TDC/Planning-Organization
The Digital Campus
Planning & Organization
Develop the right tone & voice
What I have to say about the digital campus has a lot of personal meaning for me, and the urge to express it wells up from my life situation, not from some external need. I've become advanced in years, and feel priviledged to still have health and vitality. I feel drawn to reflect on what I've thought and done during those years, partly to savor the meaning it has held for me in my life, and partly with the hope that some time, someplace, someone else may find that meaning helpful in their thinking and acting in their so-different lives.
Right at the start, I've said a lot, jumping into speaking of my life. That's a needed start in thinking about the personal meaning of something. To enable anyone to judge what I think about something, I must reveal myself as a thinking, living person. Somehow, I think I must have recognized early on that both meaning and judgment were situated in the life I'm living. That's problematic, and I don't remember when or how it occurred to me, and I still can't make full sense of it. The recognition didn't come marked with some epiphany. It just seems to have been there, and with it, there's something else of import. Things of great significance in our lives seem to reveal themselves from a fog of ignorance as a contingent, imperfect emergence out of the ignorance, which leaves much behind it, still shrouded in an indefinite unknown that one can not make go away.
Perhaps I'm saying too much. To savor meaning in my life and to make good judgments in it, I need to tell stories about how those things appear in my life, to reflect, to bend back on them, to flex them again. But every life chatters with innumerable particulars, each different and distinct, here now, gone before the next. As they rush upon us, left right up down, behind, in front, and all around. In the whirl of life, we easily lose our threads of meaning, attention overwhelmed. To cope with that, we use names to signify topics or themes, insubstantial abstractions, to buffer, provoke, guide, and sustain attention.
For example, we've already provided one such abstraction to label a big area of meaning that I think has arisen for me in the course of my thinking and acting. We will encounter many instances in which meaningful thinking and acting turn on recognizing something as a possibility, hidden in ignorance, becoming susceptible to our thinking and acting. We can use this phrase, on the actuality of ignorance as the ground of knowledge and meaning in our lives, to anchor attention to many instances of it in an effort to develop our capacity to understand, to think and act, and to judge rightly in vital occasions.
As the stories unfold, two other thematic markers will be helpful in situating meaning in our lives. These are also empty abstractions, labels that we use to help us concentrate on diverse developments, allowing us to grasp and understand more fully the meaning for us embedded in many different particulars of life. To interpret it all, to assess significance, to anticipate what may transpire, and to grasp what's taking place, we postulate labels framing how we attend to forces and processes of one sort or another at work in the sphere of actuality within which we live—God, or the gods, Fate, Destiny, the Stars, natural substances and forces, gravitation and contagion, viruses and virtues, and character, culture, class, and on and on. Oh yes, technology, too.
All these topics, and vast compendia more, have their uses and abuses in structuring our attention in our lives, but the last mentioned one, technology, is the one I need to dwell on in reflecting on the digital campus and its meaning for me.