Students Don’t Need More Choices . . .
. . . they need more power.
I’m sitting in my hotel room at a conference. It doesn’t matter how fancy they make things, the art is bland and anticeptic. I suppose people don’t go to a hotel room to listen to a statement or to feel something deeply or to question social norms.
I flip through the cable channels. Half the shows are voyeuristic “reality” shows helping me to see the melodramatic lives of teen moms or mafia wives. The other shows are reruns of sitcoms from decades past (as if cable tv has become the world’s largest fridge to house yesterday’s hit shows) or shouting matches on a twenty-four-seven news cycle.
The hotel art and cable tv both illustrate a flaw in differentiation. More choices do not lead to higher quality (The Paradox of Choice examines this well). The overall quality decreases as executives try to tailor to each person’s tastes while also remaining a broadcast medium.
I experience this when I read most newspapers or check out my latest issue of Time. It’s as if each media
