Connect the dots
By Tom Piotrowski
Remember the puzzles our teachers used to give us where we had to connect a series of dots to reveal the outline of some hidden object? Some of the more challenging ones were pretty intricate, and only after patiently wielding our #2 pencil were we able to begin to color the form unveiled by the connected points.
Before the puzzle is solved, it as a non-linear problem. All we see at the outset is a group of points on the paper, often appearing to be unrelated to each other - hence the puzzle. Our perception improves once we join the points together to form the object. Connecting the points into a connected line is a linear exercise.
This type of learning is more than a simple example of the ordered and structured rote education we've been accustomed to in school. It also provides a picture of how our actual world is organized. We've rapidly been exiting what could be described as a linear culture - a world where life, communication and education moved in streams, in sequence and in a structured order. That culture is being replaced by a non-linear culture, a faster-paced, more random and uncertain world where we work, live, love and learn.
Have you been perplexed lately that today's young people seem to have a harder time "connecting the dots?" Attention spans are shorter. Patience and concentration are victims of what we might describe as a faster, random and unpredictable world. Today's young people are among the first generations to be noticeably affected by this culture shift. For example, educators tell us that for increasing numbers of students, a classroom is akin to a prison cell because it is a place where time and expectations are completely structured. Similarly, our churches are struggling with fidgety youth who are sliding out of the pews for good in alarming numbers. Who's to blame? There's no easy answer, but we do have some dubious suspects in the world of today's music and media.
Media madness
The burgeoning media consumption has been bothering us for some time. This includes some 15,000 hours of TV by the time the average young person leaves high school. It's reported American businesses spend some $12 billion a year to pitch products to young people, resulting in the viewing of 20,000 commercials on television a year. They listen to four-six hours of music a day, play video games, surf the Internet, watch movies and read magazines.
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study reported that the average young person accumulates a media schedule of 38 hours a week. It's also estimated the average brain processes an average of 1,800,000 media messages a year! They do all this stuff outside the 11,000 hours of traditional schooling we normally prescribe for our young.
A disturbing conflict? Yes. And there is also a powerful difference in the way the media deliver information as compared to the traditional classroom or bedtime story. Media has gradually and steadily created a new style of learner. Rampant media consumption has ultimately resulted in a non-linear learning environment affecting the way we parent, teach and raise young people in this media age.
I want my MTV!
When Music Television (MTV) was created in 1981, the network did more than revolutionize the music industry. The exploding popularity of MTV music videos and programming changed the way television shows, advertisements and even films are constructed. The rapid, blitzkrieg editing of images one after the other spawned "entertainment by bombardment."
In the case of music videos, the images don't always match the background audio. A complete story is not always told, neither is the story offered in a simple stream of information. "Understanding" a music video may involve extracting information from various parts of the video timeline, sometimes out of sequence. Meaning is transferred, even if it is not the original intended message. But in a non-linear world, that's not the point. A unique and puzzling feature of mass media consumption in today's world is that audiences negotiate their own meaning.
It's interesting to talk to members of the pre-MTV generations after they've tried to digest a music video. They're accustomed to listening to a song as young people and directing their own "music video" in their own heads. Often times, older viewers will throw hands in the air after taking in a music video. The pace of the video and the layering of disjointed visual images with the song create an excruciating media experience, one that often leaves them anxious and bewildered. One senior citizen described his experience of watching a music video to be like "gulping hot coffee."
Groovy?
How many remember those venerable but long-gone vehicles of music called the LP record? When you ran home with that giant plastic platter and placed it gingerly on the turntable, how did you listen to it? Chances are, you dropped the needle at the first set of grooved tracks, then sat back and listened to the record in its entirety - from beginning to end. This is a linear style of music consumption. You probably did not regularly jump around the disk listening to tracks in random fashion. If you did, it was intricate work, and kind of weird.
How do we listen to CDs today? It is typical to casually jump to any point on the disc to play various songs. In fact, that's what my kids always do. They never listen to a CD from start to finish. They think that's weird. This is non-linear music consumption. Tech-savvy kids can also rip MP3s from places around the world and copy and mix music from a variety of sources. This is non-linear music collecting.
Mish-mosh
The reigning music genre of Hip Hop fits the non-linear category. For example, a ballad is more linear because it is described by a flowing and clearly distinguished beginning, middle and end. A ballad also consists of a melody that streams common music elements joining all parts of the song together.
One of the defining elements of Hip-Hop is the genre's practice of combining unrelated pieces and styles of music together to form a new piece. Several forms of music, even older songs, may be layered or inserted to create a new song. The actual structure of the song may include interchangeable beginnings, middle and ends. Rock stylings may be added to Rap elements or any other music influence to create a unique but patchwork music product. The music has been picked from various places on the timeline and has been constructed using selected parts from the music-genre assembly line. Hip-Hop can be described as non-linear.
