A New Kind of Mind. What’s to Educate?

Anyone who tries to make a distinction
between education and entertainment
doesn’t know the first thing about either.

(Marshall McLuhan)

Contemporary society is presently facing a situation of ‘education overload’, in which the information environment outside of schools is far richer than that inside of schools, in which virtual environments offer a multifaceted and complex dimension for learning practices, in which people suffer the limits, and enjoy the benefits of this ‘total surround’ of information and knowledge. In this scenario traditional pedagogies no longer suffice for a world that calls for new visions, tools and skills for training in perception and pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is a theme directly inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s many references to that topic in the context of education. In fact, the intent of this edition of the Journal on education under the influence of electricity is to let McLuhan guide it. The selected quotes contain an implicit pedagogy for the age. Our task is to update it in terms of what can be observed today.

One of McLuhan’s core observations was that the principal agent of change is electricity (not merely the electronic variations):

The medium, or process, of our time, electric technology, is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing: you, your family, your education, your neighborhood, your job, your government, your relation to the others. And they’re changing dramatically. (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967: 8)

Applying his method to the overall context of education, McLuhan distinguishes two geometrical configurations that help to seize the whole field:

When information moved slowly in written form, job specialism and pyramidal hierarchies of function were normal and even workable […] The new pattern is one of small teams comprising clusters of diverse competencies with personnel accustomed to the crossing of functional lines in a perpetual dialogue of interpenetrating awareness. (McLuhan, 2003: 19)

He calls for a new attitude in the educational system fostering collaboration and participation rather than mere instruction:

The business of school is no longer instruction but discovery. […] What is indicated for the new learning procedures is not the absorption of classified and fragmented data, but pattern recognition with all that that implies of grasping relationships […](McLuhan, 1966: 105)

Pattern recognition is not simply an excellent heuristic method, it is a mental posture. The Chinese have been practicing it for millennia: their writing system not only uses patterns instead of letters, but also requires recognizing links between contextual cues to arrive at the best possible interpretation of what they read. Writing systems condition epistemologies. The ancient practice of pattern recognition is now retrieved by the new configuration of text called hypertext. Indeed, hypertext requires the reader to use multi-level pattern recognition merely to read and interpret the text. The episteme fostered by the electronic transformation of language is ruled by hypertext and hypermedia. A hypertextual mind is developing from an early age in our children. A well-known video on Youtube shows a one-year old baby girl who tries in vain to drag pictures from a fashion magazine by pinching them. Frustrated she then tests the function of her fingers on her own leg to check that they are functioning properly but the picture doesn’t. The comment of her mother: «Steve Jobs has changed my daughter’s operating system forever»¹

This not just about biological software. The hardware of the brain is, apparently, affected too². Indeed, according to research at the Medical School of the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, people who are internet-dependent develop an anomalous quantity of white matter, the myelin-covered fibers that connect the areas of the brain dedicated to attention to the executive and control functions in the spinal cord. This observation is also pertinent for children addicted to videogames.

And yet, without having to probe the brain, one can and should ask what are the psychological and social effects of blogs, tweets, skype, chats, of language use fragmented into so many channels, oral, written, multimedia, hypertextual, tagged, aggregated and repurposed in every which way? People trained by Twitter to express the maximum amount of information in the minimum amount of syllables must see language as a string of haikus. Again McLuhan demonstrates a prescient awareness of media effects on language, by the same token, presenting media as languages:

Today we’re beginning to realize that the new media aren’t just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression. Historically, the resources of English have been shaped and expressed in constantly new and changing ways. The printing press changed not only the quantity of writing but also the character of language and the relations between author and public. Radio, film, TV pushed written English toward the spontaneous shifts and freedom of the spoken idiom. They aided us in the recovery of intense awareness of facial language and bodily gesture. If these ‘mass media’ should serve only to weaken or corrupt previously achieved levels of verbal and pictorial culture, it won’t be because there’s anything inherently wrong with them. It will be because we’ve failed to master them as new languages in time to assimilate them to our total cultural heritage. (McLuhan & Carpenter, 1960: 2)

