Although “One of the shibboleths of the Church of the Holy Screen is that iPhones, Twitter, and Kindle make our age unique, uncharted territory,” observes Daniel J. Flynn in Unplugged , summarizing William Powers’ thesis in Hamlet’s Blackberry , “Man has been there, done that.”
Powers is skeptical about a world that toggles among multitudinous computer windows and screen operations. The digital revolution has transformed attention deficit disorder from a handicap to an asset, converting what earlier generations might have regarded as a lack of focus into “multitasking.” As Powers observes: “Geniuses are rare, but by using screens as we do now, constantly jumping around, we’re ensuring that all of us have fewer ingenious moments and bring less associative creativity to whatever kind of work we do.”
I commend the whole review, Powers’ ideas seeming to me perfectly sensible.
In my experience, judging from e-mail conversations I have, when you learned to write affects how you use the technology. The people who learned to write and discuss things before the invention of e-mail find it a great tool, because it creates a new mixture of conversation and letter-writing, with something of the speed of the first and the distance and reflection of the second. You can respond fairly quickly, but with time to measure what you say, check your facts, dig up good quotes, etc.
But people who didn’t learn to write and discuss things then — and I mean “didn’t learn to write and discuss things” as well as “didn’t learn to write and discuss things then” — tend to use it and similar technologies in the way it seems to encourage: to send short, pointed, undeveloped, often emotive and sometimes pointless, thoughts. The exchanges make a personal connection, which is probably all to the good, and communicate judgments and emotions, but not thoughts of any complexity. What baffles me is that this is true of young people who are some of the smartest people I know.
I sent the link to my friend Stuart Koehl (author of Friday’s “On the Square” article, An Independent Witness to Marriage ), and he responded:
I don’t substantially disagree with Powers, particularly in regard to people who have grown up in the digital age. I notice, for instance, a fundamental disregard for basic knowledge, both of things and of how to do things. “I can always look that up on the web”, I am told, to which my response is, “What if your server is down, your computer is busted, or your iPhone’s battery is flat?”Just as the advent of literacy undermined the mnemonic skills needed for oral culture, digitization will undermine the skills needed to work “unplugged”. I know soldiers whose skill with map and compass has seriously (or even totally) atrophied due to the ubiquity of GPS — something that will some day get someone killed, I’m sure (if it hasn’t already).
While I fully appreciate the internet, the Web, digital music, You Tube and all the rest, I had the advantage of learning how to write using a typewriter, of doing research with a pile of dead tree editions, and of the need to carry a lot of knowledge in my head, organized for rapid recall.
As for the Crackberry, I loathe the things, and refuse to get one (or any sort of smart phone). Those who say they are addictive are correct — I know people who cannot go for five minutes without checking their e-mail, and I have become used to attending meetings where all I see are the tops of other people’s heads, as they all engage in the Blackberry Prayer: reading or texting messages under the table.
Everybody should be forced to go for a couple of months disconnected from the net, just so they can remember how things were done—and can still be done—with paper and pencil and memorized facts. This will stand us in good stead, when, inevitably, somebody figures out how to crash the whole web, or large portions of it.
It’s interesting that this subject keeps coming up, again and again. Another friend pointed me at a study that said kids who are raised with computers tend to have shorter attention spans. That’s where I began thinking that every breakthrough in communications technology involves the loss of some existing skill set, almost as compensation for whatever benefits accrue from the new technology.
Writing tended to undermine our ability to memorize long stories, lists, poems, etc. Printing undermined calligraphy (and typing destroyed handwriting); television undermined the listening skills and imagination required for radio (or reading aloud). It’s a constant process of trading off one thing for another, and each generation has to judge whether the game is worth the candle.
I’m not sure each generation actually judges whether the game is worth the candle, or just plays the game because it’s the game evreryone is playing.
