Communications

I’ve recently read an article that captured my attention written by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic Monthly July 2008 entitled “Is Google Making us Stoopid?; What the Internet is Doing to our Brains.” The author complains of his inability to read long and complex books or articles as he used to, and believes it is because his brain has been, literally, re-wired by his fast-paced, hyper-linked and synopsized daily internet reading. He writes: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

The next paragraph continues as follows:

“I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

That idea totally fascinates me – what if we actually attain, process, and comprehend information in an entirely different way because of the internet? The way the information is written, displayed and stored is entirely different than the paper-bound passages of the past, so why not consider the brain itself has changed accordingly? Nicholas Carr writes:

“Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains… We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.”

Certainly the experience of attaining information is different, clicking versus page-turning. It takes half a minute to read an online page, but considerably more to read a page in a book. The internet delivers information quickly, instantaneously, and we absorb it almost as quickly. The mechanistic aspect of the computer not only drains the romance of reading (to me, anyway) but actually may be changing the way we write and think. Re-wiring our thinking patterns, making them quicker and more superficial.

Later in the article Carr wrote:

“Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

What a fascinating idea – the machine determines what we say and how we say it. We visual words and communication through a machine. Cell phones have certainly revolutionized interpersonal communication. Text messages force the sender to condense ideas to mere fragments, curtailing any complex or intricate ideas, reserving them for a different type of communication. But even on the phone, the caller is constantly aware of counted minutes, and is almost always busied with something else while talking (say, by driving or cooking). So when does deep communication occur? Do we care anymore?

I believe the only real communication is face to face, where you can sense body language, you can see lips, hands, eyes, eyebrows, feet. You can hear subtle intonations. You sense emotional boundaries and open doors. There is not metallic device or electronic buzz between you, no medium to work with. Some people still cannot communicate face to face, some people are irrevocably ruined by electronic communication (my brother, for example, with whom every conversation begins and ends with: "Sorry, I'm on my way here to see so-and-so, will talk later"). But when both parties are wholly involved and willing to give, that is true communication.

I can’t help but mourn this change from written page to text on a screen. Books are so tactile, it feels like you are actually gaining knowledge by reading, whereas reading on the internet feels like you’re simply downloading information that can be easily lost on your mental hard drive. I’m a bono fide bibliophile and a bit of a luddite. Reading, owning and handling a book is a uniquely personal experience – generally you read a book by yourself and become involved in the world you are creating from the words. But Carr is right, it takes more concentration and more commitment to read a book than read a blog or article on the internet. But reading a book can never compare to reading a screen. A computer screen doesn’t have a scent (I can tell how old a book is by how it smells) it doesn’t have an age, it doesn’t have character or heart. However, further in the article Carr argued this point, which I thought was interesting:

“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).

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.”

So maybe internet reading is not so bad? There are certainly positive aspects having an international, day and night, instant information source. But deep down, I feel cheated and cheapened by it. So many of my single friends rely on electronic and online sources to not only augment their romantic and friendly relationships, but actually replace human interactions with technology. Texting, ‘facebook-ing,’ and e-mailing play active roles in their relationships, replacing face-to-face encounters. How actual can that be? How moving, how deep?

Maybe you’ve stopped reading by now, maybe you’ve followed another link, hopped to another site, or lost interest. But if you have made it, you’ve given me hope for the human heart and brain :).