Digital Natives

Athens 450 B.C.E. was the cultural centre. Greek philosophy took a new direction. Interest was now focused on the individual and the individual’s place in the society with popular assembly and court of law democracy evolved. In order of democracy to work people had to be educated to take part in the democratic process. Thus for the Athenian it became very crucial for them to master the art of rhetoric and the sophist did just that. And from the time of Plato’s “academy” education started. Different cultures across the world are nothing but a constant struggle to stabilize the existing society. And across history we have seen various dimensions of education evolving. Education acted as a “social parent” where in it trained us to be the honourable recipient of the modern state craft. Staying on the relation between democracy and education, education invested in us the spirit of citizenship because there was this notion that left to ourselves we would be a very in-disciplined lot. Till the eighteenth century church held the monopoly of education and the so called “training of morality”. A major shift was noticed when the universities took over the function of the church in terms of education. But education by and large was a tool used to stabilize culture and to stabilize society. With developmental economy coming into the picture, and institutions like Humboldt and Shanti Nikhatan an emphasis on self knowledge was emphasised. These institutions questioned the whole structure of learning. In our present day context cyber space is doing the same thing in a more radical way. It has stripped down the medium of communication wherein the individual is unhindered by the boundries of nation, state, class and gender.
In the initial classes Digital Natives challenged the basic structure of a classroom. It questioned the student’s role of acting as a recipient of knowledge and at the same time questioned the role of a teacher too. It also argued on the whole notion of ‘meritocracy’ and looked at the impact of peer to peer learning in cyberspace. It also questioned the internet’s elitist mode of functioning especially in the realms of academics. With India progressing towards being a “welfare state” and with the recent ‘right to education bill 2009’, public examination going online and the country’s very strong inclination towards globalization we are no longer in a position to choose whether we want technology or not . In the survey which I would first emphasis on the four A’s that the U.N. projected on its right to education which is Availability Accessibility Acceptability Adaptability (U.N.). Secondly I would like to know the impact that the cyber space is making on our lives and identity. The status message in social networking sites is a prime example. Some post how their day was like, some quote, some express their anger and so on. Everyone engrossed in their own world. Irrespective of what I feel about these status messages it gives us this window of expression that is basically not controlled by “civilized” notion of so called reason that we have to fit into. With Internet fostering a new dynamics of interactivity and unprecedented ability to form new forms of social relations the degree of nation state to an extraordinary degree in recent times. But then again to go by Jhon Perry’s argument against internet as a ‘essential laboratory’ a profound degree of subjectivity can be witnessed within the realms of academics itself, on one hand we have this basic structure of “meritocracy” on which our future depends on and on the other hand with cyber culture in into the classrooms a challenge against the metaphysical assumption of “being educated” can be sensed, providing room for imagination within academics. Mr. Pinto’s experiment of using blogs in education has emphasised the use of internet both locally (in Christ) and in a global manner. This has been a case with various social movements too. Thus cyber space has opened up new possibilities to fashion subjectivity as fluid, decentred and heterogeneous. Julian Stallabrass’s argues that cyberspace not only reduces everything to calculable, quantifiable, exchangeable and sailable bits of information commodities but also becomes a commodification in which both objects and subjects are captured. He demystifies the ideology of a cyberspace as a false promise to bring a more liberal, democratic and free society. In the survey I would also like to highlight a bit of Marxist tradition of social criticism directing towards an inherent inequality of cyberspace in distributing social resources among different class and gender. A point of argument I would stress upon is the communication situation fostered by cyberspace will reduce forms of identity to mere signs floating freely in transmission and exchange on the net.
Ashif Ali.