proliferated. Then my parents got a Tandy 1000 desktop computer, and a family friend provided some programs via 3.25″ floppy disks. It was the original Rogue on a blue disk that managed to melt away my longing for a game console. Another family friend extended my curiosity by sending more games, including The Bard’s Tale II, which wonderfully satiated my D&D tendencies. Some of the disks didn’t work, and it was then I began my first foray into troubleshooting computers at the MS-DOS Shell command prompt. My fascination with computers almost kept me on the path towards a career with them, but my big-concept, artistic-philosophical side took over during my first year of undergrad in 2000. I forayed into teaching history and politics in 2005, and recent events 16 years later, I found myself–like many around the world–with the time to reflect.
As a teacher, I have ultimately spent less and less time in the physical classroom. Remote learning is here to stay, and I have more thoughts below, but the point philosophically was this: I wanted to be social in my working environment, and yet computers helped; as computers changed the work, I decided I wanted to shift the outcome of pressing on the keyboard for “virtual” classrooms to pressing on it for enterprise and small business solution outcomes. This suspended past-present-future pandemic moment collapsed into a singularity of realization: “leveling up” in the professional world of community college teaching seemed to enter “side-quest” territory. Time for a new game, wait, time to return to an old game 🙂
I started learning cyberoperations with www.codefellows.org in January 2021. There are tons are political reasons (personal and external) to stop teaching as well. When a computer is not working and I tell you how to fix it, to not listen is to have a broken computer. Despite spending my professional life teaching history and political science I find people trust me when I help with their computers because it is so essential to their lives. When January 6th, 2021 featured a lifetime’s worth of retrograde right-wing rabble culminating in an anti-intellectual movement descending on Washington, D.C., with explicit intent to overthrow the government, it is clear I do not “fix” anything teaching history and political science. This realization was not independently acquired, as books have proven to be my truest salvation. The following are a few books I have recently read that have dramatically affected me.
Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock crystalized for me the problem facing social scientists: the acceleration of technological reality changes social mores faster than any prior society has experienced thus far. The essential lesson is to understand this, and prepare to catch the wave. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death follows the trail from Lewis Mumford (via Technics and Civilization) and Marshall McLuhan to explore the ways different communication methods derive communication styles unique to the system. The big takeaway is that successive technologies are NOT natural or explicit extensions of previous technologies as the each medium shapes messages within the confines of the system. While the book focuses on television of the 1980s, his projection of what relying on television for news of reality would do has become what it is. But there is more to the idea of how succession of technology can shift how we think of the old. The best example of this in our recent moment with the advent of text messaging and its dynamism via smart phones: how telephone calls have become perceived differently across generations. You should and need not take my word for it. The generational experience with phones is partially age-related, but can also be job-related. The only people I hear being explicit about phone calls as the means to reach them, tend to be older, so it’s entirely possible future smart phones may not even be used for calling at all or perhaps texting itself!
I enjoy reading and writing at length. My teaching experience exposed me to many convinced they “learn better from videos…” and then hopefully, they are in the class assigned to read Postman. Hannah Arendt’s On the Origins of Totalitarianism revealed to me the essential history of the West’s development as nationalizing-imperial-totalitarians. I saw it very much as the nonfiction version of It Can Happen Here. This was my last attempt to fix things through social learning, and the anti-intellectual reaction to a very intellectual book crushed the notion I could inspire change in this way. The notion was smoothed out by an equally important work of philosophy by Michael Allen Gillespie called Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History. There’s no way to concisely explain how this book has helped me, but I think it’s important to try. History is more than a professional art; it’s more than what most people are taught; history is existence. Human beings are both becoming and existing, or being and Beings. Today, we have become overly fixated with becoming and have lost sight of our wholeness over time which is essential to the dignity of our eternal Being from birth to death. We have fissured and atomized too much at the expense of harmony and fusion. But there is good news to all of this murkiness: it’s our chance to find our spark and reclaim who we are.
So, in these pandemic times, I participate in a historical phenomenon I rather teach than experience firsthand. I am sure many of you have experience some version of Gandalf’s response to Frodo. I see pseudo-revolutionaries fomenting conspiracy-laden rioting at governmental buildings throughout the country. I have taught from the vantage point of thinking we were past these topics of what should be bound to the textbook, instead, by living in it, I feel what I do with this time requires something more urgent to address the moment we will spring into. We are a technological civilization, for better or for worse. Our social technology is disparately underpowered compared to mechanical technology–a concern of numerous social scientists of the 20th century–leaving us at the mercy of what underdeveloped social creatures with technological powers create. The industry is at a breaking point of finding mechanic-technical AND sociotechnical expertise to satisfy customer relations. This could be a capitalist success story: as businesses consolidated away any real competition, they are now at the mercy of customer satisfaction more so than ever. Recognizing this has forced companies to start thinking the way institutions of higher learning have promoted in this country since GI Bill: the well-being of your workers enhances productivity. Mission-driven companies tend to retain workers longer as the values customers demand shape the communication between client and business. As my friend Cary Hill of Digital Fix Consulting points out, “Remote workforces and remote support is here to stay in 2021. Companies that were caught off guard by COVID need to embrace remote support and transition their IT to manage workers offsite. Even if the COVID vaccine brings a ‘return to normalcy’, employees have adjusted (and come to enjoy) working remotely. Therefore, employers should be prepared to welcome and support a remote workforce.” The future is here tonight, so I’m getting ready for tomorrow, what about you?