|
Articles Conference Reviews |
2007KeyKarcherRichard Doyle, The Wiki is the Medium is the Message
I have to say I have never attended a keynote speech quite like that given by Dr. Richard Doyle. I’m sure I have never laughed so much at a keynote speech, and I know I have never before been asked to chant a mantra. However Doyle’s entertaining and engaging talk provoked me, along with the rest of the 200 or so audience members, to do just that. With a rather unassuming appearance and in a laid-back manner, Doyle offered the title of his talk, “the wiki is the medium is the message”, as a remix of McLuhan, as a mantra, and as a framework for his discussion of wikis, Wyrd! and technology. Doyle began by pointing out that even when we are not ‘plugged in’ or ‘switched on’, still we are all caught up in technology. We live in a world so bombarded by information that, as Doyle jokingly observed, it is like we are living with planet-wide attention deficit disorder. He explained that we live in a world of infoquake; in the first 800,000 years of human kind we had 12 exabytes of information (1 exabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). From the year 2000 to the year 2001 we doubled that amount of information. As a culture, we are incredible manipulators of information. If we as compositionists are to be involved in the creation and dissipation of that information, then we should be concerned with how to deal with all the information, and how to help our students do likewise. Wyrd! is the name of the wiki product Doyle has been involved with in his teaching, and he offered his own experience with using wikis in his syllabus as a method of helping students understand the interconnectedness of information and of their place as creators and manipulators of information. Doyle argued that we need what he referred to as ‘sunga,’ a sense of intertwingleness, because in fact our senses lie to is when they tell us that we are individual selves isolated from others. Doyle’s project Wyrd! involves having students go through a series of activities that ultimately help them to realize the interconnectedness of all people and of all information. First Doyle asks his students to isolate themselves from any form of online communication or information. Next he has his student post three times for three weeks to a class wiki. Stage three is to then have the students create links to three of their classmates’ wiki pages, regardless of whether or not those links make sense. Through this, and through looking at the links created by the others, Doyle claimed that the students slowly begin to discover that everything in the world is connected to itself, that we are living on a plane where all things are interconnected. According to Doyle, what ends up happening is that students start to take responsibility for their actions, for their interactions with others, and for their writing. By way of a conclusion, Doyle drew a parallel between our culture’s fears about the scarcity of natural resources, and its fears about being unable to deal with the plethora of information. He claimed that we live in a discourse of scarcity, a discourse that says we are running out natural resources like coal and water; that we are running out of energy. In actuality, according to Doyle, we are being bombarded by enormous amounts of energy, for example from the sun; we just need to know how to use it. In the same way, we need to know how to process, remix and dissipate the wealth of information available to us online, and for Doyle, the wiki is one way to do that.
Comments? |