Sarah's Response

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#331

On page 10, Hayles briefly mentions that courses such as Comparative Media Studies will prepare students “entering the information-intensive and media-rich environments in which their careers will be forged and their lives will be lived.” This is a point that is often glazed over in articles similar to this one that I have read recently. That she states this so matter-of-factly is both refreshing and encouraging. For me, this point is something that can’t be stressed enough. Coming from a position in marketing at a staffing agency, nearly all recent college graduates who were eligible for an entry-level job had received nearly all their job-related training during an unpaid internship. (Humanities students) who were not “lucky” enough to find such an internship, or did not have the financial means to do so, rarely had any applicable skills and were passed over for other candidates. Students are paying money to go to school so they will get a job. It has always baffled me that even expansive private schools do not always offer humanities students a chance to learn basic things like Photoshop, HTML or WordPress. Many students are either unaware how important these skills are, or are forced to learn it on their own. Thankfully, this seems to be changing, though there are a multitude of structural issues in the university system that often need to be resolved first.

This reminds me of something else Hayles mentions about attention span on page 11. Her article is one of the first pieces I’ve read that seems to suggest it may not be a problem, but rather, it is a by-product of technology’s extreme rate of growth. That students are learning differently is something to build upon, rather than to write off as laziness. Effective close-reading, long a pinnacle of achievement for humanities students, is not the only way to read a text anymore. To be able to educate younger generations is to recognize these changes and meet them accordingly. It seems to me that to be an educator now, more than ever, is to be able to adapt. I appreciate her optimistic way of looking at this issue, though I think it’s only part of the picture.

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