“I’m Dying, Dave… Dave? Dave… pay attention!
NOTE: once you have read this blog, you can find an abbreviated version of it… at the end of this blog. Should you be able to read all of this blog, and compare it with the ‘abstract’ at the end of this blog, you will know why… BUT, current studies (see below) are indicating that you will not be able to get to the end of this blog anyway; as it is more than 4 paragraphs long, and your attention span is fading quicker than a gay liberal Koran salesman’s chances of getting laid in a Texas roadhouse.
So: please ignore, in effect, this blog, and just scroll down to the end. It may take a full five seconds to scroll down, depending on your computer’s processor speed; if you can’t hack this excruciating lull in your information intake, then I would simply abandon this page and go back to your online bowling, celebrity hunts and Lego news updates.
Nicholas Carr is, like most of us, a worried man. I don’t know if he’s worried about his mortgage, or the fuel ratio of his car (he should be), but he’s certainly worried about the erosion of our “deep reading” capabilities (wherein we surrender ourselves to lengthy and unspecified commitments to complex and extended written narratives, or non-fictional arguments. You know: reading….). I have just read his latest piece in the July/August issue of The Atlantic, a marvelously argued analysis of the way the internet is changing our cognitive abilities. As he readily admits in his article, there is a long history of people lining up to denounce the latest technical innovations since even before the advent of the printing press (Socrates, himself, was worried about the effect of introducing the idea of written words to the population at large: try getting your head around that…), and he acknowledges that the Internet has been an innovation in many profound ways; but the basic thesis of his argument is that the way we process information from a computer screen actually reconfigures the plasticity of our brains, literally and physically adapting us at a biological level; and consequently our ability to concentrate is decreasing. Referencing a study by scholars from University College London he quotes:
“It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “powerbrowse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”
In case you didn’t know what an “abstract” is - and neither did I until I used the Internet to find out - it’s a hook that summarizes the more detailed contents of an honest-to-God real length article. According to eHow.com:
“On the Internet, an abstract is the first stage in getting someone to read a longer piece of writing… a concise summary of a longer article and entices readers to enjoy an entire magazine. Abstracts should be informative and brief, covering the basics and provide an opinion of the article to the reader. Creating a magazine abstract for the Internet is a simple and effective way of streamlining content.”
Statements like this are almost maliciously designed to provoke bourgeoise rage in people who would sooner immolate their first edition Victor Hugos - along with their wives and children - in their Kennebunkport homes than “streamline content.” However, those of us reasonable - open even - citizens, who believe we will still be safe to read books of the physical kind for years to come without being persecuted and snorted at by the kind of morons who paid for the first generation i-phone or the beta-version of Windows ‘95, know that we are being somehow, subtly, changed beyond our immediate cogniscence by our proximity to computers, moreso even than when our peasant ancestors were introduced to something called… a clock (“Shit. There goes my lie in.”).
Whilst the idea that the hundreds of billions of neurons in our brains may be mutating in a new unholy alliance with electronic devices may leave members of the Borg fan club (although I bet they don’t call themselves a “fan club”; I bet they prefer “meld” or “consortium”) flickering an eyelid in a rash display of untrammeled ecstasy, it is kind of scary when you realize, like me, that you can’t spend even an hour with the Sunday edition of the LA Times before casting the entire tree-pulped mass aside with a sigh, and returning to identifying potential sarcomas on your ankles, or lunging back to your Airbook for re-heated exclusives on SuperHeroHype.
“But” - I hear you say (although nobody but me is here by now anyway, because we are now 9 paragraphs in: deeper than William Beebe in his bathysphere) - “change is scary.”
Yes. Yes it is. In fact: it’s bloody terrifying to the poor souls that run traditional print media. If you have some spare time on your hands, try this one out for fun: run in to the listings department of any city broadsheet and shout out “Craigslist!”, then click your ruby red slippers together three times fast and get the hell out of there before they tear you limb from limb. Or pull up a chair and have a low fat latte with those gaunt downsized souls who used to be the gatekeepers of Hollywood, and ask them whether their script coverage departments think that “tube” is now a verb: as in, “I you.tube. You say you don’t you.tube. We all you.tube.”
But change is only scary, I find myself concluding, to people who give a shit in the first place, and they tend to be in the minority, ‘cos what’s the use of worrying in the first place, right? There are a lot more people who don’t care about change. They certainly don’t care about climate change. Or regime change in Darfur. Or changing the banking system back into a regulated one so hundreds of thousands of people don’t get gypped out of their homes. Or even changing the channel.
The Internet is the goddamned Holy Grail for most people precisely because the only change it provides is in the content, and it’s all presented as variegated streams of instant gratification in front of our beady eyes as our asses meld into our chairs like the space jockey in Alien. Eating a hundred mini-Snickers in an hour isn’t, effectively, changed much if you substitute the occasional mini-Mars Bar as a palate cleanser…
Forget all those thinkers, journalists and academics who fret that we’ve stopped reading; they’re just the small tribe in the corner whose ass we’ll kick when Skynet takes over and bombs us back into the stone age and make all the mac n’cheese packets radioactive. We can lurch over to them and say, “Ever heard of sweet meats, scholar boy? Pity you were too busy “deep reading” Gore Vidal bon mots to Google the survivalist handbook…”
To many people, Carr’s pronouncements of doom actually sound like wonderful predictions. To them, the prospect of decreased concentration, a steady diet of meaningless distractions, and the feeling of being master of one’s own electronic spoon-fed universe can’t come soon enough to shut out all that other complex crap that gums up the cogs of their lives.
Back when I was a film student at UCLA I attended a class on new developments in media where a visiting CEO of a major Internet provider (I’m not allowed to tell due to a confidentiality agreement I signed to attend. And I know we’re now 14 paragraphs in, but corporate lawyers read everything….) lectured on the “picture frame” of a viewer’s laptop, its seductive potential and how they needed new ways to - and I quote - “Narcotize our customers.”
He said it with a straight face. Evangelizing for the “new flesh” like he was a character out of a David Cronenberg movie - and he had one of those same terrible ‘70s haircut (but that’s what happens when the hairdressers have no attention span any more…).
BLOG ABSTRACT:
Gay liberal Koran salesman don’t get lucky much. Scrolling takes up part of your life, which is finite. We can’t concentrate any more. “Powerbrowse” is not a cereal bar. The internet can learn you stuff real good. Readers can theoretically read a whole magazine. People in Kennebunkport are unhinged. I have no sarcomas yet. Change is scary. Hollywood is terrified. The people of Darfur are probably more terrified. Mars Bars are the new wasabi/black. The Mac n’ Cheese is radioactive. Doom is wonderful. Lawyers read everything. Hairdressers are easily distracted. And from now on this blog will be split in two parts: Tuesdays and Fridays…