The Shallows

And I thought that it was just "senioritis"

The first chapter of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows explained something that I have been complaining about for a while, I can't concentrate on one thing for very long. I have noticed that if I try to read a book, especially a scholarly text, my brain also wants to play a game of solitaire. OK, I admit that my parents complained about that characteristic of mine back before there was an internet, but I prefer Carr's thesis.
Carr's main point is that technology and the way we use technology changes us not just physically, as in the epidemic of carpal tunnel syndrome and game boy thumb, but it changes our brains. The more time we spend on line, the more we are training our brains to process information in smaller chunks and to skim instead of doing close reading. He explains his theory in this brief interview for PBS.



Maybe we are not getting stupid, but we are getting something else. On line, we no longer read horizontally on the page but also vertically and we search for hyperlinks in saccdes, those rapid eye movements and jumps around the page that we used to think must have been such a problem for ancient readers of unseparated scripts. (haha, how they would laugh at us now)Something is definitely happening. Anyone who has ever seen someone get out of a cab in the middle of moving traffic while trying to pay the driver, talk to the person they are going to meet and find the address of the restaurant they were meeting at on their "smart" phone, or seen someone try to text while steering their car with their knees has to wonder what's really going on in our brains. Maybe we are losing our sense of self preservation as we are gaining a new hyperliteracy.
The language used to describe this change in literacy is the same as the language used to talk about addiction. It's intoxicating, you can feel your brain light up, feel yourself getting smarter. Pretty much the way people talked about cocaine in the 1980s, before crack. Yes, we are living in a time that is obsessed with compulsive behavior, or at least fascinated with it, but is what we talk about when we talk about "surfing the web" really an addiction?. For me it is a similar sensation to the one I get when I try to carry on a conversation in another language. The search for vocabulary and having to unscramble idioms makes my brain tingle. Maybe it's just the way plasticity feels in action. Just because it feels good and it seems to change the way we think and we get really cranky if we have to do without it...


This is Nietzsche's Brain



This is Nietzsche's Brain online


Why do we celebrate the jump from orality to literacy but not the one from print literacy to digital literacy?


Unlike Ong and Goody, who are absolutely sure that an intellectual technology wreaking major change on our brains is good for us, Carr is not quite so sanguine. The scholars quoted in the first chapter of The Shallows, Karp, Friedman and Davis, all seem to be happy with the idea of their brains going from linear processing to networked processing. I don't know why, Goody and Ong at least have the benefit of a couple of millennia of hindsight to consider the changes made by print literacy, while Karp, Friedman, Davis and the rest of us are still guessing.
I am not even certain that the great intellectual technology of print literacy was such a giant leap up the evolutionary chain. It certainly doesn't seem to have much use as a basic survival tool. Marco Polo's "Dog Headed Men", the Onge of the Andaman Islands, survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami while their literate neighbors did not. They were stuck in orality, the poor illiterate things, had to use the brain for remembering and so they survived. Ong might be annoyed but Darwin would be proud.

"Every intellectual technology...embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work" (Carr 45).
If the assumptions are simply ways of mapping our reality, just another metaphor or as Lilly Tomlin would define it, a collective hunch. Then as I see it (another hunch) the assumptions are running the show. They, the assumptions, are self-generating metaphors that become the lens through which we interpret the world. Web 2.0 described this for us. So we might want to watch the addiction references.

May you live in interesting times(Chinese curse)/ Or the dialogic nature of reality.

Ever since I first saw his name in the prologue of The Shallows, Marshall McLuhan has been everywhere. It's his 100th birthday anniversary and "the media is the message" is being quoted by the media everywhere. He said that we are distracted by the message, some would say the mess, and have missed what the medium of delivery is creating in us. God only knows what he would have made of YouTube.

At the end of chapter three of The Shallows, Carr quotes McLuhan, " The achievements of the Western world, it is obvious, are a testimony to the tremendous values of literacy..." I always thought that the achievements of the Western world were a testimony to the tremendous value of superior fire power.
I would like to quote another scholar, Chinua Achebe, "If the story of the hunt was told from the point of view of the lion, it would be a completely different tale."

Happy Birthday Marshall! Here is an NPR broadcast of the commemorative show on the Fishko Files.



Whatever is happening to us, we are changing. Maybe we will need the benefit of a couple of millennia of hindsight to really understand how, but at least today we can be grateful that we are not Merzenich's monkey. (Carr 25)