Open access
GAMES ON THE FUTURE: PARTICULAR CASE OF EDUCATION TO INFOFREEDOM
Tadeusz MICZKA1
Publication language: Polish
Journal article
Special issue Lech W. Zacher in memoriam
Transformations No. 3 (118) 2023, Publication date: 29 September 2023
Keywords: game, media education, infreedom, cyberlibertarianism, cyberpaternalism, decomposition, responsibility, game theory
Abstract The article continues the idea taken from Lech W. Zacher's book Games for Future Worlds. New media have become both permanent elements of modern man's everyday life and signs of civilisational progress. They must therefore play an increasingly important role in the processes of learning, school and extracurricular education, a role that goes far beyond the significance of teaching aids previously known in these processes. Education cannot ignore the major changes that are taking place in everyone's environment. Attempts to tame multimedia in various concepts and forms of media education have been made for several decades, but they do not produce satisfactory pedagogical results because the expansion of multimedia is still ongoing and is accompanied by a crisis of tradition, science (especially art) and values. I support the persistent work on effective models of media (or rather multimedia) education, taking into account specific national cultures, multinational communities and religions, but in my article I focus exclusively on the phenomenon of informational freedom, the so-called infreedom, which is strongly linked to these new areas of pedagogy. In my view, the problem of freedom offered by the mobile, personal and almost ubiquitous new media, their producers and policy-makers goes beyond the purely pedagogical aspects. It relates (even if not now, then in the future) to everyone's thinking and behaviour and should therefore be taken as a starting point for reflecting on their contemporary mental and material condition. Despite the overabundance of information felt by multimedia users and the enormous potential for activity offered to them (so-called consumers turning into prosumers) by so-called participatory culture, I accept Lawrence Lessig's critical assumption that in this case we are not dealing with freedom turning into arbitrariness, it is rather "freedom through control". This attitude has important implications for teaching and learning processes. I explain this apparent opposition by commenting on the heated arguments between cyberlibertarians, proclaiming the total freedom of the Internet, and cyberpaternalists, arguing that there is more surveillance and control in networked communication than before the advent of this electronic metamedium. I argue that the dominant direction of media education is indicated by communication practice, which shows that the new media restrict individual freedom more than traditional media and expand the scop
Instytut Nauk o Kulturze, Wydziała Humanistyczny, Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach, Polska
ORCID: 0000-0002-0464-9793
E-mail: tadeusz.miczka@us.edu.pl