EDSS 530

Reflection on the Visitors and Residents Video

Cyberspace:  It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.  The simple fact that I call it cyberspace is a giveaway; puts me in a generation that considers that realm foreign and somehow disconnected from the world of human interaction and experience.  Neuroscientists have determined that the music we listen to in our adolescence will remain our favorite throughout our lives.  Personally, I believe that the principle applies to the majority of our experience.  The psycho-emotional biases we are exposed to during the period when we are developing our higher-order thinking become the fundamental principles that govern our behavior and our preferences through adulthood.  So let’s look at some of those biases. 

We baby boomers all read Orwell, Kesey and Kerouac in school.  We’re deeply distrustful of Big Brother.  And while we envisioned him as an all-powerful, vindictive, reactionary government and he’s turned out to be more like the marketing department at Sirius Cybernetics, still we don’t want anybody (I say anybody) following us around and snooping into our business.  Still, we hear that  people will follow us around on the web if we’re not careful; that we need secure passwords and must be careful about the cookies left on our computers.  But we don’t really know what any of that means.  The password must be between 8 and 20 characters with at least one numeral and one capital letter and with no actual dictionary word embedded anywhere within it.  And cookies.  Shades of Hansel and Gretel!  Not truly understanding the mechanisms by which we may be tracked, we don’t know how to protect ourselves and generally elect to avoid the woods altogether. 

And we like words.  Orwell, Kesey and Kerouac.  I mean, #csusmedu just doesn’t trip lightly off the tongue.  We put a lot of energy into mastering our version of English and we don’t want to give it up.  We can become functionally literate in this other language if we have to, but we won’t bother to become fluent if we don’t see any joy in it. 

So I’ll visit from time to time, maybe even work there.  But at the end of the day I’ll go home to my books.  But really, what’s the problem?  “Old people just don’t understand this stuff.”  The young may build their homes on the foundation left them by their parents, but do they really want grandpa hanging around all day  yapping about his prostate and how he had to walk 12 miles through the snow to school uphill both ways?  I don’t think so.  Visits are good.