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I adjust very slowly to new technologies. I have an instinctive aversion to them. Yet, recently I had to adjust everything I have ever done while teaching literature in a college classroom. I became completely dependent on technology. No more small, intimate seminars. No more office visitations with students. No more give and take of a college classroom as my students and I discuss and debate literary topics. No more reading excerpts of beautiful prose or poetry from an open book while standing behind a lectern. Most importantly, no more teaching the humanities as a branch of knowledge that encourages us to create close physical and intellectual bonds with our students as we share a classroom with one another.
All of that was gone, replaced by faces on a computer screen. Sometimes there were no faces at all, just names on emails and email attachments. Our common humanity had been replaced by technology, which many of us in literary studies had often seen as the enemy of the human race, not its salvation. Now we had to recognize that higher education, at least for a time, had to be propped up by the “enemy” as characterized in many science fiction stories, dystopian novels, and other literary genres. I had to temporarily abandon my own prejudices and embrace the flow of a technological world I had often seen as a threat to my academic discipline and career as a writer.
As I was making those adjustments, I was reminded of what Henry Adams, the author of The Education of Henry Adams (1907), had said about change in his lifetime. Perhaps he still had much to tell us about the new technologies we were embracing in the college classrooms as we adjusted to remote teaching and learning. Adams arguably saw more deeply into the twentieth century than any other writer of his time, and he had some of the same concerns about the emerging modern world. He had attended the Paris Exposition in 1900 and visited the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. At these events, he witnessed the electrical-powered turbines and other machines that were on display. He realized, as he wandered among those colossal inventions, that he was witnessing the birth of a new world. Gone were the days of a simpler America. This new world seemed to Adams to have eliminated a time when people had some control over their lives. Now those controls were disappearing.
In his memoir, Adams wrote of this epiphany in the chapters titled “A Dynamic Theory of History,” “A Law of Acceleration,” and “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” He argued that the human race was entering a future in which changes would take place in ever-accelerating patterns. What once constituted changes that occurred over 100 years would be compacted into changes that occurred every 10 years. The changes that occurred over 10 years would soon be replaced by changes that occurred over one year. To Adams, the question was whether the human race could keep up with these accelerating rates of change and the need to understand new systems simply to survive. He was also concerned that these future technologies might contribute to the gradual moral degradation of the human race because that side of human nature could not keep pace with the powerful accelerating technologies.
Adams illustrated his ideas regarding change with a series of analogies, one of which was the speed at which a meteor would approach the sun before disappearing in a fireball. Adams argued that the meteor’s speed would increase every second of its existence as the sun’s gravitational pull became more powerful. At the moment of impact, the meteor would be travelling at its fastest rate of speed. Adams felt that human evolution, fueled by the modern technologies of his time, could assert similarly destructive forces of accelerating change in the twentieth century. His prediction of a future in which humankind would struggle to cope with these changes was undeniably accurate in the context of the computer-generated technologies after his death in 1918.
Although I agreed with many of the concerns Adams raised in his memoir, I did not wish to return to the “good old days.” I typed my first published book on a manual typewriter. I remember distinctly having to retype an entire page just to insert or remove a word, phrase, or complete sentence from the manuscript before submitting it to a publisher. Due to these experiences, I saw the merits of computer-assisted writing rather quickly. If it could eliminate many of the tedious tasks of editing and revising a manuscript until it was ready for publication, I was all for it—and I decided to purchase my first computer. As software programs changed, however, I found myself devoting as much time to learning new word processing software as I was producing publishable prose. I became concerned that remote learning and teaching might do something similar to courses in literary studies.
From what I read in newspapers, there are others who have similar concerns about the impact of technology on higher education. As a temporary solution to the challenges the coronavirus has unleashed on our universities, these new technologies are somewhat of a godsend. However, as a long-term pedagogy in many academic disciplines, we should embrace them with caution—and only in disciplines where it is appropriate.
Henry Adams had a similar view of the use and misuse of the new technologies he witnessed. He described them as an “ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal.” So long as they helped heat the world’s homes, he believed these “dynamos” served a useful purpose. However, he was concerned they could become “a moral force, much as the Christians felt the Cross.” It was the fervor with which his generation embraced the new technologies that concerned him the most. He felt he was witnessing the birth of a new religion, but one that was devoid of anything resembling human feelings.
Perhaps we should have the same concerns about the new technologies that presently support higher education’s transition to remote learning. They are useful tools to get us through these difficult times. However, they should not be permanent fixtures in every academic discipline—less we lose our common humanity and yield to their potential to create the future for us.
References
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), available on Project Gutenberg.
