231 Roberto Simanowski Teaching Digital Literature Didactic and Institutional Aspects 1 Making Students Fit for the 21 st Century When Nam Jun Paik in the last two decades of the 20 th century created video installations confronting the audience with multiple screens which the specta- tor had to follow by simultaneously jumping from one to another while scan- ning them all for information, Paik was training his audience for the tasks of the 21 st century. With this notion, Janez Strehovec situates our topic within the broader cultural and social context of new media that redefine the areas of economy, sciences, education, and art, stressing the importance of new media literacy in contemporary society. Such literacy not only consists of the ability to read, write, navigate, alter, download and ideally program web documents (i.e., reading non-linear structures, being able to orient oneself within a labyrinthic environment). It also includes the ability to identify with the cursor, the avatar and with virtual space, to travel in spatially and temporally compressed units without physical motion, to carry out real-time activities, and to undertake as- sociative selection, sampling and reconfiguration resembling DJ and VJ cul- ture. In Strehovec’s perspective (in his essay in Part One), the stakes are very high. The aesthetics of the Web teaches the logic of contemporary culture but also the needs of contemporary multicultural society. The mosaic structure of a web site with documents of divergent origin each with its own particular iden- tity and time, the simultaneity of divergent documents, artifacts, and media teaches us, according to Strehovec, to live with the coexistence of conflicting concepts, discourses, and cultures. For this reason it will, as Strehovec holds, also teach us to accept the divergence of life we encounter spatially compress- ed in modern cities. Such a perspective suggests that the Internet is the appro- priate medium for the ethical needs of a globalizing world. It should not be ig- nored that—in contrast to such rather positive accounts—some scholars have pointed out new forms of “segregation” and “balkanization” on the Internet which foster the “daily me” or “daily we” rather than the attitude of the poly- vocal, multicultural, cosmopolitan person (Sunstein; Bell; Doheny-Farina). While this is not the place to debate the pros and cons of these different per- Bereitgestellt von | Universitaetsbibliothek Basel Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 09.10.18 08:47