“I love this thing,” Rennstich said. “I can do everything on it. I love technology and all kinds of gadgets. In fact, I’m convinced that technology is very much the future of teaching.”

For Rennstich, that future is now.
The 36-year-old professor keeps a virtual office via a blog and records many of his lectures and distributed them though Apple’s popular online media playing software, iTunes, as podcasts—digital media files distributed over the Internet that can be played on portable media players and computers.

Immersing himself in the latest technology is not merely personal interest, however, but a professional concern. An expert in global economics and international relations, he is writing a book on the emergence of what he refers to as the “iGeneration.”

“The iGeneration is a digital generation that consists of two cohorts so far: the first, my own, starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the second starting 25 years later, roughly around the 1990s,” Rennstich said. “This is part of big theory in international relations, which is my branch of political science. I’m trying to push the field into a new framework.”

Rennstich’s interest in the iGenerations began when he was working on his dissertation about globalization. In order to understand the evolving structure of globalization, Rennstich applied an evolutionary approach, putting the changes into a historical context, using past trends and trajectories to evaluate current changes.

By applying an evolutionary approach, Rennstich has sought to understand the role of the iGeneration in a globalized environment.

So what has Rennstich found so far? “Technology changes, its impact doesn’t,” he said.

“Technology changes the entire game, but not the rules of the game. What doesn’t change are humans and how they use the technology, whether digital or not.”

Rennstich is convinced, based on his research, that the ebbs and flows of war and peace or economic boom or bust aren’t any different because of today’s ever faster and more powerful technology.

“If I follow the rules of complex systems, certain things emerge in a repetitive pattern—clashes of states, new leaders emerging,” he said. “But how does this evolutionary stuff work? We need a better understanding of the ages.”

And that is what Rennstich is seeking to do. He has proposed a theoretical framework for understanding technological development and globalization that draws on what is known as the Buddenbrook Cycle, which is based on a Thomas Mann novel about four generations of a merchant family in Germany.

In the cycle, the first generation establishes the foundation for a new set of innovations through a “new way of doing things.” The second generation, having been reared in that new environment, pushes the level of innovation to new heights.

The third generation, however, gets locked into doing things the way they have been done before and is unable to adapt, falling victim to the “Buddenbrook way.”

“The very formula that bred much of the success in the first two generations eventually proves to be a major obstacle as the world around them changes and the previous innovators remain stuck in the now old ways,’” Rennstich said.

What Rennstich has done is move the Buddenbrook model out of the realm of individual families and placed it squarely in the sphere of societal and even global movements, especially as it relates to technology.

For Rennstich, the iPod, the digital music player, is a case in point.

“The first generation that invented the iPod encountered feedback like ‘You’re crazy. Who wants to spend all that money on that?’” Rennstich said. “The second generation was the one who discovered the iPod as a nifty gadget and improved it. The third generation, of which my students are part of, all have one and they are stuck in this paradigm.”

In fact, he describes many of his students as “pure users” of technology, completely at home with such things text messaging and e-mail.

“But using a word processor, built by people who were brought up using computers via programming, is something many of them have only mastered on a very rudimentary basis,” he said. “Three-quarters of them have no idea how to use tabs or how to insert a page break. Half of them don’t know how to insert page numbers or any other basic word-processing features.

“So the supposedly tech-savvy generation is anything but,” he said, “because technology is usually built and designed by older folks who were brought up in a different technology regime.”

In the spring, Rennstich intends to take on some of these ideas with Fordham undergraduates when he teaches the course “Understanding the Global Economy.”

Not surprisingly, his students will get plenty of exposure to technology. He has been working with Fordham IT to loan each of his student an iPod Touch, a media player with a touch screen.

For Rennstich, tapping technology is simply the future of education and all part of the deep currents of generational and global change.

“My students will be able to research material on their iPods, read and work on assignments, communicate with each other via Facebook and watch material on YouTube with restricted access to protect copyrights and the privacy of the interviewed persons,” Rennstich said. “To me, that’s the future textbook—right here, right now.”

