Curiosity

So I wanted to write some brilliant wrap-up blog post, summarizing the course and the readings, and integrating the article review I wrote, and highlighting some great stories I have heard on the radio and stuff, but I don't feel that I have that sense of mastery over the information. I mean I feel like I know what I need to know, or rather, I know what I should be paying attention to and what I am going to be thinking about, and I have a new language in which to think about all the topics, but I don't think that I have a sense of finality about the course topic. Which is good, of course, since one always wants to be in the process of learning, but is also a little daunting, since it emphasizes that feeling of "too much-ness" that I get when I start to think about the world, technology, the future, etc. Kind of like the feeling of "too much-ness" that I get when I think about the environment and all that is going wrong and all the many many many things that will have to change to give us any hope.

Instead of wrapping things up, then, I want to throw something out there that I don't think we have really talked about all that much, and that is the question of curiosity. We have talked about the importance of play and creativity, and wondered about what effects games and new media have on traditional play, but to me that is not the same thing as curiosity.

When I used to teach college (English, film studies, writing), I was always concerned with getting students to be (semi) fluent in the language of the discipline, to help them learn how to be better readers of texts, better consumers of information, better critics of social constructions and cultural assumptions and presuppositions. I wanted them to think of ideologies that run and shape our lives and our sense of selves; I wanted them to interpret the different signs and signifiers that comprise modern life. But I realize now that I never really took the time to consider ways to foster curiosity. I was more about reading (interpreting any different kind of text, either textual, visual, aural, or cultural) but less about curiosity.

And I think that much of what we have been reading and talking about in this class has that same focus--an instrumentalist focus, I guess, or a pragmatic one, which is concerned more with causes and effects and statistics and other practical things and less with what this all means for human curiosity. In terms of new media and information technology, I am always a big defender of what I see are the advantages--we have access to information, to networks, to communities, to art, to creative practice. But are these things, as great as they are, the same thing as curiosity? Is the ability to "do" the same thing as the desire to "know", just for the pleasure of knowing?

I find that in my own life my curiosity has, in many ways dwindled to these quick, one-shot Q&A moments: I want to know something about a topic, I look it up and get a quick answer, and then move on. But is that the same thing as being curious about something, and then exploring it, learning about it, *knowing* it, or just even getting "curioser and curioser"? I am not sure, and I certainly don't know the answer regarding youth today, but I am wondering if there is something happening to the whole experience and concept of curiosity and serendipitous discovery.

**And on a totally different note: I am writing this in a Panera, and next to me is a man in his 50s at least, with a headset, playing a shooter game on his laptop, trying not to exclaim with every shot. How funny is that for an end-of-semester image??