This morning I recorded my first online lecture. It was a demonstration of how to find out who your local representatives are (congress, state senate, state assembly, city council), as preparation for an essay my students will write about local politics.
In the past, before giving this presentation to classes, I would ask my students if they knew who there congressperson was. Normally, I would get 1 or 2 or 0 students who knew who represented them in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The theme of my courses is “Writing About Your Community.” My students research and write essays about local culture, politics, social issues, and history. It’s a writing class, but it’s also a bit of a civics lesson as well.
With the pandemic going on, this community-focused theme takes on a new dimension. Communities have been disrupted, and I find myself wondering how people have managed to hold onto a sense of community when so many things are closed down or severely limited.
As someone who tries to be involved in my community, I have struggled with this. Editing a local newspaper has kept me sort of connected with what’s happening locally, but much of my participation is virtual.
So much of my life these days is mediated by computer screens. This was a problem before COVID-19, but it has become a much bigger problem now.
While I’m grateful for how the Internet allows me to communicate with others, I also find that, by the afternoon, I must take my eyes away from the screen and do something else—read a book, take a walk, write in my notebook, clean.
Last time I wrote about Dune. In the Dune-iverse, there was a war against “thinking machines” which led to a ban on advanced computers. Maybe such a thing is in our future—humanity enslaved by computers. I guess that’s a familiar plot-line in a lot of sci-fi—Terminator, The Matrix, etc.
What a weird time to be alive.
