A. and I took a trip to the downtown library today. I still find driving in downtown areas rather a harrowing experience, and I imagine the other drivers do, too. The library parking lot was NOT well-marked, and in trying to get back to it I went the wrong way down a one-way street, carefully maintaining my obscenities under my breath.
Anyway, what this post is actually about is media. I spent a whole class talking about books, so you'd I'd have thoroughly chewed the cud, but I find contemplation is contingent upon leisure.
I didn't realize that when A. wanted to "go to the library," what he really wanted to do was play on the computers. I was horrified, and insisted that we at least get a couple books. A., who is nobody's fool, indulged his nanny's obsolete notions by pulling several books at random off the shelf: "I want these. Can I go play the computer now?" I reluctantly acquiesced, and was left hugging the randomly-chosen codices. An hour later, I lured him away from the screen with promises of a movie before school.
So here is the question: Am I as dated as the scroll, or does the transition from page to screen bring with it more than a mere change of materials? McLuhan (of whom I was reminded last night while watching Annie Hall) explores this question in Gutenberg Galaxy, and his answer is essentially yes. Some people mourn the feel of paper, the look of bindings, the smell of ink. I do, as well, but I would gladly trade all that in for the ability to carry my library around on something like Sony's E-Ink.
I think what I find disturbing about computers and televisions is that they are so attention-grabbing. We talked a lot about attention in cognitive psychology. People actually have very little of it, and can't pay attention to multiple things. Computers are not simply machines to read e-books--they have more images, buttons, and movement. Many computer games, even ones that are "educational," are actually based on reaction-time, and pack an awful lot of graphics. We pay for "free" websites by putting up with ads that are primarily designed to get our attention. Personally, I often come home from a day of being bombarded by billboards, traffic, and powerpoint lectures only to find that I can't concentrate on reading an actual book.
And the content of books is important. Book-length attention spans are necessary for contemplation. Jane Austen, Tolkein, and even parts of the Bible, may be turned into successful feature films, and ideas can be elaborated upon through cinema, but complex higher-level thinking--Plato, Aquinas, Locke--can only be conveyed through words.
In all parts of our society, we can see attention spans shortening in sync with our media. Treatises are superceded by news blurbs, extended dialogues are diminished as people become busier (and have less to say?), Bach has given way to Madonna.
Sometimes I think society has given me ADD--and I'm literate compared to "the man on the street" (to quote an inimitable professor). It's not that I don't enjoy pop music and movies; it is just so frighteningly easy to be consumed by them.
In fact, how many people managed to get through this entire post?
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8 comments:
I made it through too! :) Great post, Michaela. My boss at Keyboard for Kids tells me that it is much harder to keep her students' attention these days than it was twenty years ago when she first started teaching. It's very sad.
I made it through. Maybe it was all the times you put "attention" in bold that allowed me to do so.
I haven't concentrated on anything in years.
Congratulations! You are all literate!
And, yes, Em, my cognitive psych book informed me that bolding (along with size, color, and movement) was a way to get people's attention--like that was something the general public didn't know.
Oh--and Postman is definitely on my reading list, Bri :-) I've read part of Amusing Ourselves , but not Technopoloy . Another worthwhile voice in the literacy discussion is Walter Ong, who pre-dates McLuhan and Postman. McLuhan loves to refer to him as "Father Ong."
Ha, I had to come back a couple times before getting through it.
Well, some of that may have been due to not having time while studying for the final that I just got out of...
Nonetheless, I do find that when moving from "normal life" mode to anything requiring attention (be it reading a long book, condensing materials into a study guide, or hammering out a lengthy brief), there is usually a period at the beginning in which I feel the lack of secondary distracting activities disorienting.
The focus on instant completion over process would seem to also be related (which could get at the ink-and-paper issue). I read a novel the other day at my "legal reading" speed, and noticed that when I had finished the book in under two hours, I had absorbed the facts, but lost almost the entirety of the humor built into the dialog.
On the other hand, a few weeks ago, when the weather first turned nice here, I decided to walk the five and a half miles home from school (through a semi-rural area). I could have driven it in an hour less, but instead I had a very real sense of actually being there, instead of just a blip in transit between points.
(ok, I didn't mean to write that much or that widely... I would add an adequate conclusion if I could bring together the foregoing.)
Yes! I think the paper and ink idea has a lot to do with it. The medieval scholars talked about writing as laboring with your whole body. Even the binary form of the book is echoed in the structure of our own bodies.
Futurists (i.e. computer geeks) today desire to escape the physical, to one-up the physical in the "virtual." I heard Dr. Mitchell describe it as Gnosticism once.
Yet even our mind is "only human." Our world is made difficult because there is more information bombarded at us than we can process, because we can type faster than we can think. Maybe we were "made" to move at the speed our legs could carry us, maybe that optimizes our enjoyment.
I don't know. I mean, writing itself is a technology, as I said before. I'm not advocating the noble savage concept. It's just that we've had to adapt to an unprecedented amount of new technology in the past century, particularly information technology, and it doesn't always seem friendly to human life or thought.
in light of the last comment, I'm tempted to advocate reverting to verbal instruction and storytelling.
:-p OK--who's going to throw out their books and computers first?
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