A kind of unsolicited amnesia

The element of instantaneity: everything (news, memes, personal crises) is arriving simultaneously in the ‘feed’ – without the time to process the quality or layers of it. And it disappears just as fast. The page is ‘refreshed’.

Karen Gabriel in conversation with Amit Sengupta

You have been teaching in the university since many years. How have things changed in the contemporary era with the advent of social media and its obsessions.

I’d like to begin by saying that all education, and higher education in particular – notwithstanding the limitations it may be seen to have – involves sustained engagement with reading, focus and thinking. While it has often been understood as a road to employment, the actual aim of higher education is to give the student the tools that will enable her/him to understand the world and their place in it relative to others.

With this comes the ability to think critically, to understand the logic of systems, and to imagine a better world. It also seeks to equip the student to deal with some of what the world and life may throw at them, but always with a degree of inclusive self-awareness.

The advent of social and digital media has radically transformed the life of both the student (and the teacher) in unprecedented ways. I will briefly look at a few of these.

The first is the concerted shift towards Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs that governments and educational institutions are pushing. The stated agenda of MOOCs is to democratise education and vastly increase accessibility to it across the board. MOOCs is being marketed as a guided but flexible online engagement with somewhat customised courses that allow people of all ages to upskill at any time in their day/life. Its apparently diverse pedagogical methods and learning styles and multimedia formats are talked up.

However, MOOCs must also be understood as a bit of a dupe for the following reasons. First, MOOCs may be accessed only with a good quality computer or smart phone, good connectivity and bandwidth (none of which are available in remote or poor households). Its touted democratic disposition is not quite credible.

Second, MOOCs is a key and concerted way to dismantle the classroom, divest it of its crucial dynamics (student-teacher and peer interaction), segregate individuals, and terminate student collectives, rendering the student deeply vulnerable socially.

Third, it reduces education to the curricular, deleting the co-curricular and social aspects of it completely.

Fourth, it is also a vital and strategic way of jettisoning the teacher (who is being badly discredited and smeared), appropriating the expertise they have and the methods that they have evolved, without a thought about the intellectual property rights that governments an corporations go on about.

Finally, online teaching makes the mortal fallacy of equating information and data with knowledge and education, an error no teacher worth their salt will make.

The second way in which social media has impacted education is through a culture of instant gratification (likes and shares). Students now tend to constantly curate perfect selves which they upload to various platforms for affirmation. Often these have little to do with how they actually feel or the lives they lead.

I believe that this makes young people extremely vulnerable psychologically. Along with joblessness, violence, poor wages and a pervasive hopelessness, this contributes to a spike in anxiety, self-doubt, mental health issues. Social media also institutes an perilous slippage between the virtual and the material world, while the culture of scrolling through bytes and clips in particular has reshaped attention spans.

Students are flooded with information, but they are not really conceptually equipped to either assess or process it. In fact, their powers of discernment are not being developed enough. This is where the teacher becomes invaluable.

Students shy away from books, avoid demanding reading and have becomes cynical about education and learning. They also sound clever, but are impatient with the demanding business of thinking. They prefer shortcuts and images.

Writing skills are also on the decline, for two reasons: short attention spans and clever sounding neologisms that are not backed by robust and powerful concepts.

Finally, student activism too, has moved substantially to the social media. While this has been enabling in many ways, for the spread of awareness about issues, for instance, it has also been at the expense of actual participation in ground-level political activity. Of course, one must qualify this with a comment on the systematic curtailment of spaces for protest and the crackdown on dissent.

What, according to you, is the positive and negative impact of the social media on young, eclectic and vulnerable minds?

Social media has proved very useful for the dissemination of opinion and information, and platforms like WhatsApp have greatly enhanced the speed and efficacy of communication, not just among students, but between students and teachers, students and institutions, etc. That said, the architecture of social media is such that individuals have direct, private access to a much wider range of information and opinion than earlier, making the regulation of that information -- in terms of its credibility, its age-appropriateness, the access to it as well as its consumption - nearly impossible.

The rise of the social media influencer as a new kind of public intellectual, as well as the increased exposure to such intellectuals, are both consequences of this architecture,


Another significant change in this regard has been the increasing reliance of students on YouTube ‘academics and gurus’, as alternatives to teachers. They can afford to avoid attending classes, or to not pay attention in class, and instead turn to such unregulated – and sometimes spurious content – when preparing for their exams.

Most of social media seems to be anti-knowledge, against books, or learning. Everything is transitory, rapid and passing by. How does it impact the academic world of students?

I have already addressed some of this above. Here, I will add that the fundamental change in the attention span of students is accompanied by the avoidance of complexity. Social media's reliance on quick, easily digestible content, as well as its constant pursuit of ‘eyeballs’ through ‘new’ attention-grabbing material, has rendered the teaching-learning process much more challenging. Unfortunately, the media shift towards ‘infotainment’ has seeped into education.

The other point that I’d like to make is about the ways in which we experience, measure, and move through time—has been radically altered in the digital era. The element of instantaneity: everything (news, memes, personal crises) is arriving simultaneously in the ‘feed’ – without the time to process the quality or layers of it. And it disappears just as fast.

The page is ‘refreshed’.

This seems to inculcate an enormous sense of fragmentation and forgetfulness. Yet, the internet never forgets. The speed of technological changes and the adaptive speed and energy that they demand, are disconcerting and even demoralising. Slowing down, resisting the recursive and seeking depth, become radical acts of resistance.

Is there a generation gap between say teenagers, the young, and their parents?

Generation gaps have always existed between different generations, but the effect of social media on the current kind of generation gap has been to exacerbate it, perhaps unprecedentedly. Older generations or digital migrants, have been slower to adapt to the new media, and perhaps have not been as comfortable with its complexities as the digital natives who have grown up knowing and relying on these media.

Another feature of a perceived generational difference may be seen in the newer generation’s attachment to identity politics over structural change. This is often expressed in a commitment to and performance of gender and sexual fluidity.

However, the most disconcerting gap is in the approach to language. Most language now lives alongside or within visuals like memes, gifs, emojis, images and videos. Communication appears to have become more casual, highly abbreviated and grammatically dubious. Spellings appear to have become irrelevant.

To my mind, this is a form of language loss even while something new is developing. This type of language loss will have long-term consequences, as earlier writings and ideas will slowly become inaccessible, leading to a kind of unsolicited amnesia.

However, and interestingly, many of the students return after a year or two and say that they feel much closer to me than they do to those younger than they are – a testament to the speed of change and also perhaps to their changing perspectives.

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Karen Gabriel is Head, Department of English, St Stephen’s College, Delhi University. She says that the advent of social and digital media has radically transformed the life of both the student (and the teacher) in unprecedented ways.