Even technophobic me is a little awed by the digital media moment we’re in. It’s like balancing on top of one of those gigantic earth balls and it’s about to roll forward. It’s going to be nutty is what it’s gonna be.

Every generation, upon reaching responsible-adult status, suddenly looks around in alarm and is certain that the world is going straight to the hot place where all the interesting people are.

Which means I’m caught between panic (when I think about the life expectancy vs. social security and the retirement non-options for my Gen-X cohort), and almost unbearable giddiness and curiosity (when I watch the technology and the digital media wave starting to crest).

I’m excited to read more of AcademHack’s posts on the University of Texas at Dallas’ new media literacy program, Emerging Media and Communications. As he explains below, they didn’t slap some higher-tech digital stuff onto an existing media studies program. They’re starting from scratch and it sounds mightily intriguing.

From AcademHack’s Post:

“A new kind of digital divide ten years from now will separate those who know how to use new media to band together from those who don’t.”

Now Rheingold wrote this in 2003, so we are over half way to his projected ten year horizon. And so, this is what I lie awake at night thinking about. There is a new type of literacy developing, one between those who will understand the digital network media landscape, and who use it to produce, to organize, to take ownership over their lives, responsiblity for their community, to be critical of it, to engage with it . . . and with those who merely consume it. A divide between those who will be passive consumers at best, victims at worst, and those who will be active participants. There is a lot of nuance in this argument that gets glossed over when I reduce it this way, but I think it is essentially true. We are at “the changeover” a moment when culture is changing, will look completely different than it does now. What that is I have no idea, but I am sure it is going to be profoundly heterogenous to what we have now (think printing press change but on steroids).

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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