by Doug Mann

Our electronic times are out of joint. The bodies and minds of both educators and students have been snatched by the growing wave of virtual culture. Every day thousands of professors, TAs and students wake up to a growing list of email demands imposed on them by friends, colleagues and superiors. Each stroke of the electronic pen makes our virtual burden that much heavier, to the point where some are so weighed down that they feel like a virtual Sisyphus hauling a hundred tiny e-rocks up the hill each day, only to have them magically reappear at the bottom the following day. The gods must be angry.

It’s a given that university life is becoming more and more virtual, more and more based on electrical impulses and keyboards, less on face-to-face dialogue. This is a theme of Heather Menzies’ brand new book No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life. Menzies argues that in education we are moving away from an embodied presence to a virtual pseudo-reality. Menzies feels that as the Internet compresses time and space to an eternal Now, our social institutions “are losing their integrity” and our society is “losing touch with what’s real and what really matters.” In the context of higher education, it’s dialogue between educators and students that matters. Electronic communication is snatching this away, turning students’ minds into electronic pods fed by virtual information tubes.

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