Each semester, students of Julie Cornett's LIBR C111 classes at the correctional institutions in California City and Tehachapi are asked to reflect on the impacts of an information-saturated society while their own information access is heavily restricted. One standout essay is selected each semester and reproduced in full, both on our blog and in a newsletter that is mailed to incarcerated Cerro Coso students. The selected essay from fall 2021 is presented below.
Jonathan Holeman, Tehachapi CCI
As an incarcerated student, serving life in prison with no possibility of ever parolling, I must emphasize that my educational experience is quite different than the large percentage of anyone, anywhere, attending college. Allow this piece of writing to explain.
Several concepts concerning academic research expressed in various college courses and discussions baffle me. It is somewhat odd in modern society, but worth mentioning here, any internet language or acronyms, are the most severe sort of gibberish and ballyhoo to my mind. The last full internet access I experienced was in the year 2001, and it was a world wide web of confusing nonsence. If the internet is the information highway, then I’m the driver who fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a ditch on an unpaved road to knowhere.
Here's the interesting part. I’ve numerous credentials in some religious and spiritual fields. Completed every course that several groups and organizations offer to prisoners. Even recieved high marks in a large share of both accreditted and non-accreditted classes, ranging from sciences to literature, history to mathematics, and from art to anthropology. All done with no access to the internet at all. Many countless days I’ve spent, decades in my stone tomb, flipping through papers and pages of tattered and worn documents and books. Pages with water damage and burn marks. Books with missing pages, that prior prisoners used to roll their cigarettes. Years of reading, day after day, locked inside for days or weeks, with no release, no sight of the sun. Reading my life away into history, and fiction classics. Scientific worlds of creative non-realities. The internet? I’ve never had a thought or care for social media, or the confusion that comes with a simple search. The most peace I’ve ever experienced within these cages and man made caves has been the peace and quiet of holding a book in my hand, late at night. The moon and starlight drifting through the skies into my cell in silent harmony while Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, or London shared their tales of life from fictional perspectives.
The incarcerated cannot connect on social media, and are limited to no technological research. Prohibited in many states to access the internet at all (Rumold, 2020). This, however, does not have to hinder the incarcerated from educational success or a proficient college career. “Information overload is everywhere, from non-stop news to rat-a-tat email inboxes… Your brain consumes 20% of the body’s energy even though it only uses 2% of the body’s volume” (Pillay, 2017). In todays world full of nonsencical opinionated internet posts, where a student could research the history of an ancient pyramid and end up reading about parallel dimension theory associated with triangles, internet access then can be a major problem to the scholar and the casual student alike.
There’s no worry over information overload when reading basic texts from tattered books. Our information saturated society leaves many questions to what education is as a whole. What does anyone retain? If we take time to research data, we are likely to remember it. This isn’t so true for the “researcher” who just asks a magical box on the table for every answer. Why bother to memorize anything when I can just ask the magic box? This isn’t to say technologies are useless, but one can manage without them. Classes like Advanced Library Research, or any college preparation course should then be experienced by any serious student, especially the incarcerated. In a society that relies upon magical devices for answers, and misguided, misinformed individuals with no credentials can convince others that vaccines have secret microchips in them, or that the world is flat, we must be careful to learn proper and accurate ways to research information.
References:
Pillay, S. (2017, June 7). The Ways Your Brain Manages Overload, and How to Improve Them. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved January 16, 2021 from https://hbr.org/2017/06/the-ways-your-brain-manages-overload-and-how-to-improve-them.
Rumold, M. (2020, March 27). Now More Than Ever, Prisoners Should Have Some Access to Social Media. Retrieved September 7, 2020 from https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/now-more-ever-inmates-should-have-some-access-social-media.
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