Technology, Phenomenology, a Dead Body, and When Pretty Girls Talk to Me

It was a fine morning as Professor Fahy walked down the street in Morocco. The air was cool and crisp, the street echoed the quiet murmuring of locals who were going about their usual morning rituals, and Professor Fahy was taking it all in. However, the routine morning for the well traveled Professor came to an abrupt end; he stepped on a dead body in the street. Realizing what lay at his feet, Professor Fahy sprinted to the nearest store yelling for them to call 911, call an ambulance, find this man help. The clerk in the store looked at him and shrugged his shoulders. They had no medical system, no way to call for help, no hesitancy when stepping over a dead body in the street. At this moment Professor Fahy had the abrupt and intense realization that the streets he walked, the city he was now in, was far different from his home. Only now did he realize that the whole structure of the society; everything he knew to be a standard and way of life, did not exist here. His own disappeared, the real world appeared. At this moment, he became more aware of the very world he lived in. At this moment Professor Fahy experienced a disruption in the phenomenological experience of the world.

Phenomenology is the philosophical study of moment-by-moment lived experience, and expected lived experience. Simply put, it is the attempt to understand each moment of life experience as a phenomenon. (How can you live life if not in a constant state of awe?) Here’s the sad thing: we tend to get quite accustomed to the life we live. You know that tomorrow you will wake up, eat your Frosted Flakes, go to your cognates, look at espn.com or for new shoes on your laptop during class, sit next to the same person, go out for a beer at the same bar after class with the same people, go home and do the usual busy work and fight with imovie for an hour, then go to sleep after watching Letterman. I bet you can go through a day without even realizing it. Humans are creatures of habit; we tend to find a comfortable way to go through life and stick to it. However, there are moments when everything we know to be, everything we expect, gets disrupted. When this moment occurs our eyes are opened; the world and our experience of it recreates itself in a matter of seconds. I think these are moments of enlightenment, moments of true learning. These are phenomenological disruptions – instances when we truly realize that every second of existence is strange and beautiful; it is in only in our search for and perception of meaning that we are the phenomenal exception to the universe.

The best learning comes when a student's expected lived experience is disrupted. This can happen on a number of different scales – whether it be traveling to a foreign country (no dead body required) or sitting through an eye-opening lesson (though you will experience few of these in your life, yet hopefully teach many.) Here’s the thing though – I don’t think this can be done in a mediated environment. I don’t think that we can significantly alter a student’s perception of the world through the use of the Internet or other technology.

Today we are conditioned against letting media significantly affect our lives. First of all, we are brought up with media only being considered entertainment – from Sesame Street to Saved by the Bell, in our initial years media is only educational entertainment or amusing adventures. Then we grow to watch movies, to surf the Internet, to talk to those from far away places through media – but it barely registers.

There is no phenomenon in mediated experience. I like to look at the National Geographic Photo of The Day everyday; I see the sublime but there is little effect. Americans read about the genocide in Darfur, they see the images, they hear the testimonies. Do they do anything? Do you think we’d take action if we spent a day, a week, a year, with those who are suffering? This world ends the moment the laptop screen is closed.

The more I use technology, the more I consider its vast possibilities, the more I see its limitations. It is a valuable tool, but I think that it should not be a priority. There are more important things, more meaningful interactions (see my last post.) Don’t get me wrong – I like emailing, I like instant messaging – but I go to these only when alone in my apartment (or other situations where speech is not permitted and my laptop screen isn’t facing Charlie or Deanna.) These are only sad alternatives for when sitting at a quiet table with a drink, taking a stroll under the Christmas lights of Ann Arbor, or hanging out and playing a game of pool is not an option. The realm of the real will always trump the mediated world. It is only in the real and physical world that we can truly experience the phenomena of life; that we can truly begin understand even a small bit of what there is to be understood.

So how can we use this idea as teachers? (Or oppose it, that’s fine. In fact, I thank you if you even read the whole thing. I doubt I’d read my own writing.) I myself don’t know how we can create these moments for students; I don’t even begin to claim that what I say here is something to be striven for. In fact, I doubt I had very few of these phenomenological disruptions, these moments in which the world became a very new place, a much more fantastic place to exist, during my high school experience. There were a few times this happened – reading Jack Kerouac, a great conversation in AP English or Philosophy, when a pretty girl actually talked to me – that the world I knew became a very different place from what I thought it to be, but they were seldom. Do they have to be seldom? How, or can, we create these experiences? I want to be able to open my students’ eyes to the phenomena that every moment of lived experience should be, that it is.