In the  last couple of months, I’ve lived through a few milestones and accomplishments that are puzzlingly, wonderfully hard to process. On May 16 (which happens to be my Coming to America Day), I graduated from the MA in Communication, Culture, and Technology program at Georgetown University.

Throughout my time in the program and up to graduation, virtually everyone asked me why I did a masters considering that I have a previous MA and a PhD. I have plenty of reasons, all of which are true–but not satisfying to anyone asking.

Pandemic boredom. Grief. Languishing as restlessness. Curiosity. But, the real reason, and the one that leaves most people speechless (whether out of wonder or reproof, I don’t know), is that I love to learn. And I happened to be in a situation in which I could, quite literally, afford the privilege of learning for learning’s sake. Case in point, July 1 marked the 10th anniversary of my joining the College of Arts & Sciences’ advising team. My years of service at Georgetown gave me the freedom, financially through tuition benefits and professionally through the support of my managers and role models, to pursue this degree. My husband provided the emotional support and understanding that I needed to get the degree done.

That’s the why of the degree. Why CCT, the program?

Communication. I tend to look at the world as a series of communicative challenges, most problems belonging to a particular domain (or domains) accompanied by unique aleatory communicative registers that can both illuminate and confuse. How we talk about something, with whom, and in which context matters. How we communicate can bring us together or separate us, build knowledge or destroy it, solve problems or intensify them. Break or save the world.

Culture. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America alerts us to the constant motion and change of the human condition. In that play, Kushner is talking about actual movement, of bodies across time and space, but also about how the codes through which we live change and move constantly. For example, when “literally” literally becomes “not literally”; that is, figurative. This restless shifting fascinates me, not just as an intellectual exercise but also as a way to reveal truths-in-the-moment. From analyzing how the podcast The Read establishes parasocial relationships with its audience through authenticity-as-humor to how X-Men comics if not predicted then made legible the shipwreck of multiculturalism and diversity in the U.S., I encountered, deeply, feelingly, culture. It’s an ongoing encounter whose experience I can only express in Spanish: un encanto, es un encanto retozar con la cultura contemporánea.

Technology. The very medium in which you’re likely reading this entails a complex web of technological systems that simply did not exist, not at this scale and at this level of diffusion, even 20 years ago. Technology tends to mystify and confuse us, but part of what we learn at CCT is to radically demystify technology, perform the counterspell that can banish technology’s thrall. From unblackboxing technologies like Duolingo to exploring how technology both guarantees and threatens the plenitude of utopia in Star Trek: Discovery, I sharpened my skills in discerning not what technology can do but what’s at stake when we marshall technology to solve human problems, how in so doing we are at our most human, making tools and solving problems, and at our most inhuman, automating life such that choice weakens and thinking is outsourced.

If you had the chance to study communication, culture, and technology in this deep, immersive way, wouldn’t you? Come on, be honest.

That silence, the silence I often encountered whenever I answered the why of the degree with learning for learning’s sake is telling. The idealism, even naiveté, of my answer I think sometimes embarrassed the person who asked. They seem to feel shame on my behalf, pena ajena: at this age, how preposterous!! Perhaps some feel shame for themselves–because they have expurgated, exorcized that kind of reckless abandon long ago (right around the time they began routinely circling back, following up, closing loops). Because, indeed, it is very hard to live every day life with a collection of what ifs? sometimes hanging around your neck, sometimes dancing around in traffic, dancing around in those zoom meetings with everyone’s camera off.

When we’re young, we can be hopelessly idealistic. Later, we become savvy…but the world acquires a grayish cast, one that can be impenetrable and confusing, like Melville’s Chilean coast in Benito Cereno: “Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.” But, if we’re lucky, we can regain our idealism (at least some?), engaging in the world such that our disillusionment wanes and reveals a discerning enchantment, a world in which our experience can inflame, not reduce, our curiosity.

Hold on. Wait. 

Ok. I kind of lied. I just sort of made a case for a return to idealism (in these unprecedented times!) in Middle Age…but I didn’t do the masters because I love to learn. That kind of idealism goes a bridge too far, really. Here’s the real reason: I love to play. I did the masters because for me learning is play. With serious ideas about serious matters and serious consequences, I like to play in conversations, in writing, in image. That’s the simple truth.