Left Behind in the digital age

raptured learning and blank stares

There’s a digital rapture of the human spirit, attention, and potential.

So many things are normalized inside this digital age. Phrases seep into the collective consciousness and take root as the “way it is,” the status quo everyone automatically repeats without thinking.

An example of this is with learning online, or on YouTube. Everyone talks about how wonderful it is that so much knowledge is at our fingertips with the touch of a button on a computer.

But, if you’re like me, watching something on YouTube often leaves me with more of a blank stare. As a kinesthetic learner, I need to do something live in order to learn. Perhaps, this is why I get so frustrated and have made so many mistakes in my life. YouTube is just the modern-day pamphlet of instructions, to which I struggle to focus and retain steps beyond it as a means of entertainment, a tiny TV.

I’m an air sign, a thinker, an over-analyzer. I love reading and learning but often my brain operates faster than my patience. Despite these traits I’m more suited for learning through hands on examples and/or trial and error through my own efforts.

I have found it useful, depending on the subject matter, to learn by video, evergreen courses, zoom, YouTube or downloads, but my own struggles with learning through these methods is also why I hesitate to offer my own offerings, at times, through the same modalities.

I wonder if there are other introverted kinesthetic learning folks out there who get tired of the online world and the assumption that just because something is available that it’s the preferred, or only, way to connect to retain new skills and information…because it’s not.

Sometimes it’s the only way to learn something, for example, if you want to learn a certain type of dance or exercise technique that’s not available in your area, it’s nice to have the opportunity to do so through the digital landscape. But, nothing soaks into the body and mind like live learning, like connecting with a real mentor.

I think about the influence teachers had on me in my life. The weekly drive my mother did as a child to drop me off at piano lessons and the influence that teacher had on the totality of my life in a way that never could have happened online. I may not have retained the information learned, as that was some time ago, but that skill as a child saved me, it was my meditation when I didn’t know what meditation was. It was an outlet. And the weekly appointment gave me something to look forward to each week that included accountability and responsibility for meeting the weekly homework. Remembering how to play the piano may not have stayed with me, but the discipline remained and the calming effect of turning on classical music in times of stress did too.

This is why we need to support local. The depth to which our influence can reach should not be dependent upon our reach through a screen, nor normalized as the only way.

Let’s not forget that we all learn in different ways and both have their place and outreach depending on the individual.

There’s a trade off for only learning in the digital space and if we forget that we alienate an entire group of people…and ourselves from the connections meant to be made that last beyond the words and images formed through a keyboard.

Let us remember, that just as we love differently, so do we learn differently….it’s always the messenger that forges a message…and the frequency of that may travel through the quantum field, but nothing can replace the human touch and communication shared from soul to soul via the lens of the eyes and the witness of our errors from learning, from being a beginner.

I read so much about how to care for chickens, but nothing taught me like the experience of just doing it and that’s meant a lot of terrible mistakes, but it’s the only true way…the lived experience…otherwise we learn a bunch of stuff on the interwebs and it sits in our mind like a lost highway. The mistakes granted me greater skills faster by diving in head first instead of relying on a google search.

I don’t know the answers, I can only share from my own experiences and observations.

What I find interesting is that according to VARK research:

• Only around 5% of the general population are primarily kinesthetic learners. (Source)

• Kinesthetic learning can improve information retention by up to 75%.

• Both hemispheres of the brain are activated simultaneously through kinesthetic learning.

I need the visceral of the physical to grasp the totality of new information, so sitting through online classes patiently is difficult for me, though I find myself always signing up for things then procrastinating because I know it’s not my natural way of learning new information. I’m the person who speeds things up to the fastest speed possible and throws away the directions that come with putting something together.

While this is not necessarily the most efficient way of being, it definitely is my innate inclination and the speediest way for me to retain the information even if it looks like I’m taking the longest path to a destination.

I’ve certainly had to learn to adapt to more visual and auditory learning styles in this technocratic, not so intelligent artificial intelligence, age that we’ve been moving through, and I certainly feel a longing to get out from behind this keyboard and into the real world more and more.

Sometimes these screens facilitate more of a desire to scream than the learning of anything.

What’s your experience? Do you like learning online? What shaped you that was a real life skill you learned in person? How do you think online learning is affecting the different types of learning styles? What type of learner are you and is the digital realm inhibiting your growth or helping it? How do we balance this as a collective when everything is leaning so far in one direction? Which generation stopped learning tangible skills from parents and grandparents…how do we reclaim the lost ways that are integral to our health and wellbeing as individuals and communities? I believe the “Labels” like ADHD, etcetera, are not only due to the programming and conditioning of schools and society, but the inability to recognize how our learning style shapes each of us…and kinesthetic learners can never learn through their natural style via an online platform.

Thoughts from trying to learn in the modern era….just show me how….don’t make me read a manual…. that’s why I don’t like cooking, I don’t like no recipes or rules…

I read a quote once that said something like, “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing it” —and I’d bet that was from a kinesthetic learner.

Sometimes in life you just have to figure things out as you go….the not-knowing-is-the-invitation-for-doing…the not knowing is a prompt for going….you can only learn forward, every mistake, or fumble, is a step in the right direction.

The internet may be full of information right at our fingertips, but it’s not always what we need and it’s never useful if it’s not applied in reality.

May your dreams be as big as your mistakes…for they really are connected as one in the same…may you know yourself and learn things your own way…no matter what anyone else says…no matter what’s popular and the latest “thing.”

While it may look like a roadblock, I think being a kinesthetic learner is a gift that pulls us out of the digital and into the presence of our humanness.

Maybe it’s those that are left behind in the digital age that are really a thousand steps ahead?

Maybe the best learning isn’t online, but what you do with the life you have in real time?

Angela