The extent to which students, faculty and administrators at colleges rely upon digital technology is at a historical peak. Professors prefer coursework to be assigned and submitted through Canvas, Gradescope or other digital platforms, and administrators across the 5Cs are well acquainted with email bureaucracy and virtual meetings dominating their schedule.
Students at the 5Cs, too, increasingly invest their precious time into their devices, certainly for leisure, but also for academic or professional duties. This shift is reflected across the digital landscape: students rely on color-coded calendar entries for time management and tailored search algorithms for quick research. In recent years, this development has most visibly manifested in the form of the ever-vexatious yet indispensable AI assistant.
Critically, it is important to note the shallow depth at which this shift is occurring. When a new digital feature is introduced — say, Gemini’s recent integration into Google Workspace — students seldom have the digital literacy or even the time to truly gain a strong understanding of 1) the design specifications of the feature, 2) how the feature was programmatically implemented, 3) how one can most effectively utilize the feature for their own purposes. To resolve this imbalance, the 5Cs should strongly consider implementing targeted computing curricula that encourage deep thinking regarding digital tools — and, in tandem, students should embrace a holistic understanding of digital literacy that extends beyond AI, or even the digital ecosystem as a whole, to include potential applications in non-STEM disciplines.
While it may be the case that a given individual can learn to use technologies like Google Docs’ AI integration without any understanding of their inner workings, accepting this practice on a large scale can contribute to a problematic ‘black box’ understanding of technology, where software is abstracted as a computational function that accepts inputs — to some users, merely power, internet and a login — and returns outputs in the form of unbridled productivity. Gemini’s algorithmic complexity and data thievery are analogously abstracted away from the user. Solely focusing on the efficacious use of Gemini or any other software ignores intellectually fascinating advancements, but more importantly, disguises potential ethical trade-offs, security vulnerabilities and corporate exploitation. This myopic approach transforms active, critical consumers into passive consumers. The ability to critically evaluate, adapt and troubleshoot the tools shaping one’s work is a necessary prerequisite to achieving true computational fluency.
The idea that daily users don’t need to comprehend the digital ‘black box’ they rely on is largely created and actively cultivated by Google, Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Tesla and every other ‘Big Tech’ oligarch. It is in their financial interest for consumers to obliviously purchase and use their products. Candidly, no member of the Magnificent Seven truly cares about “engaged, socially responsible” Pitzer College students, nor do they desire the “probing inquiry” of Pomona College students. Despite the prevalent, reasonable understanding that corporations make a poor best friend, the 5Cs are no less vulnerable to this sweeping narrative. There are many students who utilize software in a strikingly suboptimal manner, without cybersecurity and privacy precautions and without a clear understanding of what they are doing, which amplifies and increases the frequency of errors.
For instance, it is perplexing that the very same 5C students who vocally critique corporations so swiftly accept Google’s terms of service when prompted, but without thoroughly understanding what they may be agreeing to. Faculty members who might quite possibly be the brightest minds in their fields may routinely find themselves at the mercy of simple Canvas permission errors. Individuals with high technical knowledge, including those in computing fields, may be buttressed in part against this discursive onslaught. However, the fact that the facts of our daily lives are increasingly intertwined with technology makes it more essential that we devote attention to our own digital literacy.
These concerns are magnified by the fact that most students plan to enter careers against the backdrop of an increasingly constricting workforce. Basic technical competence will no longer equate to a competitive edge; instead, employers increasingly expect demonstrable familiarity with a wide range of tools. In parallel, businesses increasingly employ algorithmic tools to select applicants, and it can be to one’s benefit to know how to manipulate the system to one’s advantage.
This pattern is far from short-term. The decline of digital literacy in the public, including as measured throughout primary and secondary education, is intense and projected to remain as such. Any delusional hope that AI tools will genuinely replace the need for critical thought or digital competency is quashed by mounting scientific concern about decreasing attention spans, eroding cognitive endurance and decaying foundational skills. Advances in chip and processor architectures, data collection and processing microservices and corporate platforms have exponentially compounded computational complexity. This rapid pace of innovation is increasing in tandem with the expectation for individuals to fuse technology into their personal lives.
Thus, digital users and 5C students in particular should strive to educate themselves about emerging technologies and strengthen their digital literacy to avoid these very issues. Students must be able to take full advantage of computational innovations without being taken advantage of themselves. Luckily, there are multiple potential solutions.
First, the 5Cs must institutionally realign to prioritize computational fluency as a core pillar of a liberal arts education. Currently, departmental distribution requirements, major credit caps and GPA concerns across the consortium actively disincentivize certain students from taking algorithmic or computational courses. To resolve these obstacles, academic oversight committees should establish interdisciplinary computing general education requirements — or, at a minimum, modernize existing distribution requirements to mandate digital literacy within non-STEM pathways. The 5Cs should continue to actively incentivize cross-departmental offerings that bridge computer science with the humanities and social sciences.
Second, students should personally elect to enroll in courses with a strong focus on computing; while not strictly limited to STEM departments, these courses are most likely to look like introductory computing or data science classes. The purpose of taking these classes would not necessarily be to achieve expertise, but rather to gain familiarity with software and understand the fundamentals of how software is programmatically implemented. Even the capability to write a simple Python script to scrape public records can fundamentally shift one’s relationship with technology and time.
Third, faculty should seek to incorporate quantitative analysis techniques into humanities and social science courses, in light of the recent, profoundly important trend wherein highly technical concepts are brilliantly applied to non-STEM disciplines. For instance, in public health research, machine learning algorithms can be highly insightful in measuring disease spread and developing risk prevention strategies. Similarly, in English and literary studies, natural language processing (NLP) enables scholars to chart linguistic shifts over centuries of literature that would be otherwise impossible to analyze manually. 5C faculty should strive to be at the forefront of this research revolution.
Fourth, on an individual level, people should give greater consideration to how technology operates in their own lives. This can most effectively manifest as a critical interrogation of the software one uses. While it may be impractical to uproot one’s life in the pursuit of online independence, through awareness and investigation, it is certainly possible to improve the quality, safety and ethicality of our interactions with evolving technology.
Whether the use of new technological features — especially those powered by AI — is desirable is a distinct and highly contextual question. However, it is difficult to imagine that a scholarly understanding of these new features could in any way be inherently problematic. It is far more likely that a stronger grasp of hardware and software architecture will provide 1) an individual the pedagogical foundation for further computational education, whether it be through structured learning or personal research, 2) the technical knowledge to make significantly more informed decisions regarding digital devices in their life, and 3) the capability to extract the maximum potential out of computational instruments.
The acceleration of digital accessibility and computational complexity is not an excuse for individuals to shirk the challenge of learning software skills. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. Cataclysmic innovation offers to propel productivity and academic advancement, and the 5Cs must accept the challenge.
Thea Wachtler PZ ’29 is an IPE major who enjoys a dash of Paul Virilio here and there.
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