Professor Serafim Seppälä (UEF, School of Theology), writes:
The world is filled with confrontations, such as that between conservatives and liberals. Sometimes I wonder to what extent the whole setup is an abstraction constructed in social media – two virtual bubbles colliding.
Based on my experiences and readings, however, I prefer to think that humans are a complex mix. For example, there are people in universities who present themselves as liberals but vote for conservatives – perhaps the ”safe space” allows views in a bit selective way, after all? Churches, on the other hand, are filled with people who present themselves as conservatives but live in most liberal ways. And so forth.
In social media, it is easy to adopt a caricatured role, ignoring some essential aspects of your own personality. The result is a commitment to an abstraction that does not fully reflect who the person really and fully is. This, in turn, can make people become more liberal or more conservative than they initially were. Until the bubble bursts.
So, what does this have to do with distance education? Let’s think about it.
The exciting thing about face-to-face communication in a lecture hall is that there is something I cannot fully explain. You can sense the mood of the audience as soon as you step into the room: excited, enthusiastic, tired, bored. And you can sense it without even looking at the audience.
When teaching Hebrew classes in a large hall, I used to watch people’s faces, sense the mood and adjust the pace accordingly: bored faces – speed up, confused faces – explain again. If someone found Hebrew incomprehensible or completely irrelevant, it was easy to sense it and use that for shared humour.
There was a kind of mysticism of presence. It seemed mystical, perhaps mainly because we can sense tiny micro-movements more than we are consciously aware of, learning more about the other person than we realise. However, sometimes you could sense emotions even without looking at anyone – a phenomenon harder to explain.
In online teaching, however, the feeling is like that of a lone pilot in the cockpit with blacked-out windows: the instruments tell you that the direction is towards the destination, but there is no experience of the landscape. Cracking a joke in the quiet cabin only underlines the loneliness. Even when the cameras are on, the micro-movements do not translate through the pixels.
The recipients live in worlds of their own to which the speaker has no contact. So, does the online set-up encourage a caricature-like role-playing, like that of the social media? When asked for feedback, students may comment from the perspective of an assumed ideal student, but their real thoughts are shared elsewhere.
Of course, the same thing happens on campus: no questions or comments during the lecture, but a lively discussion breaks out in the corridor immediately afterward. Paradoxically, the reason is that philosophical or theological issues can be interesting as they touch upon the whole person. In the lecture setting, participants may be unsure of how the “ideal student” should comment, but in a more relaxed setting it is easier to talk and interact in the fullness of their being, as their true selves.
In maths and science, this is not much of a problem. The personality of the calculator is irrelevant to the calculation. In disciplines like psychology and theology, however, it would be good to be present in entirety, since one is learning to become a professional in encountering, and professional identity-building is intertwined with personal identity formation.
One might expect the bursting of social media’s bubble identities to be a liberating experience – a dynamic emergence, allowing the person to express their ideals and ideas freely, without being confined by conservative or liberal labels.
However, the bursting of identities belongs to the university only indirectly. Networking has made this indirectness mediated and thus even more indirect. The same phenomenon is, of course, also happening all over the society, even in worship (my analysis of the ontology of online liturgy, HERE).
I am not against change: online participation options have made life easier and do more good than harm. However, the worst thing about online academic life is how Zoom has ruined the lectures in halls. When one or two people are sitting in a big hall, the atmosphere becomes awkward. There is no mysticism of presence, or signs of presence at all.
In the hybrid (dual) mode, everyone seems to be left unsatisfied. Those on Zoom feel the teacher is addressing the people in the room; those in the room feel that the speaker is merely flirting with those on Zoom. The teacher feels that he is not fully connecting with anyone.
When everyone feels like being the only one talking to the others alone, it reminds of the logic of the social media bubbles: lots of talking, plenty of listening, but no real “You” anywhere.
Moreover, the camera locks the speaker in one place and position. I used to enjoy moving to the side of the room, placing myself at the students’ level; we looked at obscure texts on the wall together, as equals, without opposing positions. The atmosphere became relaxed. In hybrid or dual lectures, I am forced into a traditional confrontational set-up with both the people in the hall and the pixel faces. This confrontational set-up itself imposes an unconscious barrier to genuine encounter of persons.
Despite all this, however, this most awkward form of lecture (hybrid) is the most effective, and therefore it is the one with which we should learn to live.
I find myself sinking into cynicism: I give a lecture, leaving everyone dissatisfied.
It was a good lecture, I suppose. Or was it bad? There is no one in the corridor to ask. I, too, go searching for the experience of presence elsewhere.