Digital Anxiety Self-Help Group

Abstract

We live in a challenging digital world that is constantly in a state of up-dates. In higher arts education teachers and students are expected to fully embrace new forms of digitalization. Educators and students sense strong expectations to learn, practice and produce, teach and research in the constantly up-dating digital realms. In 2019 in my current home institution, the Arts and Design Education Department at Basel Academy for Arts and Design, some students indulge in the aesthetics of digital photography of a decade ago, others prefer to learn crafty skills, most refuse to use digital class room software. Educators tend to use and re-teach the digital tools they have learned during their studies. They use video, Wordpress and Dropbox as their state of the (digital) arts. Students and educators alike show an approach to media and digitalization that is affected rather by conservative nostalgia than by euphoria and optimism. In my experience in teaching and learning environments in the arts and design, only some educators and students jump enthusiastically into new digital environments, for most digital tools feel like a burden. Often the first argument of my colleagues is that in the good old days the digital tools and their aesthetics were better. Their second argument is that nobody needs those new digital tools anyways. But who dares to openly talk about their feelings? Or to put it even more clearly: How can we overcome digital anxiety? At the ELIA Academy 2019 in Stuttgart I want to install a digital anxiety self-help group in the form of a playful performative group therapy round table discussion. In a humorous way the self-help group will support each other to go through the following steps: 1) We will indulge in our most favorite (yet obsolete) digital setups to embrace our current (outdated) digital state with self-compassion. 2) Next step is to let go of the digital past in a healing ritual supported by the group. 3) Finally having permission to move on from the past - we will jump right into the eye of our biggest digital fears. In the company of like-minded colleagues, together we will experience that today’s digital environments are actually kind of fun, easier to handle than we think, and filled with creative artistic and pedagogic opportunities. 4) Lastly, we set up individual goals on how to keep in the loop with digitalization in the coming academic year.