Education, Media, and Love

Many of you prob­a­bly want an update on how things are going in Ethiopia.  That will come soon.  Let me get past the ini­tial banal­i­ties of set­ting up shop.  In the mean time, some gushy hopes for edu­ca­tion, media, and love:

The writ­ten ver­sion of Ian Bogost’s keynote for the 2008 GDA Edu­ca­tional Sum­mit just moved me to tears.  I was totally con­vinced by his aspi­ra­tions to make videogame stud­ies more like the rich uncer­tainty of love and less like the “cold indus­tri­al­ism of interdisciplinarity.”

In addi­tion to stok­ing my high hopes for videogame stud­ies, Bogost’s speech out­lines an approach to edu­ca­tion that might make sense of my sprawl­ing under­grad­u­ate career, if only in ret­ro­spect.  Both Bogost (and Kather­ine Hayles) imag­ine a higher edu­ca­tion sys­tem orga­nized around prob­lems, rather than aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­plines.  Stu­dents would choose a prob­lem to work on and a men­tor to assist them in pur­su­ing an answer.  This approach would actively embrace uncer­tainty in edu­ca­tional pur­suits rather than pur­port mas­tery guarded by var­i­ous dis­ci­plines.  And inher­ent uncer­tainty would allow edu­ca­tors to bring together oth­er­wise dis­parate fields with all the heart­felt and frag­ile poten­tial of a “love affair between unlikely mates.”

Is there a prob­lem I have con­sis­tently been try­ing to answer in study­ing his­tory, pho­tog­ra­phy, and design tech­nol­ogy?  I think so.  Tak­ing his­tory to be a medium between us and the past, the prob­lem I am always address­ing is: “How can media facil­i­tate iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and empathy?”

No won­der I was so moved by Bogost’s speech, what with all his analo­gies to dis­sim­i­lar things form­ing lov­ing rela­tion­ships.  My ques­tion con­tains a hope that media can help make uncer­tainty just nav­i­ga­ble enough to sus­tain love.