The idiot wall

Socrates also IIRC was cranky about those young whippersnappers who think they can understand something by *reading* it, instead of memorizing it and actually holding in their heads where understanding happens. And if you base your knowledge on what you *read*, then of course you can flit from book to book, without the true discipline and concentration needed to study in an oral tradition.

Socrates was right, of course. If wisdom is based on what is in your head, then reading is pseudo-wisdom, a cheat. I prefer to think of it as off-site storage, and that reading is a way to access lots of information and ideas without having to keep them on-site. The Internet does the exact same thing, but it pumps the process up another couple of orders of magnitude.

I used to say that Aristotle was undoubtably smarter than I, but I plus the Columbia Encyclopedia know more than Aristotle. Today, I plus Wikipedia know *way* more than that, but the essential process is the same.

If you want to talk about how the Internet is changing the way we think, first look at how literacy changed the way people think.

Actually, I have been informed that the trick is to not throw the spear straight as no serious professional goalkeeper can be fooled with a straight shot.

Spears,pah! They’re for pussies who can’t cope with getting up close and personal.

My sister rang up once and mentioned taht she was doing a Phd in internet communication. I said that for the first six months I’d lived in East London, we hadn’t had a phone in the house, and so the only people who’d come round were those really interested in seeing us, and so perhaps the proliferation of communications media didn’t necessarily increase the quantity of quality personal interactions. She didn’t get in touch for another five years after that.

Very well-put, Dr. Science. I’d also add that when reading a book you’re also stuck in that author’s head. Now, this may be a marvelous place to be. But it can also be insidious. I’m thinking of the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages develop false feelings of fealty towards their captors. One of the most marvelous aspects of reading the classics is the availability of annotation.

I’ve yet to read a book on one of these new-fangled e-readers, but the addition of subtle hyper-linking might be interesting. But then of course, if they’re created by the author you’re still in his grip. Maybe one day we’ll have open-sourced editions, whereby anyone can publish their own hyper-link annotations for a particular work.

In the meantime, having the computer handy is often just a brilliance reference tool. For instance, right now I’m reading Donald Worster’s biography of John Muir and I’ve popped over to Wikipedia more than once.

“But I can’t help imagining some grouchy old-timer saying something like “Damn cave paintings…”

I find this line of reasoning is pernicious. Not because it’s usually false–it’s usually right. However, because criticisms based in false, nostalgic notions of “good old days” are so often weak, it promotes a thoughtless, reactionary leap to the opposite (and ironically conservative) falsehood that the status quo is always superior to the past. For that reason, I think we should err on the side of caution and never allow a critique of the present to be dismissed simply because it favors a prior state.

“But it can also be insidious. I’m thinking of the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages develop false feelings of fealty towards their captors.”

True, this phenomenon in reading can sometimes be harmful (depending on the knowledge and intelligence of the reader, the harmfulness of the captor, the degree of the author’s countermeasures against it). But I think eliminating the possibility of this element of transference from education and communication is much more harmful.

The greatest threat to the development and promotion of human intelligence (both theoretical and moral) is the fact that the individual is constitutionally in the grip of her own ego. The first step of intellectual independence, just like physiological independence, always a form of dependence upon others–a captivity that liberates us from ourselves (more specifically, from captivity to the culture and history that produced it). So we might critique a naive enlightenment notion of decaptivation in the same way as those other grouchy oldtimers, Adorno and Horkheimer, critiqued an overly naive notion of demystification.

The ethical (and, it’s not trivial to add, _aesthetic_) danger of current cultural developments is precisely that it protects from being captivated by anyone or anything besides ourselves.

See also

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/may/22/multitaking-unitasking-aj-jacobs

“The attractivity of cultural pessimism is easily explained: only when the future is – necessarily – worse than the past, is it possible for a cultural pessimist to believe what he, above all, wants to believe: that he is the best humanity will ever have to offer.”

Funny how that works for the worship of the now, too.

I wonder what the percentage change is in non-book-readers who now type on things vs. non-book-readers who typed on things in, say, 1970.

Substance:
I wonder what the percentage change is in non-book-readers who now type on things vs. non-book-readers who typed on things in, say, 1970

Approximately a squillion. Let’s talk about everyone between the ages of 10 and 15, for a start, and all but a couple percent of those between 15 and 25.

(didn’t people miss important letters amid the junk mail back in the old days?)

