Technology and Its Literacy Minuses

I sometimes wonder as we charge full-speed into the techno-utopia that is our electronic future whether we understand what kind of future we are creating for ourselves. I remember in the 1990s when the internet was first hitting critical mass it was being hailed as a creator of literacy, a thing that required people to type which would, at the same time, force people to engage with text. That seemed exciting at the time, until the first time I saw somebody do Instant Messaging. I was struck by how sloppy the writing was with it. Little did I know that that type of writing would soon become the established norm for the internet.

This is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong with sloppy writing; I do it myself from time to time. What concerns me is that the sloppy writing which people, especially young people, are doing now is becoming the established norm. Facebook English is becoming standard internet English. As a teacher I can only fight that so much, and railing against it isn't going to make any difference. What's happening right now is a deep cultural trend, and one which I am not encouraged by.

I do hope that improved writing begins to prevail in general internet writing. This may be a utopian dream, and I'm certainly not going to hold my breath, but I do hope so. I find myself very discouraged reading comments off a news article or even reading the posts some of my friends make on some of the websites we share. I know going on a rant will serve little purpose besides making people uncomfortable and making myself unpopular. In the end, all I can do is to just keep writing well and hoping perhaps something will stick.

I'm not feeling too positive this morning. Maybe I need another cup of coffee.

Great Essay on the Waning of Nerd Culture

Did you know that we are now in the decline of Nerd culture? All that stuff which used to be verboten and embarrassing, like knowing obsessive details about Star Trek trivia (guilty!), memorizing stats off the D&D Monster Manual (also guilty), being able to recite speeches from Blade Runner (not guilty, although I'm ashamed of that!), are now acceptable parts of internet culture. If you don't believe me, read this rant about it by Patton Oswalt, best known as the voice of Remy the rat from the Pixar movie Ratatouille.

Worth showing to your students then talking about.

Thank You, Mr. Gates

Before I became an English teacher I was an IT (Information Technology) guy. I specialized in Macintosh computers and was pretty good, especially in the early 1990s, at training artists who had spent their entire life doing traditional paste-up to us a computer to do desktop publishing. I was a Mac guy during the demoralizing late 1990s, when Apple was going through a self-induced tailspin. It was a painful time for an Apple fan such as myself.

Bill Gates represented Microsoft then, and to a certain extent still does, although he isn't really involved with their day-to-day operations. I did not like that man during the dark days, but I've recently grown to respect him for certain reasons.

Mr. Gates is perhaps the most important reason “geekiness” or “nerdiness” has become cool. When I was a child, geeks like me worried about getting beaten up simply because of who we were. Mr. Gates, along with the entire technology revolution, changed that image. When a nerd becomes the richest man in the world, even those who despise nerds must sit up and take notice.

I'm also pleased with Mr. Gates's transformation from rapacious capitalist to philanthropist. While as a teacher I think his education reforms are questionable, thank you Mr. Gates for making people like me cool.

And oddly, now it seems Apple is becoming the new Microsoft. Go figure.

Books For Reading vs. Books For Teaching

One of the great things about teen readers these days is how much speculative fiction they're reading. Any teacher that's conscious can name the titles kids have in their packs:

• The Lightning Thief series
• City of Ember series
• The Hunger Games books
• The Harry Potter books (of course)
• The Twilight novels
• The Uglies series
• The Eragon series

There are more, of course, but you get the idea. The question is for a teacher, should we consider actually teaching these books? I would argue “No,” and for a couple of good reasons. As a teacher you have limited time to teach, only ± about  180 days, and half that if you're teaching high school. How many books can you teach within this time? This means that you need to be very selective about your books, and it makes sense in this context to choose books that kids are not reading.

Part of what we should be doing with science fiction and fantasy literature is giving kids an education in science fiction and fantasy literature. With that in mind, we should teach some of the more seminal works of the genre, the ones kids aren't regularly reading. Kids who are reading the Twilight series should be taught Dracula. You're into dystopian novels? What about The Time Machine or 1984? You like swords and sorcery? Then let's do The Hobbit.

It's up to the teacher ultimately to choose which books to teach, but what the kids are reading is a good way to determine that choice. If you don't have the luxury of choosing books in this matter, have a class library of the appropriate books ready to hand out to the enthusiastic reader.

