Turkle argues that we have come to expect more from technology than from each other and our reliance upon technology has created loneliness and isolation when we were seeking to create community and connection. There is no doubt that advancement in technology has increased our reliance on innovation and reduced our dependence on face-to-face social interaction. During the pandemic, technology was the only way we were able to engage with much of our otherwise in-person lives. School, work, and socialization all happened through our screens. If it weren’t for technology, the pandemic experience would have been very different.
For me, this increased dependence on technology felt much like Turkle described in her article The Pandemic Made Us Strangers to Ourselves in Time magazine. It felt like an ongoing state of transition. Every day presented new challenges in trying to figure out how to use technology to accomplish the same tasks we were custom to doing through other means. This experience created new rituals, expectations, and practices. Now, in the post-pandemic world, we are in a position to figure out how to reimagine life and move forward in a space where everything is different but also the same.
The pandemic made me feel more comfortable and adept with technology. At the same time, it created a dependence on technology that has outlived online schooling and stay-at-home orders. I see myself working to balance between how it was before to how it had to be during the pandemic.
In Part 4 of Rethinking Popular Culture and Media the fourth chapter, May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor: Teaching class and collective action with The Hunger Games (p.234) by Elizabeth Marshall and Matt Rosati, describes a series of lessons that use The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins to help students explore oppression as a byproduct of social classes and the power of the collective action of young people.
The Hunger Games presents a critique of economic injustice and capitalist ideals and a version of a large collective led by youth. This emphasis on organized youths coming together to force change and fight oppression creates relevancy for my students that have experienced and/or witnessed real-world examples of this. In their lessons, Marshall and Rosati had two goals: challenge students’ stereotypes about social class and encourage students to see connections between the class struggles that exist in the novel and the class struggles that exist in society.
The initial activities described in the chapter were designed to support students in developing a foundational and agreed-upon understanding of social class, the stereotypes associated with different social classes, and the implications of social class from their diverse experiences. After establishing the necessary background knowledge, Marshall and Rosati used the students’ knowledge of the social structures and characters from the novel to have students analyze real-world class conflicts that influence modern society. Students read about a labor strike from the early 20th century and were then asked to consider how a similar situation would unfold in the context of the novel. To wrap up their lessons, Marshall and Rosati asked students to reflect on the decisions they made on how the characters would behave. In these reflections, students connected back to their understanding of social classes and their influence on power, both real and perceived.
I decided to use what we learned through our work in CURR 501 to develop a personalized learning project for my Newcomer Elective class. ...