Tell me a story, but make it quick
Traditional storytelling presents information with a beginning, a story build, a body, a climax and an ending with a resolution. In television and film we willingly abandon issues like time and space to make sense of a story. Jumping around the timeline is non-linear. Contemporary story structure leans even further away from the traditional in that stories are often told out of sequence. The beginning is actually the end of the story or vice versa. Meaning is provided out of sequence, or in non-linear fashion. Try showing the Great Train Robbery (from 1909) to a group of youngsters today. The scenes are so painfully long, I guarantee your young viewers won't make it past five minutes.
Young people today thrive in the fast-paced non-linear world. They can consume information created in non-linear fashion and they will often consume multiple inputs at the same time. Have you ever walked into a teenager's bedroom and succumbed to media overload? They can play a video game, chat online, sing to the song on the stereo and check out the TV in the corner all at the same time! Wondrous creatures indeed! Tomorrow, a new invention will arrive. Their world is one of unlimited stimuli, a universe of blinking stars that capture the attention for a moment, then pale in the gleam of some new light. Our culture has conditioned them to expect speed and change.
Order out of chaos
Today's rapidly changing world has shown the unprecedented ability to affect many unimaginable things. Many of us feel helpless and afraid in a world where science, culture and technology have dramatically altered concepts of God, parenting and the future to ideas askew of what many of us in older generations were raised with. How can we enjoy any peace for ourselves or our children in such a chaotic world?
In the 1960s, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot experimented with "discontinuous equations." These were non-linear mathematical descriptions that took the answer of an equation and plugged it back into the equation to produce a perpetual and unpredictable mathematical problem. It strays from the formalities of traditional math because the answers describe unpredictable change or Chaos in the universe.
Early in the '90s, I very reluctantly teamed up with a math teacher to try to explain the difficult subject of Mandelbrot equations to high school students. Using an old Commodore Amiga computer and program, we experimented with the students to see what the random and changeable equations would produce after the graph points were fed into the computer. The teacher described how mathematical chaos might actually define the world, but the computer program chugged along and eventually produced incredible and beautiful designs created from these supposedly random and unpredictable equations. I remember it as a very visual and poignant epiphany. The thought that complete order and indescribable beauty was only disguised by outside representations of change and disorder was remarkable.
Do we understand that within the sometimes random disorder of this chaotic world, can be found the omni-present company, order and peace of the Savior? Can we accept that change is not always pretty at the onset?
I had the awesome privilege of witnessing the birth of my sons. Their deliveries were the most incredible experiences in my life to date. But the perplexing thought that new and wonderful life begins in such a loud, confusing, messy and stressful event did occur to me. We likewise need to look and sometimes wait for how God's plan and his hand will be revealed in tumultuous times.
We need not be afraid of change. This is not the first time in human history that the "accepted" order of things was disturbed. Can you imagine the confusion after the printing press allowed the masses to read and interpret Scripture outside of the Church and free of the clergy's interpretation? What did people talk about when lunatics spoke of the world being round or part of a larger solar system? The Reformation and Renaissance periods are just two such times when the world culture was shifting through huge tremors of change.
Things to know about young people in a non-linear world.
Recognize how young people accumulate knowledge and worldviews. Not long ago, we might have described the common method we learned about ourselves socially and sexually as a linear learning ladder. We were fed, or discovered, little chunks of learning a little bit at a time, usually when it was deemed we were ready to digest it.
Surely, this is not the case today. The pervasive media of TV, films, music, radio, advertising and the Internet have created a learning environment in which youth of all ages are asked to process information inappropriate to stages of physical and emotional development, and devoid of adult explanation or clarification. Today's young people are witnesses to almost every facet of human intimacy before they've even thought about a first kiss. When splintered families and the rising tide of dis-integrated faith in God meets the reckless flood of a careless media, our children are at a worrisome risk.
Today's young people are adept at multi-tasking and processing things quickly. We can throw a lot of things at them. As teachers, the new challenge is adapting our styles to the learner. The buzzword in education is performance-based learning, which endeavors to make students uncover understanding, rather than to have someone stuff it down the throat.
Rapid change and techno-reliance creates a force that pushes young people toward relationships and spirituality. Rock singer David Bowie once said today's world created a response that will evidence itself eventually by a desire to simply touch something made of warm wood. His point was that the coldness of technology makes humans crave relationships and intimacy. Whereas the linear world is about context, the non-linear world is about texture. Things that thrill or feel good are the first choice of this generation. TV, film and advertising all espouse the Epicurean mantra of personal pleasure first - at the expense of spiritual integrity. Holiness and the dedication of steadfast faith are hard sells in this culture.
The Word of God and the life of Jesus may be the ultimate example for the non-linear world. Sure the Bible is a long, linear story in the traditional sense. But the never-changing Word has survived shifts and changes throughout the history of man. God's Word is like a Mandelbrot equation! The God of today has shown through the ages that he has been the same from the very beginning and will be the same until the end. He connected the dots for us!
So even when change spins us around from breakneck speed and the cacophony from the culture-circus makes us want to cover our ears and eyes, we cannot shrink. Instead, we need to look at the puzzle in its entirety and continue to help connect the dots for today's young people.
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©2002, The Center for Parent/Youth Understanding