[ Town Meeting on Technology (WAV Audio; 13:03 Minutes; 3.03 MBytes) ]

"Something fundamental is changing. It's not just a matter of new technologies, new ways of producing the old materials, but there's a sense that there's a kind of qualitative, as well as quantitative, shift taking place, that there's a kind of change in sensibility or structure of feeling, that our sensorium is getting re-arranged by the means of communication.

"This is particularly evident for teachers in the way in which we think about and represent our students to ourselves. Increasingly, I think, teachers think about their students as a kind of 'techno-generation,' a kind of phenomenon of post-modern cyborg culture. These are a new kind of human being who are acclimated to a particular space in the interface between the human subjects and its technological representation.

"I mean, this is not just the first generation any longer that grew up never knowing a house without a television, but this is a generation that was represented in the fetus by an ultrasonic imaging. This is a generation that has already been visualized before they'd even entered into the world. This is a generation with the omnipresent beepers and cell phones who devote all their time to web surfing and video games. This is an online and plugged-in generation. It's wired. Media-savvy. And it expects immediate communication and connectivity."

-- John Trimbur, "Making Connections VII," 2/12/99