More than that, people were known to toss checks out with the junk mail by accident in the “good old days.” You can have my direct deposit when you pry it out of my cold, dead bank account.

It’s my understanding that even in the Good Very Old Days when culture and knowledge were mostly transmitted orally, a good portion of that oral culture was pornography (or at least dirty jokes) and escapism. Was there ever a time when people from all walks of life engaged in nonstop “meaningful” communication and/or had bookshelves full of meaty books? Perhaps some (many?) of those cave paintings were really the Paleolithic’s answer to junk mail.

geo–really? as I recall, that was basically a grumpy essay, padded out to book length, in which a fancy prose style failed to compensate for a lack of historical depth….but I read it when it came out, and my distaste may have been exaggerated by youth.

care to briefly summarize what make Birkerts definitive on this question?

Laurel, is there such a thing as cultural optimism, do you think? or is this a question on which it is possible to err in only one direction?

@Lemuel: absolutely, and there’s a specially American version of cultural optimism (irrational cultural exuberance?) that focuses on the relentless march of progress, predicting that the grand utopia is just around the corner. Examples include Manifest Destiny and Dow 36,000.

Laurel,

Thanks for the reply. And having now looked at your lovely blog — if only I could throw dinners like yours — I feel a bit bad about the snippiness of my comment.

So you are saying that the time and type of media that you consume for hours a day makes no difference to your brain? Also: are you claiming that all new developments, like heavy use of the internet (or for that matter, offshore drilling) is unambiguously good, and anyone who points to a possible drawback is a caveman or Luddite?

While it is silly to conclude anything from an N=1, the real evidence in the article is in the experimental studies, such as “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The internet does have widely recognized advantages; it is much easier to search for information, and it facilitates certain forms of communication and collaboration. But it is worth studying seriously whether heavy use of it might tend to distract, shorten attention span, or adversely affect academic performance.

I have been informed that the trick is to not throw the spear straight as no serious professional goalkeeper can be fooled with a straight shot.

This presumably only applies to people who throw spears at goalkeepers.

ajay: “This presumably only applies to people who throw spears at goalkeepers.”

Which would make soccer more interesting than the current version, where people run around not scoring for two hours, and a penalty kick decides the game.

37- you can have your football and eat it too.

38- and you too.

And the use of the phrase “real world” for the world of face-to-face in-person interaction is common enough to not jump down someone’s throat about it.

If it weren’t for the context of this thread, sure. But it’s the same kind of sloppy thinking about the Internet being automatically different from everything else that has gone before (never mind the similarities) that is mocked in the OP, isn’t it?

As for the interpretation question, even under your interpretation, stating that the real world is a social world conversationally implicates the proposition that the unreal (i.e. electronic or virtual) world is *not* a social world, which is exactly the kind of misperception I was pointing out in the first place. Humans are social animals and therefore worlds populated by humans — or avatars controlled by humans — are social worlds. (E.g. Usenet, IRC, blogs, every MMO ever, etc.)

Although on second thought, the idea that kids can’t learn to negotiate social worlds without adult interaction is even weirder. Kids’ primary social world is their peers and they learn to negotiate it by the time-honored method of sinking or swimming.

Well, as someone who had already stopped watching TV, I have sacrificed some book time to the Internet.

Well, as someone who had already stopped watching TV, I have sacrificed some book time to the Internet.

I’ve definitely sacrificed some time-that-would-have-been-spent-reading to the Internet, but on average I’m a much much happier person for it. (My quip in response to criticism for setting aside Laurence Sterne or Aphra Behn to go patter online is that it’s probably a healthy thing for me to be spending less time curled up with dead people.)

geo–ah, if Birkerts is to you a “superlative literary critic” then we are too far apart to discuss these matters usefully, since I remember him primarily as “the author of a small-minded and dull polemic against John Ashbery”…..but thanks for your courteous reply!

49-

OK, yes, that makes sense. Sorry for being dense.

In which case I would suggest, quite seriously, that the invention of agriculture is an even better candidate. It’s very hard to argue that the bulk of the population in most historical agricultural societies has been better off than typical hunter-gatherers.

As a 57 year old who’s been using computers since the early 80s, and the internet since the beginning, I have to agree with the basic argument of the Times article. I very definitely have more trouble concentrating on things, and staying focused. Above all I waste an enormous amount of time browsing the net, checking my email, and reading and writing silly comments. And I don’t seem able to stop.