Cool. Coolish. Coolish and gray. Except for the parts that are bright and sunny. That’s today and maybe all week. But we’ll have a change of pace on Friday and Saturday, when we have a lot of rain in the forecast. And on Sunday, looks like wind. On all of this, the seasons will change. Summer ran long and autumn will be the less for it. Or summer ran right on schedule. I’ve no idea how it works here.
And it’s all so variable, anyway, right? You enjoy the pleasant days, marveling at your good fortune, and try not to think too holistically about what it all means. Or you think about what it all means and try to enjoy the day.
All of which is confusing. For a Monday.
Not to worry! We’ll have all week to ponder this, and other mysteries of our time.
So many mysteries of our time. That’s why I’m taking a social media sabbatical. I decided this just last night.
Recently we discussed Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? in class.
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets, reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?””
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
I’ve felt that. Felt it off and on for a long time. And while Carr is talking about other, slightly older elements of the web itself, social media has only exacerbated the problems. I asked my students if they have experienced these same things, and a general now that you mention it consensus emerged.
So, I figured, time to experiment. World events are making it a little easier, too.
How’s it going? Going great so far, thanks for asking. Early observations: I know less. Maybe that’s good. I’m skimming less. That’ll help. The habit of reaching for some platform or another in down times will fade — probably. I’ll get a lot of time back. Like, a lot. My thumb has enjoyed the break. I wonder how long it will last.
Tonight, I’m going to read (part of) a book.
We went for a bike ride just after noon. Warmest part of the day. Just mild enough to wear a gilet. Warm enough to feel like I could take it off. Not that any of that mattered, slow as I wound up riding. Difficult to get overheated when you don’t work too hard.
But the views!
Also, I’m tinkering with new video ideas. It’ll come to nothing, of course, but it changes things up a little bit, maybe.
Problem is, you need those lovely bike photos to prove it all. Usually your bike is leaned up against something, the scenery in the background must be picturesque. The lighting just so. Maybe I should just concentrate on the ride. This was a 21-mile route and I didn’t have to take my feet out of the clips the first time, which is the ideal experience — except for the being slow part.
We went to campus later in the afternoon for a faculty meeting. Faculty met. Information was conveyed. Questions were asked and questions were answered. The meeting ending early, which might be a faculty meeting first. Some people lingered to chat, which was lovely.
Before long it was time to get ready for class. Imagine having to teach opposite the hometown baseball team in the playoffs.
Some may say, Hey, you’re teaching a media class. That’s media! And that’s true, but entirely. We were talking about groups — activists, hate groups and group dynamics — tonight, so if the fans somehow won the game, maybe we can dive into that next time.
The best part was that I got them out of class in time for them to watch most of the game. I’m sure they appreciated that; the good guys were winning. There’s nothing quite like the energy of a local pennant chase.