Regarding the student today, the weak signals of the future are getting stronger: for example, psychological research discovers that many young folks tend to not remember. The general idea is that children, like their parents, tend to put more trust in the Internet and their cellular phones than in their own memories. Indeed, psychologist Roddy Roediger, from Washington University³, suggests that children do not appear to need to remember, since all it takes is to know where to find things. Memory functions are thus exported into the instantly accessible external and augmented mind of the web, even as intelligent functions are extended and amplified in endless streams of applications. How do you teach people like that? As McLuhan observed:

In a global information environment, the old pattern of education in answer-finding is of no avail: one is surrounded by answers, millions of them, moving and mutating at electric speed. Survival and control will depend on the ability to probe and to question in the proper way and place. As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu. Else we will have no more control of this technology and environment than we have of the wind and the tides. (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988: 239)

The new field of media ecology credits McLuhan and the manner of thinking (and probing) that he developed with being the inspiration behind its efforts. Media Ecology studies the interactions between new media and old in any culture, and interactions between media and cultures. Media Ecology means that from now on, media environments can be organized to result in any form of culture imaginable. The architecture of totally new cultures is now a practical reality. That is, the programming of the globe could be managed from the remove of Mars, or from the moon, to allow the programmer sufficient detachment.

The essential prerequisite for any media-ecological activity is a thorough understanding of the senses. Here, the processes of the artists assume center stage. They have developed in each of the arts the probe as a technique of exploration where there are neither maps nor texts: they found how to use style itself as a means of probing environments.

The probe is a means or method of perceiving. It comes from the world of conversation and dialogue as much as from poetics and literary criticism. Like conversation, the verbal probe is discontinuous, nonlinear; it tackles things from many angles at once. (McLuhan & Carson, 2003: 403)

Fifty years before the arrival of the Internet, McLuhan predicted in his book on education, City as Classroom, that information and expertise would be found outside the school not within, and that children would find it easier than their parents to access and sort it:

A worldwide network of computers will make all of mankind’s factual knowledge available to students everywhere in a matter of minutes or seconds. Then, the human brain will not have to serve as a repository of specific facts, and the uses of memory will shift in the new education. Breaking the timeworn, rigid chains of memory may not have greater priority than forging new links. New materials may be learned just as were the great myths of past cultures, as fully integrated systems that resonate on several levels and share the qualities of poetry and song. (McLuhan M., Hutchon & McLuhan E., 1977: 25)

Today, other research highlights the shortening of school children’s attention span to any one thing for any length of time, but also their capacity to handle many tasks at once. The collapse of the attention span is attributed to the obsessive need to check on one’s social media every three to five minutes: «Kids have been raised on the concept of connection. To them, it’s not the quality that’s important, but the connection itself. Phone or face-to-face conversations allow for a minimal number of connections, while other tools let them connect to the world» (Larry Rosen, California State University)⁴.

Short attention spans and non-linearity are classic indicators of a change in sensory orientation from a visual to a multisensory imagination. The pattern of briefer and briefer advertisements, for example, is a response to this shift in the viewer’s sensory preferences, not a cause of it.

One potentially harmful outcome of these trends according to Maryanne Wolf⁵, a psychologist from Tufts University, author of best-seller Proust and the Squid, could be the loss of the ability to sort out priorities and relevance in the total information environment. Again McLuhan:

As (the student) sits in the informational control room, whether at home or at work, receiving data at enormous speeds — imagistic, sound, or tactile — from all areas of the world, the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic. His body will remain in one place but his mind will float out into the electronic void, being everywhere at once in the data bank. (McLuhan & Powers, 1989: 97)⁶

Research also points out that there could be correlation between one’s number of friends on Facebook and evidence of narcissistic tendencies⁷. A trend to watch is manners and practices of profiling on Facebook. A pattern is evolving there where during a few years after signing on, adolescents and young adults tend to manage their profile weekly if not daily, stuffing it with photographs, videos and deep thoughts, but then, gradually, as they get older, letting the image stabilize, as, perhaps their character.