Joachim K. Rennstich

The Earth is flat, after all — at least according to some in the more popular accounts of globalization. Of course, what Thomas Friedman meant to convey with this description of globalization was the way in which the world has come to grow together, a process that expresses itself in many different areas of our lives. Globalization as a phenomenon has also been studied extensively in academic circles. A multitude of approaches and research traditions have devoted much time and effort to try to make more sense of the many transformative changes that seem to characterize our time. Most commonly, it is understood to be either an economic or a cultural process of integration.

Yet, even within my own field, political science, the concept of globalization is a contested one. For some, it is a process ignited by technological revolutions somewhere in the 1970s or after World War II. For others, its origin lies in the so-called Industrial Revolution. And for some, the mere concept of an ever-growing globalization phenomenon is questionable, as they point out to higher levels of integration some hundred years ago (for example as expressed in patterns of trade) and a recent strengthening of the nation state. What all of these approaches acknowledge, however, is some sort of “global” unit that is separate from, say, the “state,” a “region,” or some “local” unit.

The development of this global system is at the heart of my own research. Growing out of the work of not only political scientists, but also historians, sociologists, economists, geographers and even some natural (especially environmental) scientists, my work and that of my colleagues in this arena tries to uncover how such a global system could come into existence and how its basic functions have been established and work together to create what you and I experience as “globalization” today.

This is no easy task. What we are trying to do in our work is to create a view of the bigger picture of how globalization came into existence as a system, how its key drivers shape its development and what kind of effects this has on individuals (such as you and me), groups (for example firms or religious organizations), or states over an extended period of time, including the future possibilities of all of these actors. I developed a model of global system development that focuses on innovation, technology, social, and economic but also coercive (i.e., military) interactions. My most recent book, The Making of a Digital World, to be published later this year by Palgrave Macmillan, has used this model to test whether “globalization” as we experience it today is radically different from past patterns or so disruptive as to “break” this mode of global system formation. There, I focus on the impact of digital technologies and the way these technologies shape the systems that previously have shaped globalization. What I find is very reflective of past patterns of global system formation, indicating a continuation of the global system process as it has evolved over the last one thousand years.

This process is by no means a linear path, nor are there any forgone conclusions (or any other form of determinism). A complex system such as that at the heart of globalization is merely a platform or a stage – it allows the actors on it to act out in a certain way (or denies them others) but does not predetermine it. Having a balcony and a wall on the set does not automatically yield “Romeo and Juliet.” This might sound rather obvious but is in fact a very important question: to what degree are we determined by the systems in which we engage in or how much do we control and shape those systems? Think of your own immediate ones, for example: think of the relationship with your parents or your children, think of how your employer and your employment (or lack thereof) shapes your immediately experienced world.

This has led me to the next step in my research, that focuses on the generational aspects of this system: as much as technology, political, and economic processes matter – in the end they do not predetermine outcomes. Those outcomes are still shaped by the decisions of individual actors, although, as the example above illustrates, the “possibility space” we encounter in our decision making is often limited by certain constraints. This pattern is captured in what I call the “Buddenbrook Cycle,” based on Thomas Mann’s novel about four generations of a Hanseatic merchant family in Northern Germany. Mann traces back the family’s rise to economic and political heights during the first two generations and its seemingly unavoidable decline in the third and fourth generation (which is unable to escape the “Buddenbrook way” of doing things). The very formula that bred much of the success in the first two generations eventually proves to be a major obstacle as the world around them changes and the previous innovators remain stuck in the now “old ways.”

This pattern of generational learning seems to be at the heart of the larger process of global system formation and would explain its relative regularity. Continuing the focus of my book, my new project focuses on the rise of “digital generations.” Contrasting “analog” generations with the emerging digital ones, I take up the ideas of the Buddenbrook cycle and develop simulations in addition to other techniques that test the concept in a variety of methodologies to test the ideas of generational learning and the impact of technologies (both physical and social) on this kind of learning.

The “Sapientia et Doctrina” section of Inside Fordham features first-person columns written by members of the Fordham Jesuit community and University faculty. Our Jesuit correspondents offer essays on teaching and learning from a Jesuit perspective, or focus on some aspect of scholarship as seen through the lens of Jesuit tradition. Faculty correspondents write on an academictopic: their own academic specialty or current research; or an aspect of scholarship, written for the lay person. The two types of columns alternate by issue.

For more information please contact the editor, Bob Howe, at (212) 636-6538, [email protected].

By Joachim K. Rennstich