S60 Open to new features

Bertolt Brecht held that theater, above all, was a way to educate.

Brecht talked about his plays as if they were political meetings, and expected the audience to play a part -- the part of "participating in the discussion". To reinforce this notion he employed techniques to remind the audience that after all they were watching a play. The "willing suspension of disbelief" that theatre depends on was something Brecht wanted to bend, if not break. He called this the verfremdungseffekt, which I'm told doesn't translate precisely to English but is close to something like "the distancing effect". When attending a Brecht performance you are supposed to mentally take a step back and observe yourself watching the performance.

Brenda Laurel, whose book Computers as Theatre I read in about 1990 and didn't understand until at least ten years later, has said some things that resonate with this. In Piercing the Spectacle: A Situationist Critique of Computer Games, she said

"The reason why we have not succeeded in building good games for education is that to do so would entail reconstructing the notion of education itself. In particular, we would need to redefine what it means to be a good learner. Instead of receiving information, we might construct understanding. Instead of giving the right answer, we might think of taking an appropriate action. Instead of obeying the rules, we might question authority. These are the sorts of rehearsals for living that games could be offering us."

This brings us to danah boyd. She is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communications. In a piece written for the Brittanica Blog she says:

"Why are we telling our students not to use Wikipedia rather than educating them about how Wikipedia works? Sitting in front of us is an ideal opportunity to talk about how knowledge is produced, how information is disseminated, how ideas are shared. Imagine if we taught the “history” feature so that students would have the ability to track how a Wikipedia entry is produced and assess for themselves what the authority of the author is. You can’t do this with an encyclopedia. Imagine if we taught students how to fact check claims in Wikipedia and, better yet, to add valuable sources to a Wikipedia entry so that their work becomes part of the public good."

A great deal of all this, it seems to me, is all about hyperlinking. At the most basic level, this piece of writing almost certainly would never have existed if not for hyperlinking. I followed hyperlinks to find these things, and I'm using hyperlinks now to create relationships among them. At another level, Brecht's ideas about the distancing effect are very much postmodern ideas. In the hyperlinked world of today the distancing effect is second nature to us. It's a common trick nowadays for media, whether transmitting fiction, fact, or something in between, to prod the audience to realize that "this is not reality, this is a performance.".

The hyperlinking of content is continuing and accelerating, and it's changing the way we interact with information. This is hardly news. But it's interesting that institutions -- educational, governmental, and corporate -- are not changing; they're resisting. Maybe Brecht would have predicted this; that institutions seem to try not to change. Maybe that's the whole point; maybe humans create and maintain institutions in order to resist change. But no matter what they do or don't do, "Brechtian" today means something a bit different than it used to, and before long "Laurelian" and "boydian" may achieve common usage as well.