Return CV Dorothy Nixon

YouTube and Yams

Originally in Spring 2008 Education Canada Magazine. All rights reserved by the author.

In grade four geography
I read about
Bunga the Pygmy
who lived in Malaysia,
and other children, too,
tucked away in faraway
corners of the earth:
the steppes of Russia,
the savannahs of Africa,
the outback of Australia.

In grade four geography
I saw illustrations
of ten-year-old children;
for all their differences
they looked the same:
like Barbie dolls
with interchangeable costumes[1]

The textbook was Visits In Other Lands and it was a 1943 social studies classic with an impeccable pedagogical pedigree. A generation of students in North America took their first geography lesson from it.

My turn was in 1964, and just like Newfoundlander Carl Leggo, I remember Bunga best. After all, Bunga had a funny sounding name and ate an even funnier-sounding vegetable, a yam.

Funnier still, Malaya, at mid-century, was a bustling multi-cultural society and geo-political hotspot, but I believed that peninsula to be populated by stone-age pygmies.

The fact that my six-foot-three-inch father was born in Kuala Lumpur, where he ate MUL-I-G-A-TAW-NEE soup, and my British grandmother was still living there, in the newly-minted Malaysian Federation, didn’t shake my faith in the correctness of the text.

Oh, the awe the textbook inspired in me, and the authority it imposed! The thrill electric of opening an unfamiliar tome (sometimes roughed-up and ragged, sometimes inky fresh) and learning something new!

Years later, studying Communications in college, I learned all about Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy and how the medium is the message. Yes, there is a reason textbooks had such a powerful effect on me back then in elementary school. There is a reason I instinctively believed in the sanctity of the written word.

Two and a half years after Bunga, when I was 12, I had my best educational experience ever. Text had little to do with it. It was 1967, the summer of Centennial Year ( oh joy) and for local children like me Expo67, the 6 month long World’s Fair, with its eye-popping architecture and ambitious future-gazing exhibits, was a mind-bending 3-D adventure in learning. (No, Malaysia didn’t sponsor a national pavilion, although that country had initially signed on. Political problems, it seems.)Even my Grade 6 teacher, Mrs. Bryant, the sober serious Brit who didn’t own a TV, told us to visit Expo every chance we got.. But watch out for bad people, she warned, who might kidnap and sell you into white slavery.

At Man and the Community I learned that ‘laziness is the cause of all progress’. At Man the Producer, a key question was posed: Will Man be swallowed up by technology and buried in too much information or will Man remain in control?

And I took in films aplenty. There were multi-screen movies, interactive movies, movies that surrounded the audience 360 degrees and movies where the stage- and audience- moved around the screen. At school we watched the occasional NFB film, but this was what my twelve-year old heart really hungered for, new ways of seeing, feeling and living. Keeping an eye out, in bathrooms, for Boris and Natasha types who might spirit me away to a Siberian salt mine (white slavery, you see), I walked on a cloud of infinite possibilities that sweet Expo season.

Well, Expo came and went and, now, 40 years later, I sit at my computer and show my 20 year old son video clips of The FAIR on YouTube. He fumbles as he endeavors to enlarge the screen on my ‘antiquated’ PC.

My son may be joined at the elbow with his laptop (and have ten years experience with the Internet), but even he isn’t nearly as tuned-in, technologically, as the average elementary-age student. He admits it.

In the 90’s, we parents were advised to get wired, for the sake of our children’s education.

Today 94 percent of Canadian students, grades 4-11 have Internet at home. Most have high speed connections. Many have webcams. This according to the Media Awareness Network

However, school-age children spend only an average of 20-30 minutes a day on the Net on homework; the rest of the time is devoted to building social networks and visiting their favorite ad- imbedded, celebrity worshipping websites.

Yes, it would be very easy for me to conclude, as a wizened Old Timer with a solid background in media studies, that the Internet is degenerating into yet another ‘vast infotainment wasteland’, softening children’s brains (and bodies) while building brand loyalty for mindless media and all foods junky, and I would but for one astonishing fact. It’s 12 year olds, today, all over the world, who hold the very latest digital technologies in their nimble grasp – call it the Gutenberg Galaxy Plus3. Or Expo67 to the nth degree. In this dizzying media environment, adults are no longer the ultimate founts of wisdom and guardians of The Word: in fact, in many regards, we might as well be living, well, with Bunga, back in The Stone Age.

In second year university
I learned about McLuhan
And his hot
and cold media
And how the Medium
Was the Massage.

I deconstructed Robert Redford,
Using Freudian psychology
And a funky new machine
Called a V-I-D-E-O Tape recorder.

[1] Leggo, Carl. "Grade Four Geography." View from My Mother's House. St. John's: Killick Press, 1999, pp. 39-40.

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