Hello Dear,
We were having what could be called an Idea Meeting at work today. Well, we did not exactly call it that. But essentially, that is what it was. Three of us colleagues were discussing ways and means of rediscovering and reinventing one of our public communication initiatives, as to how we can add more value, and make our work more meaningful, so that it renders a genuine public service. And #NotJust a box-ticking exercise, meant to fulfill some targets given by someone.
Now, in the middle of this meeting, one of my two colleagues with whom I had the meeting was telling us of the numerous obstacles she is bound to face in executing the project which we were asking her to take up and lead. She was citing problems such as the general resistance to new ideas, the way good ideas are rejected, the way our well-meaning actions fall flat because of the ill intentions or misaligned incentives of other stakeholders, and so on. And in the course of addressing her concerns, I found myself saying something to this effect.
“Yes, I perfectly agree with you, that we have all these problems. But then, isn’t this what makes life so interesting?”
This reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my close school friends, around 25 years ago. From what I remember, I was expressing anxieties about various aspects of my future. And my friend had something like this to tell me.
“Isn’t this what makes life so interesting? If I knew my whole future, my life would be so unimaginably boring. Hence, I would never want to know for sure what is going to happen in the future.”
Now, these situations on what makes life interesting raise an interesting question. That is, besides the question of whether and why life should be interesting, after all. For now, let us take it that it is better if life is interesting rather than boring or uninteresting. Then, the above situations beg the question…
Is it enough if we just accept the problems of life? Or is it that we should #NotJust accept but welcome and maybe even desire for problems?
Well, for sure, a lot of humanity’s journey over the ages has been a story of the pursuit of improving our hard lot, of making some betterments in our state of life, in reducing the immense depth and variety of human sufferings. As the great Indian devleopment economist and philosopher Amartya Sen says:
“What moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injustices.” - Amartya Sen
So yes, we do strive to remedy injustices, to reduce human suffering. At the same time, there can be no denying that:
Sufferings are #NotJust sufferings, but blessings too.
What say? Here is an earlier One Doubt Please article on this theme.
Fine, let us leave aside the grand question of human suffering, and take up a simpler version of the problem: the question of learning.
I need not say that learning is of utmost importance in life, do I? Here is the futurist Alvin Toffler, speaking about learning, in his 1970 classic Future Shock.
“The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Well, one interesting question this raises is…wasn’t learning important before Toffler, before the 21st century? I would think that it may not have been as vital for survival in the 20th century as it is today, when it comes to the sphere of work and careers. Part of the reason for this being that “change itself has changed1” - the nature as well as the pace of change. But, when it comes to questions concerning #NotJust work and careers, but non-material aspects such as our growth as a human being, I am inclined to think that learning has always been paramount. Yes…
Learning has always been important. Without learning continuously, how can we hope to grow as a person?
And when we think of our nomadic foreparents who were hunter-gatherers, we could imagine that learning was essential #NotJust for spiritual growth, but also for staying alive, to protect oneself from predators and to find food for oneself and one’s tribe.
It would be quite a task - and an interesting project - to explore the history of human learning - how human learning has evolved over the millennia2. But let us leave that aside for now, and speak about today.
How is learning today, in the hyper-communicative information-overloaded world of today? I mean, how easy or difficult it is to learn today? In this “new digital age”, in the age of the internet, of social media, and of Artificial Intelligence, “intelligent chatbots” and “thinking machines”?
Let us zoom out from here and ask a rather different question.
How should learning be? How easy, how hard?
Well, quite interestingly, our modern world is suffused with examples of countless people, tools and technologies which promise that they will make learning easy for us. We have so many how-to articles, including on how to learn anything. And for sure, there are a lot many valuable resources on these. Do check them out3. And yes, we can discover a lot many of these - in general, many more than what we may be able to absorb - in a matter of seconds.
Besides, the globalized digital society of today also enables us to reach out to and connect with potentially most people, or otherwise, at least learn from them. Since the advent of writing and then printing, we also have the wisdom of generations before us, through the medium of books and the written word, which enables us to listen to and also engage in a dialogue of sorts, with the greats who have passed away and passed on their wisdom to us.
So, one question is, have all these resources really made learning easier? Or has it indeed made learning easier in very many ways, while also making it hard in certain other ways? For instance, has the abundance of resources made learning much more accessible, but has it also made it much more difficult to identify where one should learn from, and what is worth learning, to begin with?
There is a lot one can say about this phenomenon. For now, let me just say that the problem described above closely mirrors the observation made by Herbert Simon, who propounded the concept of attention economy.4
"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
It would thus seem that, while the abundance of learning resources thus solves one problem (that of availability and access), it also creates another problem (of figuring out how to decide what to learn and from where and how).
Well, perhaps, you may be thinking that, hey, doesn’t tools such as search engines - or rather, just Google - solve this problem? Hasn’t Google already solved this problem, making it a trivial issue, or a non-issue rather?
