This is one of those essays I thought I had already read, since it had been quoted so many times. But actually it had escaped my attention until Santiago Ramos named it one of his favorite essays of 2008. And it is in fact, you might say, all about escaping attention. As with so many semi-jeremiads written by people a decade or so older than me, I find myself more hopeful than Mark Edmundson. (He obliquely refers to the interactive teaching techniques of Eric Mazur at Harvard—my wife's postdoctoral advisor—in a way that largely misses the point of the remote-control-like devices that Mazur uses.) But if what Edmundson says about teaching, learning, and reading applies doubly so to preaching, worship, and prayer, and it does, this is must reading for Christian leaders.

re: communication, education, reading, technology, universities

Andy

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A Romantic, says Nietzsche, is someone who always wants to be elsewhere. If that’s so, then the children of the Internet are Romantics, for they perpetually wish to be someplace else, and the laptop reliably helps take them there — if only in imagination. The e-mailer, the instant messenger, the Web browser are all dispersing their energies and interests outward, away from the present, the here and now. The Internet user is constantly connecting with people and institutions far away, creating surrogate communities that displace the potential community at hand.

Then too, booking by computer has made travel easier and, by eliminating a certain number of middlemen, kept it reasonably cheap. So there’s an inducement to take off physically as well. The Internet is perhaps the most centrifugal technology ever devised. The classroom, where you sit down in one space at one time and ponder a text or an issue in slow motion, is coming to feel ever more antiquated. What’s at a premium now is movement, making connections, getting all the circuitry fizzing and popping.

For students now, life is elsewhere. Classes matter to them, but classes are just part of an ever-enlarging web of activities and diversions. Students now seek to master their work — not to be taken over by it and consumed. They want to dispatch it, do it well and quickly, then get on to the many other things that interest them. For my students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success and pleasure. They dwell in possibility.