What’s the pattern here? There is a new geometry to identity and personality as both are being pushed towards the public and away from the private end of the personality spectrum. Young people also cultivate their profile on line rather than their personality in some private notebook or diary. If Nicholas Carr is right about the shallowness of users’ minds, then the geometry is this: the illusion and the need for one’s depth of character is vanishing even as the sense of self gets tied and represented more and more by its expansion into the networks. Young people will often choose to connect on screen rather than face-to-face.

Many parents complain about the tendency of their children to spend more time relating on screens than in the street. The truth of the matter is that people, parents included, spend already so much time in front of one screen or another, be it computers or cellular phones, that it has become ‘natural’ to share one’s cognitive properties, including imagination and relationships with this new electronic environment, this new ‘space’ of mental and social activity. Be that as it may, considering the amount of wakeful time they give to screens and to their networks, users develop a constantly networked, public life, which is archived in a dozen ways and mined for information that serve other interests.

The university and school of the future must be a means of total community participation, not in the consumption of available knowledge, but in the creation of completely unavailable insights.⁸ (McLuhan, 1971: Issue 5)

This is more than a hint at we call today crowd-sourcing. That too needs to be taught and encouraged among young people.

There is no kind of problem that baffles one or a dozen experts that cannot be solved at once by a million minds that are given a chance simultaneously to tackle a problem. The satisfaction of individual prestige, which we formerly derived from the possession of expertise, must now yield to the much greater satisfactions of dialogue and group discovery. The task yields to the task force. (McLuhan, 1971: Issue 5)

Reflecting upon François Rabelais’s prescription for the ideal education, that is to fill the student with encyclopedic knowledge, Montaigne famously wrote in his Essays, «better a well made head than a well-filled one» (Montaigne, 1596, 1, ch. 26). Such were the polar opposites of the medieval and the Renaissance favored methods of education. Nary of Plato’s warning that literacy would make fools of people because they «would trust written words to remember things instead of learning to remember by themselves», Montaigne did indeed trust books and read and commented them avidly, «retiring, as he said, in (his) library». Plato’s argument comes back with a twist, considering studies about the effects of the Internet and of multimedia on cognitive skills, emotions and learning abilities. If Google is really making us stupid (Nicholas Carr), is there a possibility that our heads are indeed emptied? Then perhaps we should turn Montaigne’s proposition around: ‘Better a few empty heads well connected than a single well-made one’. That is, at least, one conclusion one could draw from the rising quantity and quality of research done on surfers’ brains, habits, skills, gains, losses, concentration, attention, memory, social behavior, self-esteem, and the list keeps growing.

Derrick de Kerckhove and Eric McLuhan

Scientific Directors

Short References

McLuhan, M. (1966). Cybernation and Culture. The Social Impact of Cybernetics, edited by Charles R. Dechert. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

McLuhan, M. (1971). Convocation Address, The University of Alberta, McLuhan Studies, Issue 5, URL: http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss5/1_5art3.htm (viewed 12 December 2012).

McLuhan, M. (2003). Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews. Cambridge (Massachusetts): The MIT Press.

McLuhan, M. & Carpenter, E. (eds) (1960). Explorations in Communication. Boston: Beacon Press.

McLuhan, M. & Fiore, Q. (1967). The Medium is the Massage. New York: Bantam Books.

McLuhan, M., Hutchon, K., & McLuhan, E. (1977). City as classroom: Understanding language and media. Agincourt, ON: Book Society of Canada.

McLuhan, M. & McLuhan, E. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McLuhan, M. & Powers, B. R. (1989). The global village: transformations in world life and media in the 21^st century. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.