Sadly or otherwise, not quite. For one, the problem of choice remains even after taking the assistance of search engines. Two, the problem remains #NotJust, but especially after taking the assistance of search engines! What do I mean? I am talking here, of the biases inherent in and introduced by every technology, and thus search engines as well. We could hopefully discuss this in more detail, in some future articles of One Doubt Please. For now, let me just refer you to this article: Shaping the Web: Why the politics of search engines matters. And these at the footnotes5.
Quite interestingly, you might have observed that in a lot of the discussion above about learning, we spoke of the abundance of learning resources due to the advent of the transformed technologically driven communication environment. In doing so, and in asking whether this explosion in learning opportunities has made learning easier, please note that we - or shall I say, I or #NotJust I - made an implicit assumption, which I had not realized until a few lines ago. In speaking and thinking of learning, I had somehow unconsciously given dominance to learning from online material and from books, thus unknowingly giving very little importance to learning through other means.
In my opinion, this is yet another beautiful illustration of the biases which every technology introduces in every maker and user of that technology, as renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan observes in his classic book Understanding Media6, written 60 years ago [I have had a copy of this book for some time now, and am reading it now]. On another note, here is a doubt which has been lingering in my mind for many months now: how many government communication professionals, especially IIS officers , have read this book? 😊
Fine then, let us “hit pause” here, and stop our exploration of the question of whether the modern communication environment has made learning easier or more difficult. And let us come back to the question we asked earlier.
How should learning be? How easy? How hard?
Answer 1: Learning Should Be Easy, Or At Least Easier
In a sense, in undertaking the brief exploration above, we have already begun to answer the question to some extent. We can see that the many attempts of our culture and our social technologies to make learning easy or easier is inspired by an underlying philosophy that learning should be easy. Or at least easier. Isn’t it? Isn’t why we have whole professions and industries - dedicated to making learning easier, in some way or another? Especially in the Indian context, we have coaching centres for instance, which are, in a way, offering lakhs of aspirants an easier path to “success” or clearing the examinations, and earning “a killing” or handsome profits in the process. Why speak of coaching centres? We have the tuition industry right from primary school.
Answer 2: Learning Is Going to Be Hard, Be Ready For It
While this school of thought thus seems to be believing that learning is hard and should hence be made easier, if not easy, I have often found myself saying and writing, on countless occasions, a variant of the oft-heard principle that:
“Growth lies outside our comfort zone.”
My point has been, therefore, that we should be ready to get outside our comfort zone. To embrace our fears, to brace ourselves for the tough road ahead, to be courageous and adventurous enough to take the unbeaten path. My thinking, in other words, has been that we should be ready to endure pain, struggle and suffering, if we are to win and live a life of meaning, a life which is true to ourselves and our calling.
Answer 3: ???
But a few months ago, this January in fact, I heard an answer which came as a jolt to me. It was counterintuitive, surprising (as most insights are at first) and - if I may use the epithet used to refer to the late Indian and management professor C. K. Prahalad - an insight which was and is “creatively contrarian”.
Further, as with all or most great insights and truths of life, it was communicated to me in the simplest manner possible. Isn’t it absolutely wonderful and beautiful, that we tend to ignore and not pay attention to a lot many of the truths of life - eternal and timeless truths - only and only because they appear to us as too simple to be true? Not sophisticated enough?
But yes, life, at its core, is simple. It is we who insist on making it too complicated for us to bear. What we must remember though, is that:
Simple is Not Easy.
Simple as life may be, it is hard all the same. As we recounted in the previous One Doubt Please article7, the sooner we realize how hard life is, the less our pain will be.😊
Fine fine, so what is this piece of creatively contrarian insight which I heard in the beginning of this year, on how learning should be? And from whom or where did I hear it? And why might this be true? How could this be helpful to us in our journey of learning, and thus in life?
Tell you what, please allow me to leave the question hanging, and take it up in another article, hopefully the very next article. However, before I go, since we are speaking so much of learning, let me recommend what I regard as a beautiful book (though I have not completed reading it): The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, a 2019 book by Gautam Baid.
OK, so what do you think is the piece of insight referred to in Answer 3?
I would be grateful if you could mention this in the comments section. And yes, hope to be back with the answer soon, in the next One Doubt Please article. Please do consider subscribing and spreading the word, if you find some value in this #NotJust newsletter. Thank you!😊
Footnotes
Here is what appears to be a promising article on the same: A Brief History of Human Learning & How it All Started.
Here are some resources on How to Learn Anything! All of which, of course, thanks to the internet, I discovered in a few seconds.
How to Learn Anything Faster - Ali Abdaal
How to Learn Anything Faster: 12 Scientific Tips to Train Your Brain - wikiHow
Interestingly, I discovered these articles about the politics of search engines, using the Google search engine, thus potentially, or almost surely, presenting me with results which have themselves been mediated by the politics of search engines. 😊
Technology in Politics: How search engines engineer polarisation - Foreign Affairs Review
Eszter Hargittai, The Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines: An Introduction, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 12, Issue 3, 1 April 2007, Pages 769–777, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00349.x
Here is the article in question.