Why Isn't “Star Wars” Science Fiction?

Star Wars is the first example of science fiction most people think of, but it's barely science fiction. Here's why:

Science fiction is about ideas. It's about the exploration of a concept in science or technology and seeing its effect on society. What is the idea behind Star Wars?

If you ignore the science fiction setting, the Star Wars movies don't deal with science fiction issues very much. They deal with the battle between good and evil, which are differentiated quite clearly. There's very little middle ground. As well, this battle between good and evil is what sets off the action. These movies are much more like a fantasy story in a science fiction setting.

How could I claim that Star Wars is fantasy? The main heroes fight with swords (mostly). The heroes (and a couple of villains) use a magical power to gain an advantage over most of their enemies. At best, the struggle is a conversation about what kind of government is better for a galaxy, a dictatorial bureaucracy or a looser, more democratic system. Interestingly, the movies make a point that the dictatorial bureaucracy is much more efficient than a democracy, an important theme of the three prequel movies where the initial democracy is seen as inefficient and corrupt. Yet this argument tends to fall apart because we never really see what kind of government replaces the empire. At the end of The Return of the Jedi the evil emperor had been defeated, but we don't see what kind of government the rebels replace the empire with.

The best science fiction idea from Star Wars is probably the concept of the Death Star. Unfortunately, the idea of a weapon so strong it can destroy another planet isn't really a new one, nor is presented in a particularly innovative way. A better example of this might be the classic Star Trek episode “The Doomsday Machine”, where an automated “planet killer” is roaming through our galaxy, munching on planets (and star ships) for fuel. Its hull is impenetrable, which makes it a very difficult thing to kill. It's certainly nothing a lone snub-fighter could destroy, with a precision attack on a stupid design flaw.

Where Star Wars does become science fiction is in its setting, yet I would argue that may not be enough to make it a science fiction story. The different planets in the Star Wars universe are well-researched in terms of their ecosystems. As well, the space ship designs employ a certain wild creativity that makes them fascinating to look at. At best, Star Wars is the kind of science fiction called space opera, a type of science fiction story that emphasizes adventure and romance. We have lots of examples of space opera, from the Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon stories to the novels of E.E. “Doc” Smith and the the John Carter, Warlord of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. These stories are fun but not really “serious” in the same sense of H.G. Wells. Star Wars certainly isn't as goofy as some of the Buck Rogers stories (or as racist), but it shares this genre's focus on melodrama and adventure.

So when you talk about science fiction in your classrooms, keep in mind that the most recognizable example of the genre barely fits within the genre.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera

The classic Star Trek episode “The Doomsday Machine”, written by Normal Spinrad.

The Star Wars movies, episodes 4–6, and 1–3 (regretfully)

Why Teach Science Fiction?

If it's a teacher's job to get a student ready for the real world, what business does he/she have to be teaching books that, on the surface, have little or nothing to do with reality? Why teach speculative literature? This is a valid question, and the answers may be surprising. It might make sense to address fantasy and science fiction differently because, while they both share a certain “unreality”, the genres deal with very different issues.

Science fiction is the literature of the possible. It is a literature that (at its best) examines trends in technology, science and society and extrapolates what might be a result of that literature. It is literature, I like to say, that asks a “What if…” question, then proceeds to answer it.

Of course, this is a description of good science fiction. There's a lot of bad literature, cinema, and TV out there too which has little to say beyond offering a brief, entertaining diversion. The good stuff is what we want to pay attention to as teachers. The science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon is famous for saying:

“I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.” (Venture Magazine, March 1958)

In other words, 90% of science fiction is lousy, but then again 90% of all art is lousy. As teachers, we have little time to waste with bad science fiction, so we here will stick with the good stuff.

Getting back to the “Why we should teach science fiction” question, there are few forms of art that address our contemporary society and its needs like science fiction can. We live in a science fiction world now. We live in a world where technology is allowing people to do extraordinary things, and science fiction is the literature that deals with the consequences of what we're creating. When the Baltimore-Washington telegraph line was opened in 1844, Samuel Morse's first morse code message was “What hath God wrought?” This quote from Numbers 23:23 asks us all, what kind of world are we making with our technology? Science fiction is a literature that attempts to answer that question.