Once again, the generation that proclaimed in song, "the times they are a-changing", is decrying that they are a-changing without them.*
Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows, is important. That was evidenced by the turn-out at his free lecture at The Wheeler Centre last night. The room was at capacity, and there were people outside waiting in hope a no-show by someone who reserved a ticket, could mean they might enter. The room was about four or five times as long as it was wide, and all chairs faced the far end where the author and his conversant, Gideon Haigh, would sit. Before beginning, Haigh asked the audience to turn off their mobile phones, their iPhones, iPods and iPads (shame on me, I had brought mine with me in the hope I could make notes and fulfil my paperless aspirations. Alas I had to bring out the ol’ biro and ring-binder). We had to do these things because, Haigh told us, "It’s good to do this once in a while."
So the room compelled us to give Carr and his presenter our deep attention, unable to be distracted by each other or our little devices.
Haigh, an author like Carr, listed his companion’s contributions to all conversations about what his wrong with the new Twitter and Facebook generation. He let Carr talk about the new insights into himself and own capacity for reason once he learned to "back away" from his computer every once in a while. He asked Carr to talk about his theory of intellectual ethic – how each technology is created with assumptions about how humans use their minds – and that while print media are built on the ethic of deep attentiveness, online media encourage the rapid intake of small pieces of information, and value "distractedness, with no room for contemplation."
Carr obliged, of course, as it is what his book is all about. He told us that we humans are naturally wired for distraction, and that we are curious creatures who are built to take in whatever we can through our senses. For Carr, however, the natural state is not the optimal one. "To be attentive is to open up our consciousness and make our culture richer." Haigh wanted to present for consideration that digital natives, like online gamers, perhaps used more parts of their brain while being attentive, but couldn’t do it without telling us he thought them to be "inarticulate social misfits" (this coming from someone who writes books about Cricket). Carr in turn told us that while more parts of the brain are active when engaged with a screen, apparently when reading a book our brain is quieter, and suggested that a broad pattern of cerebral activity is not necessarily an optimal one. That word again.
Haigh prompted Carr to talk about what he thinks the Internet does to reading, writing and thinking. Carr responded with worries that reading is replaced by skimming, that writing is replaced by flashing bits of text, and that the "golden age of expressionism" is lost.
I couldn’t help but I think of another book I had read a few years ago (me, think about books. I know, right?), called A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel. In it is a story about what older adults thought about youth who started to enjoy reading books and scrolls silently and alone, rather than aloud and with one another. Manguel wrote that adults worried that their young were being lost in books, detaching themselves from the world and the richness of culture, disassociating themselves from other humans and drowning in words and mental images. The books are gone, but the moral panic remains.
But then Carr mentioned something that made me go, "Oh, wow. I can’t believe he just said that." When talking about the capacities of information storage he lamented that the Web’s potential to enhance memory is a good thing, but when the Web replaces memory, it’s bad. Umm, when we want to remember things, umm, don’t we write notes? Don’t we access encyclopedias when we want to find out more about something, but keep the volumes so we can go back to them? Isn’t the printed word meant to do that? The capacity of the printed word to store memory increased our capacity for building knowledge and educating each other on specialised topics, fostering the growth of the sciences, humanities, business, communications, and all the other disciplines.
Maybe it’s just me, but when I look at my Facebook page I see a reflection of a rich culture. When friends post photographs, design images, tell me about what’s happening in that specific moment, and I read what their friends think, how they appreciate the comment, I am viewing a lot of social capital, a whole stack of cultural currency being passed around. Sure, not with the same values as we find in published works in libraries, framed works in galleries, or intellectual parlances as heard in The Wheeler Centre, but it is culture.
And maybe it’s just me, but when I can’t remember what the capital of Burkina Faso is, and go to Google or Wikipedia to find out, I don’t think that makes me stupid. I’m not hopping on my bike and going to the local library and picking up a book that’s written by some guy I don’t know and published by some company I don’t know. I’m accessing sites that are written by people I don’t know and organized on the Web by a technology I’m not aware of. But I’m not stupid. I’m just relying on different authorities to give me information.
While I disagreed I took notes and listened and engaged in "deep attentiveness" toward the speaker and his presenter, who moderated discussion. So I thought it quite ironic that when one member of the audience took longer than 40 seconds to complete her comment Haigh started a little "I’m so bored" dance and asked her to hurry up and get to the question.
I think Carr’s book is important. Like Lily Allen’s The Fear, in the face of unbridled consumerism, we need words like Carr’s to remind us that our consumption of technology need not, and should not, determine who we are as humans in bodies and people in cultures. The debate into which Carr has invited us will help us temper technology’s impact on our future. Yet I think people like Haigh and Carr need to realise that when they talk about "losing the richness of culture" they are in fact talking about the failure of their own generation’s culture to stay relevant, and insulting the rich culture of generations of people who are not them. Moreover, when they talk about the ethic of "deep attentiveness", I wonder if they are actually lamenting that such attentiveness is being diverted from authors like them.
Why is it only authors who cry over the death of the author?
* Okay, so Carr and Haigh may not be more than ten years older than me, and it’s really possible that they, like me, are not children of the Dylan years. But I’m a Gen-Xer, and what they talked about was, like, so Boomer.
