Medium Versus Message

In a recent op-ed piece in the Daily Northwestern, a student columnist takes issue with “professors and academics who refuse to adopt even the most basic of (technological) changes.” Professors, he says, "need to ponder what a 21st century education really means if they desire the University to maintain relevance as an institution."

Technology, he continues, provides "a tool that has taken endless forms in altering how we as humans fundamentally process information. If today’s higher education institutions truly can’t learn anything from any of these changes, then soon they won’t be the ones teaching us about them either.”

Fair enough assessment of some instructors I’ve encountered. But the reality is that many -- if not most -- professors of a certain age have long contemplated the impact of the relentless pace of technology on their courses of study. Indeed, in the realm of journalism and communication, keeping abreast of technology has been vital.

The bold ones riding the wave of change in communications technology (and hence, interpersonal communication itself) over the past few decades -- as prophesized by Marshall McLuhan and his “global village” -- are perhaps the most skilled at adapting to communications technology because of their experience.

The journey from manual typewriter to iPad has been circuitous. Those who have witnessed the transformation know one thing for sure: change is the only certainty in the field of communications. As the oft-quoted Winston Churchill noted: “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”

While acknowledging the benefits of technology, changes in “how” we communicate won’t help us with “what” we communicate. Educators need not be obsequious to the latest fads; many will become obsolete in a trice. I recall one wag willing to guarantee that PageMaker would be the last design program I would ever need.

McLuhan said that “we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” True enough, I suppose, but effective communication involves much more than tools. What hasn’t become obsolete is Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, quantum physics, and even long division, whose mastery my teacher described as “the key to success” in fifth grade.

Learning requires thinking, and quality thinking requires space, the opposite of the incessant chatter of course wikis, live-tweeted lectures and other multi-dimensional falderal. Technology can aid in learning how to think. But it has a downside. Taking a different tack than McLuhan, I say let’s not confuse the medium with the message.

When we forget all the tricks and traps of the latest communications technology, it's the ideas behind the content of what we learned that remain. I remember not a lick of copyfitting from journalism school, the process of estimating point size and leading in which a particular piece of copy will need to fit in a predetermined area.

Fortunately, that skill is useless today. We no longer need to worry about copyfitting for offset or letterpress printing projects, just as we no longer have the need to know Wordperfect or PageMaker. The technologies will continue to evolve. What will remain is not necessarily how we learned, but what we learned.