In the latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr wrote a piece titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that raises interesting issues regarding the effects of Google on the way we read. Carr looks at history for significant technological shifts and at it’s reception. One of the oldest – and I think most interesting – is from Socrates, and his view on writing:
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong-the new technology did often have the effects he feared-but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
A similar concern arose with the printing press:
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
And now, the concern has shifted to the Internet. The Internet allows us to retrieve information quickly, but doesn’t necessarily require us to go “deep” into a topic – changing the way we engage text completely, even offline. And there is a fear that the Internet might cause an epidemic in our culture that results in people being unable to hold a focus long to enough to grasp complex ideas.
If that’s a possibility then there is reason to be concerned. The New York Times, in a piece titled “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?,” explains how we are already moving away books and onto screens:
Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.
And the effects – at least in the way we currently test for them – seem to be negative:
As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading – diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
While Socrates was right that writing made us lose our ability to memorize, he was unable to foresee (or maybe foresaw, but still did not approve) the rise of engaged and literate societies, which have been responsible for many of the great creations of humanity.
So what type of world are we unable to yet see by high level and data extracting reading that the Internet so easily provides? Well, it’s hard to say, but there is another angle we can approach this to give us an idea.
We have for the past hundred years – aided by technology – seen the rise of the “Multitasker.” Modern life requires the completion of many tasks and in the rush to complete these tasks; we break up into even smaller task, which allow us to incrementally work on many things simultaneously. That is how work is accomplished in the modern world and is also how reading is changing.
But we’re already aware of the dangers of multitasking in various parts of our lives.
A few months ago The Atlantic Monthly published an article by novelist and critic, Walter Kirn, titled “The Autumn of the Multitaskers“, that explains how multitasking affects our brain:
Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires-the constant switching and pivoting-energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.
Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.
This is the great irony of multitasking-that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. (Fact, and one more reason the bubble will pop: A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and-forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing.)
So, in our effort to complete many tasks, we inhibit our ability to complete any single one. And it doesn’t help that the computer is inherently multipurpose. What appears to be happening is that different behaviors are being consolidated into a single tool that by design favors multitasking – obstructing other possible ways to engage ideas.
Breaking up tasks has allowed for the development of the industrial revolution. Physical motions were broken up in simple actions – constraining the individual, but allowing for the “system” to work more efficiently. The computer revolution has also limited physical acts to moving our fingers and our minds too have become compartmentalized – suited to completing simple tasks.
What we find is that this compartmentalization of human minds and ideas can be beneficial to the “system.”
Wikipedia, I think, is a good example of this idea in action and I think can be a glimpse into the way we engage ideas in the future. Individuals are responsible for depositing tiny slivers of knowledge into large pools of information, but no individual idea is valued or acknowledged, while giving a sense of collective progress. But this system also deprives individuals of any deep sense of worth. Similar to mind-numbing factory jobs, I can see lives, thoughts, and entertainment being broken down into tiny plots that are easily satisfied… and never questioned.
Worst of all, when people’s needs are so easily met, few would realize the worth of deep and uninterrupted thoughts.
