I still don't like the snarky title of Mark Bauerlein's new book on how technology is blunting our reading and comprehension skills, but a recent piece in the Atlantic persuades me that he's at least right to claim that computers are changing how we think.
What's really great about the article, though, is that writer Nicholas Carr seriously wrestles with the question of what these changes mean for individuals and for society:
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".... 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)....Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.
Indeed, what makes Bauerlein's arguments so difficult to stomach is that the state of affairs he bemoans cannot fairly be judged in the context of a static today; on the contrary, we must consider how it will shape us in the ever-changing and unknowable tomorrow. Bauerlein is almost surely right that technology makes us think differently. But can he really say it makes us "dumber" when his operating definition of that word is rooted in the economic, cultural, and political realities of bygone eras? How can he can plausibly say, utterly ignorant of how the world will look even ten years from now, whether this uncharted future of human cognition will improve or degrade our lives?
On the other hand, how can you not be persuaded by the romantic paean to old-school, know-thyself deep thinking with which Carr closes the piece?
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with "content," we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.
These sentences, however, aren't intrinsically seductive. Almost certainly they appeal to Bauerlein's generation, and they're even likely to sweep up a good chunk of twenty-somethings. But once they're washed downriver by the unyielding tide of technological progress, they'll sound as quaint as Socrates' reminiscences about the days before writing.
Photo by Flickr user tmartin.
