Sociocultural context

Mind control MindlessnessBanned books Ignored booksConcealed truth Truth drowned in irrelevanceCaptive culture Trivial culture

irrelevanceincoherenceimpotence

“the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference”

c.f. Marshall McLuhan – “the medium is the message”

1985

Short attention spansMaterialisticNarcissticNot easily impressed

2011

?

“what we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life... And the prime cause is not vanity ... But the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilisation”

Henry Seidel Canby (1926)

“in the midst of a fabulous array of historically unprecedented and utterly mind-boggling stimuli...

Whatever.”

Thomas De Zegontita

The brief history of whatever...

1960s 1970s 1990s 2000

That’s what I meant to say

Whatever, you say, man. I’m not part of the system.

meh ?I really don’t care what you think, I’m more important.

What does all this mean for the culture in which we operate as professionals working in Education?

Interactivity?Online Community?

Digitisation