… says Lady Bracknell. And the professorial ideal emerging in our own age is a curious, double-edged one.
Both edges have as their essential condition an enslavement to technology; but while one annihilates the instructor’s self, the other makes her a multitasking hypomaniac.
The hypomanic ideal is based upon imitation of the professor’s students. They are surrounded by distracting technology; she is surrounded by distracting technology. An English professor at the University of Maryland
… lets students bring laptops to her class, uses technological aids in her lectures, and has even received e-mails from students while class was taking place.
The other ideal is the online nullity, the nowhere woman who sends hundreds of faceless names a smileyface when they get an answer right.