TECHNOLOGY, TEACHING & LEARNING
from a video produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1960, most of the other recordings of Lammings were from the 1980s to this current period. He said although a few online sites like YouTube provide access to some of these videos, others had restrictions, were not user-friendly, had a limited number, or were rarely curated. “We have to contend with these even as we explore the ways in which knowledge is passed down from generation to generation. I’m not proposing the exclusive approach, but I’m proposing that if we don’t seriously contend with what is in existence here in this rapidly transforming world, we can lose history, legacy, intellectual property, the value of our societies, and the value of people who have worked and devoted their life to ideas like George Lamming.” The Professor said Lamming, an unwitting mentor of his, represented one of the few that persisted in hope against disillusionment of the time in the Caribbean: “I think that Lamming has remained one of the great purveyors of that optimism, a thinker whose commitment to the vision of a transformed Caribbean has never waned, and I believe that he persisted in the idea of the long view, that the struggle was still young even at a time when people were saying it had been lost.” In the lead-up to the lecture, the online audience got the opportunity to hear the musings of Lammings, via video recording, on the importance of art in shaping human life and his criticism of how it was viewed by society. A special reading was delivered by Barbados poet laureate Esther Phillips. l
being traded, lost, kept and discarded is knowledge and who owns that knowledge. What do we do in the midst of that? ... What do we do in a sort of rearguard action to resist the ways in which the dominance of control over those technologies can cause our narratives, our history to disappear? “There is an open time now, an open moment in which the scale of affordability combined with the uncertainty of how to manage and control the rapidly shifting technology has allowed us to think ambitiously about the ways in which we approach the preservation, the protection and sharing of our collective knowledge from our perspective and our own understanding. Without reckoning with the power of new technology, our cultural vehicles that form the conveyors of history, knowledge, art, memory, [and] the presence of our great thinkers can slowly diminish.” Professor Dawes said the Caribbean was fortunate to have a comparatively significant number of video recordings of Lamming available, to an extent, online. And based on his investigations, he said Lammings’ writings were available via print in anthologies, book collections, journals, and periodicals. His papers have been collected at Duke University and special proceedings from conferences and symposia appear at Brown University and at The University of the West Indies . Turning his attention to video recordings, Professor Dawes said apart
with imperialist and capitalist-controlled communication platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. He noted the countless ways in which information is consumed such as in memes, clips, one-minute Tik Tok videos, tweets, blogs, pictorials, GIFs, and podcasts, with monetisation based on audience reach and the possibility that successful creators of such content could be awarded publishing deals and media publishing contracts. A consequence of the digital space, he suggested, was that it could render a person irrelevant, or conversely, revive or sustain their relevance: “We are in a sort of grotesque space where what is
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