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When it comes to trying to understand the Internet's psychological consequence, Jimmy Durante, the old vaudvillian with the prodigious schnoozola, has it right, "Everybody wants ta get inta da act!"
The latest voice in the growing chorus of Google versus Gutenberg is NY Times columnist David Brooks whose July 8th, 2010 column confronted whether kids are being harmed or helped by Internet culture. He concludes that "Internet culture may produce better conversationalists ... literary culture still produces better students." In other words, you want to be trendy, spend time online; you want to learn something, read a book. Of course, what he leaves out is that even on the Internet kids are still kids and parents still matter.
His rationale? Well, he waves in the direction of research. But as is always the case with research about the psycho-social consequences of the Internet, by the time a study is planned, the data collected and analyzed, the report written, submitted to peer review, and then published the technology has moved on; the world is no longer what it was when the study was planned. With tongue only lightly in cheek I've called this inescapable not knowing the Essig Uncertainty Principle.
What Brooks did was start his column by purportedly showing "broadband access is not necessarily good for kids" by citing a study. However, the study is from "2000 to 2005 before Twitter and Facebook took off." So, does it still apply today? Who knows. All we have is uncertainty.
And the certainty that kids are kids and parents matter, which I'll get back to in a minute because I'm not being fair to Brooks. He wasn't really trying to write a scientific review article. The studies he references serve rhetorical not evidential purposes. Rather than an empirically-grounded point of view, what he's doing is rehearsing an all too familiar conservative mind-set in which respect for traditional authority is good and anything undermining that authority is bad.
Ultimately, his column was not really about the Internet. It was yet another protest that they way things were, the hierarchies of knowledge and privilege that landed him on his lofty perch, is the way things should be; dammit, the world works better my way!
Lets look closer. Beneath his erudition is a rather simple dichotomy,
the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.
via Op-Ed Columnist - The Medium Is the Medium - NYTimes.com.
In contrast,
A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference [snip] The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.
Smashes hierarchy? I guess when you write on the opinion page of the Times you never have to worry about page view counts, or count the number of FB friends you have, or how many follow you on Twitter. When you actually spend time using the thing, you realize the Internet does not smash hierarchy nor is it more disrespectful or antiauthority than anything else. It does enable different hierarchies and authorities,"emergent" ones built from the billions of decisions the hive makes each day. But today's Internet is more about opportunity than it is about revenge as Brooks would have it.
Brooks and others with button-down white-male privilege—like me—have the same chance but no better than anyone else. The fact is that no one really confuses "icanhazcheezburger" with "Arts & Letters Daily" and it's somewhat disingenuine to complain that they do.
Going further, his entire either-or premise is wrong:
A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom. A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience.
via Op-Ed Columnist - The Medium Is the Medium - NYTimes.com.
In a word, no. I'm sitting here, like I assume you are with dual citizenship. I'm writing this piece referencing lots of windows and both an e-book version of Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" and a paper copy (hardback no less!) of Maggie Jackson's too often ignored and arguably superior "Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age." The question is not which is better, Internet or book culture. Rather, the question is how to develop a flexibility of mind that will allow one to exploit and enjoy both.
And that brings us back to kids and parents. If you want your kid to have dual citizenship in both the world of books and the world of bits, read to your kid. Read early, read often: do not stop. When kids get older read better books. Make reading into something intimate, connected, and fun. A love of reading does not arise in the relationship between systems of information delivery and information processing brains. A love of reading grows in relationships between adults who love to read and kids who love those adults.
Let me quote Jimmy Durante again who humorously captured the love: "There's nothing like sitting at home before a fire with a pipe, a dog, and a book at your feet."
Brooks otherwise worthwhile project of preserving that which is valuable in traditional understandings of what it means to live a virtuous, good, meaningful life is just not helped by denigrating and misunderstanding that which is new. If our emerging post-human future is going to be more "human" than "post-" we need to do better, whether the domain is attention, concentration, literacy, or, closer to my interests, love and relationships.
And finally, to show that the pre-Internet golden age that is the object of Brooks's nostalgic lust was just as irreverent as any college humor web-site (and also because it's so much fun), I turn again and for the last time to the Schnozzola, Mr. Inka Dinka Doo himself with his 1947 classic commentary on the literary world:
