I was locked into the music recording wing of level 3 on my way to the week one lab. My panicked wonderings about how long a person could survive on a diet of electrical cabling, carpet fibers and lecture notes was interrupted by two Media Studies girls who let me out with a funky key card.
A few notes on the tutorial: the Macs are great – I’m glad to be back on one that doesn't look like a massive bubble and weigh roughly the same as an African elephant. I'm not much of a blogger myself, but you'd be surprised how many blogs trainee educators are expected to create in the interests of keeping up with the generations of digital natives we will encounter throughout our teaching careers. It seems that information communication technologies are a sort of twenty-first century ‘golden child’ in education practice.
Tutespark this week asks a chicken-and-egg question for the post-modern age: what constitutes 'new' and 'old' technologies, and under what circumstances do ‘new technologies’ become ‘old technologies’?
While there seems to be widespread public debate about these questions, I’m going to share my personal opinion on this possibly unimportant distinction (as the Bard pointed out, a rose by any other name does smell as sweet).
I think we can look at this question from several angles. One of these is to use the terms to mark a specific era in the history of communication technology development. This perspective raises issues that parallel those surrounding the application of the terms ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’, as modeled facetiously above. These terms wreak similar havoc on the art world, where those of us who are not high art connoisseurs tend to become slightly confused when told that ‘modern art’ is, in fact, passé, and that we are currently in a postmodern age… What then follows the postmodern era…and who comes up with these terms? The mind boggles. If we look at this question from an historical perspective, we are tempted to demarcate a point in time whence all technologies developed up to that point are labeled ‘old’, while all communication technologies that follow constitute ‘new’ technologies. At issue here is the inherent objectivity of the terms ‘new’ and ‘old’; their meanings tend to change from one person to another, and across groups and cultures – not just across periods of time. I’m sure many of us can recall the first laptop, television, mP3 player, or mobile phone we owned – the technology would have seemed new from our perspective at the time, despite its being a hand-me-down from an older sibling or parent. Today many of us have acquired and replaced several of these technologies with newer or convergent models that claim to combine the best features of each. I would suggest that, given the rapid-fire nature of communication technology development, the use of the terms ‘new’ or ‘old’ to name such vague time periods is as impractical as it is pretentious.
Another option is to view these terms as a tool to track changes in communication technologies in specific contexts. Free email hosting is not exactly the new kid on the block; however, these communication technologies are constantly being revised and reinvented. Many of us will be aware of Griffith University’s latest technological communication innovation, using Google-hosted Gmail accounts to keep in contact with students and staff. Does this new use of the technology make it a ‘new’ technology in this context? We see this kind of innovation in many industries, including marketing, fundraising (seen a flash mob on YouTube lately?), home entertainment and appliances, and education.
My final comment comes after browsing a report by the Cultural Ministers Council (2008). I think it is interesting to see the terms ‘new technologies’, ‘interactive digital technology’, and ‘convergent technologies’ used interchangeably. The treatment of these terms in the report on Building a Creative Innovation Economy offers a third perspective – one that is strongly correlated with the recent vogue for digital and convergent communication technologies, and gives lesser importance to other kinds.
As I’ve already mentioned, I don’t see the need to make a distinction between new and old. Just like fashions and film stars, the latest ‘it’-technologies seem to come and go in frustrating blink-and-you’ll-miss-it style.
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