Demanding Creativity: A Production-Oriented Approach to Teaching the Comedia :: Essays Papers

Demanding Creativity: A Production-Oriented Approach to Teaching the Comedia For a growing number of people in the twentieth century United States, the phrase "twenty-first century" evokes the current prominence and future promise of information-age technology. The wonders of e-mail, Web browsing, and "wired" classrooms have descended upon all of us, and these developments have made lasting contributions to the way we think, organize our time, plan our activities, and interact with other people.1 With each passing year, more and more groups and individuals embrace computer technology—most notably, the Internet—for personal and professional purposes, and teachers, scholars, schools, and institutes seem to be at the forefront of this movement. In general, this trend remains in an incipient stage, as the mystique of the Internet has not fully given way to the established use of it, and as profound socio-economic disparities within our society keep the promise and implementation of any computer-based activity out of the reach of some educators and m any students.2 Even in the colleges, universities, and privileged school districts where the technological revolution has been solidly institutionalized for teaching and research purposes, there exist among today’s students—Don Tapscott’s "Net Generation" or "N-Gen"—significant disparities in interest and familiarity with the medium that defines them.3 The twenty first century as a special moment in the history of the technologizing of society may indeed be overstated, but it is certain that Internet technology exercises a direct influence on select aspects of our society, and this phenomenon has affected and continues to affect the people and institutions of society that have remained at the margins of technologization.4 In particular, the process of creation and consumption of Internet technology in certain circles of United States society has emerged from and reinforced an image culture established during this century by the mass popularity of blockbuster cinema and broadcast television.5 The predominantly visual nature of information, ideas, and epistemology of cinema and television has defined image culture in the United States, and image culture, in turn, has transformed and marginalized the primarily verbal nature of information, ideas, and epistemology of print culture. As image culture has established itself in our society, there has been no lack of cultural historians who have taken to print in order to lament the demise of print culture. Neil Postman argues in Amusing Ourselves to Death that this century’s triumph of television over books has weakened the quality of public discourse and thus has rendered education ineffectual.