Cinema Canada (Jun 1983)

economic modelling, some may become more entranced with the power and perfection of their models than with the gamut of human emotions that will accompany the application of such models to real life. That many will find and seek pleasure and profit in such forms of experience-at-a-remove tells us a great deal about the intractibility and anonymity of our existing social relations, but it may do very little to overcome them. That, in turn, may become a problem of quite profound dimensions. The university is often regarded as somehow apart from these contentious issues. It exists in a time and space of its own, somewhat sequestered, working on puzzles and problems that address longer term issues, the ones society as a whole may not yet perceive and the ones that only a small fraction of society can find time to attack. This, though, is an out-of-date image. It bears little relation to the modern university which, instead of being somewhat apart from the currents in contemporary society, is itself directly in the thick of them. This is true both of the research and teaching that occurs (though it may still have a longer range perspective than the next quarterly statement), and ofthe very conception of the university as an institution. The last ten years orso have seen a remarkable shift in the metaphors used to describe the university. Instead of the cloister or monastery, instead of the contemplative life of Critical inquiry, instead of a place where the mind is trained and the soul cultivated, the university has become a business. Not literally, yet, but metaphorically. By a process of self-selection those who administer the modern university are, on the whole, those who are most comfortable with this metaphor and who seek to perpetuate it. They speak of “system rationalization,” and “costeffectiveness”. They become excited about how new information technologies will increase faculty “productivity” (rather than quality) ; they preside over a system where productivity, merit salary increases, promotion and tenure are often decided in quantitative terms. Simultaneous references to quality and excellence are what they are in business: rhetorical devices supported to the degree necessitated by competition and other market forces and limited in any case by the bottom line: no standard of quality can be upheld if it means operating at a loss. The professor who devotes so much time to his teaching that his or her research suffers is not dedicated, but inefficient. New information technologies will help eliminate such inefficiency. Given the tendency to adopt a business metaphor for the university (One reason why, by the way, university spokesmen are often hard put to explain such unbusinesslike practices as sabbaticals and tenure), itis not surprising that many university administrators see new information technologies as no less a panacea than do many businessmen. What they and the rest of the university community need, like the rest of society, is a little more of the traditional backbone of the university: critical detachment. These technologies will be of enormous value to institutions as well as individuals if used wisely, but if embraced willynilly, they may work to further erode some of the traditional characteristics of the university that! and many others suspect are very poorly served by the analogy of education as a business. In fact, new information technologies and their proliferation will bring to sharper focus the need for two new literacies to supplement our historical reliance on verbal literacy. We now live and will increasingly live in a culture characterized and dominated by the image and the computer. New technologies like satellite television, Telidon, paytelevision and videogames, will only increase the obviousness of this fact. Much of our secondary experience arrives in visual form, be it the evening news or the feature film. How visual discourse operates to convey meanings and values often appears obvious, but seldom is entirely so. Vast sums are spent in advertising for precisely this reason. If it were a simple or ineffective method, such expenditure would not be necessary. The enormous importance of advertising tells us something indirectly about the power of the image, and independent research into the use of mental imaging in athletic competition and of visual thinking in all forms of creativity only increase the evidence thatit is most essential that we have NICHOLS a sound understanding of visual language and its properties. That the bulk of new information technologies also facilitate the processing of information of any type by various forms of machine intelligence also makes it imperative that we be computer-literate. A person may be told what a book says, be shown, via television news, what happened in the world, or be given information via a computer data base and still remain illiterate. Literacy requires an ability to understand and use a particular means of communication to desired effect. The visually literate person can comprehend a book on his or her own and communicate his or her own thoughts in clear prose. The visually literate person can comprehend how news or drama is aesthetically, rhetorically and ideologically structured as well as create and organize images to convey his or her own thoughts effectively. The computer-literate person can comprehend the basic structure, function and limitations of computers and use such devices to process, store, or communicate thougNhts of his or her own. All three of these literacies are desirable skills now; in the future they will become indispensable. One simple reason for this, apart from the proliferation of imagebased communications and computer technology, is that these forms of communication will transform the very shape of our culture itself. Culture includes not only works of high artistic merit but also the works of popular culture and the rituals of everyday life (conversation, music, sport, dress, games, and so on); in short, the forms in which social relationships manifest themselves. New information technologies will clearly affect the shape of culture itself. This is a crucial point. It is analogous to the difference between saying that television reflects social relationships (in its depiction of violence orthe rank consumerism of its advertisements, for example) and saying that television constitutes a social relationship (based on isolation within the home, secondary experience and viewer passivity). Once again, visual and computer literacy will become indispensable to an individual's ability to understand and participate in his or her own culture. Universities can certainly help 21