Bubble-wrapped, disconnected, distracted, disoriented

As a university teacher dealing with impressionable minds, I feel that social media has  succeeded in creating multiple forms of digital schizophrenia  and new forms of cyber elitism. There is a new Frankenstein in our midst.

By Ratna Raman

Yes, I have completed four decades of teaching at the university. Of course I have  grown  too, from a young person full of enthusiasm, learning and developing ideas and adding to my own thinking. Reading up and doing research were part of my portfolio for a very long time.

There was no social/digitial media in the years I spent at the university as an undergraduate student.  It was possibly a good thing, because we had to scout for information. In fact, forage for learning --and I realise I am using a very basic word -- that goes back to a time when humans had to find food to feed themselves. Learning is also one such hunger that demands to be fed. 

Resources were scarce, materials were in short supply, and gaining access to reading material demanded effort. What was available to us in abundance was time. Time to attend classes, to work in the library,  to learn how to write and to communicate an idea in tutorial sessions in small groups of six.

Watch films in black and white in special groups, go down to the National School of Drama (NSD) in Mandi House, Delhi to watch theatre, to Triveni to see displays of art, music, painting and the odd open air presentation; participate in co currcular activities at college, discover India's rich cultural heritage through Spic-Macay, learn collective interaction from protest marches and rallies.

There were, food forays at  Kamlanagar, Shajahan Road and Connaught Place in Delhi on the subsidised bus pass (Rs 12 in the 1980s), annual festivals and flower shows, as well as volunteering at the ASIAD, the Asian Games held in the capital. The university handed the world to us on a delicious platter in days when there was still one-to-one communication and eye contact.

In the contemporary era at the university, we now have the semester system in place, beaten and forced into amorphousness for over the 13 years. It has brutally compressed time for teaching and learning, grabbed vast expanses of annual time, and scrunched it into semesters. The curriculum has been shuffled and squeezed across disciplines, rupturing processes of learning unequivocally.

Into this squelched up time, an excess of trivia is being fed, unverified and titillating, and a lot of it  has been thrust in by social media and the internet. Everyone is posting, and the entire airspace is full of cyber baggage.

So we are now in a strange space, one of post-truth and optics. Form has completely revamped substance, so there is an amazing amount of statistics about information generation  that everybody has access to. Students carry their texts on their cell phones and make notes to themselves on whatsapp! Learning has become portable, and in the manner of all portable things, lost both sustainability and  energy.

A text is not mulled over, nobody engages with the process of reading. Eyeballs filter information, conveying for a brief nanosecond ideas and issues that the brain quickly filters out, as it is really a matter of out of sight and out of mind.

I know the story, says a student when I ask her if she has read the novel prescribed in her GE course.  "Have you read the novel?” I persist. “That is too tedious,” she responds.

Another student asks me what is the purpose of buying a textbook, when the semester is going to end after four months in any case. Higher education  now comes with an inbuilt  shelf life.  It has been willfully commodified, sorted and placed on the shelves of a gigantic store.

Our new tools of technology -- earlier it was cut and paste -- are now being replaced  by great enablers such as ChatGpt and AI. Our evaluation systems of CA  (Continuous Assessment) and IA (Internal Assessment) are the biggest hoaxes  that have been dreamt up. A 100 mark paper is not 160 marks, and individual teachers are responsible for 70 of these marks, 11 of which  are based on an attendance percentage.  However, due to chronic absenteeism on the part of students, for a series of reasons too varied to be catalogued here, students without sufficient  attendance  can be stopped from writing the examination. They lose 11 marks for non-attendance.  So detaining them  is a double punishment, but, hey, who's listening and who cares?

Students are supposed to churn out around five assignments per course and in one semester they do seven courses.  So there is a huge amount of impossible plodding, physical input that academics demands. It is not possible to write 35 assignments in one semester.

Writing is also an input-based activity. It involves reading, assimilating, cross-referencing, thinking and then developing an ability to be able to string ideas through sentences. Time is of essence here, and again, it is never to be given to students or teachers.

As a university teacher dealing with impressionable minds, I feel that social media has succeeded in creating multiple forms of digital schizophrenia and new forms of cyber elitism. We are still talking about the one per cent, who were perhaps trained to take stock of the unequal world they lived in when they came to the university, in years long gone by. 

What we have now are clans and cults that live bubble-wrapped in realities of their own and are even more disconnected than the previous generations.  At the university, a new process is in place. We have teachers’ whatsapp groups on which we offer both felicitations and condolences, and all kinds of information, and the numbers are impressive because we have 200 plus teachers in every  group. Does this  signify  best communication practices? This is  a yet to be discussed subject.

Any student can call me anytime to ask me where I  am, or ask if my class can be advanced or cancelled or rescheduled, because my whatsapp number is in circulation.  So academia is operating pretty much on the premises of a world where there are no boundaries that  need not be maintained. This is the point of entry that social media works from since it  services a world without  boundaries wherein all manner of information is  pumped in , without filters, checks, safeguards, verification.  

In the previous century, William Golding wrote a very disturbing novel called Lord of the Flies.  Boys abandoned on an island find that their darkest and ugliest dimensions come into play in the absence of societal or parental authority and control. Having grown up on Treasure Island  and a harmless adventure, this was a chilling text. Golding's characters foray into evil on a remote island. In his novel, evil was  a world apart, away from the civilised world.

This, however, is not the case when we speak of   the internet and social media that has been  unleashed upon us. They are very much a part of the metropolitan lives that young people lead and the new monster  prowls and creeps unseen by us, and cannot be monitored, fathomed or controlled. Most people at home and in public spaces are immersed in social media and internet narratives.

So, is there a breakdown of communication between parents and children and teachers and students? I think communication is at a minimum. There is a huge trust deficit that is in place and a great deal of hostility and suspicion on both sides.

There is a new Frankenstein in our midst.

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Ratna Raman is Professor, English Department, Sri Ventateswara College, University of Delhi. She is the author of The Fiction of Doris Lessing -Reenvisioning Feminism, Bloomsbury.