Agony and the Internet

One of the biggest things that struck me on rereading The Shallows in preparation for leading a faculty summer reading discussion at the beginning of this school year was the similarities that Carr points out between the digital word and the spoken word.

He talks a lot about the kind of mind that reading fosters: A mind that can be quiet and focus on a single task for an extended period of time.

And he contrasts that with the kind of mind that the Internet fosters: One that harvests large quantities of information quickly without going too deep.

But in these comparisons, he brings up some ways in which the digital word is taking us back to what came before writing. Primarily, this is social information sharing.

In the oral tradition, sharing information is, by necessity, a social event. One person speaks to one or more people, imparting what they know. The person sharing the information is treated as an authority and can be questioned. Information sharing is interactive. In Orality and Literacy, Ong talks about the agonistic nature of oral cultures. People do battle with words. Think of debate. Think of jokes and riddles.

Writing, and reading, Carr points out, are both solitary events. The piece of writing becomes the authority as the original author can not, usually, be questioned. And the writing continues to say the same thing, no matter what you ask it. There isn't the same back and forth, the same argumentation.

And then there is the Internet. Web 2.0, the social web, to be exact. Yes, we have blogs, facebook, and youtube, allowing anyone and everyone to share content with the multitudes. But more importantly, we have comments. Anyone and everyone can argue with the author, not just the work.

Now think about flame wars. Think about how reading the comment section on almost anything on the Internet can make you lose faith in humanity. People say it is just that people feel more free to be mean online because of distance and anonymity. But I think the driving force behind these arguments may run deep. Like, oral roots deep.

This is the agony. It is the way of social information sharing. I suspect it is a little cruder now than in the old days. But if we understand it maybe we can channel that argumentative energy towards something more productive? I would like to think so.

Scriptura Continua

It's hard for us to imagine today, but no spaces separated the words in early writing. In the books inked by scribes, words ran together without any break across every line on every page, in what's now referred to as scriptura continua. The lack of word separation reflected language's origins in speech. When we talk, we don't insert pauses between each word - long stretches of syllables flow unbroken from our lips. It would never have crossed the minds of the first writers to put blank spaces between words. They were simply transcribing speech, writing what their ears told them to write. - The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, pg. 61

Carr goes on to explain that early readers experienced a "cognitive burden" trying to pick out the words from the continuous line of letters. Spaces were introduced to make reading easier. Hyperlinks and other distractions on the Internet are again creating a cognitive burden, according to Carr, by forcing us to make decisions while we are reading (do I click on the link?) rather than focus on what the words are telling us.

One of my arguments for writing being further from meaning than the spoken word is that writing is a graphical representation of sounds. It refers back to the spoken word, not to meaning. D-O-G tells you how to pronounce the word "dog," it doesn't tell you what a dog is.

The spaces between words, however, are not there because people pause between each word when speaking, but to help readers understand the text more quickly.  They ease the cognitive burden. It is so hard to understand the written word, so laborious, that we have to add things that aren't there so that we can comprehend a text at a speed that approaches our comprehension abilities with the spoken word. And, it is not just spaces we have added. We have punctuation, we have altered word order, we have italics and bold and big and small. All in an attempt to make writing as readily understandable as speaking.

Then there is this business of the Internet. Are we moving further from meaning as we further technologize the word? Um...yeah.

We worked to ease the cognitive burden of reading so that we could spend more time thinking about meaning and less time thinking about deciphering. But the Internet is increasingly distracting - increasingly burdensome. We get so caught up looking for information, we fail to pay much attention to what we find. (This is the main thrust of Carr's book. Forgive me for making these bold claims without elaborating on them. He's done that for me.)

The digital word isn't trying to be like the spoken word. It isn't trying to be easily understood. It is like a living thing, trying only to propagate itself. The digital word is all about more and more and more digital words. But if we are too distracted to pay attention to what these words say and certainly too distracted to remember for more than a few moments - then they don't say anything.

Maybe this is all a little dramatic. Clearly, I like the Internet. Hello out there blog readers, I hope you are enjoying all my tasty digital words! Just try not to forget me when you click on the next link...

The Place of the Spoken Word in the Information Age

I've started the School Library Media program at the University of Georgia with the aim of becoming a Media Specialist. One of the classes I am taking this semester is on technology and relies heavily on online discussion and short written assignments.

In an assignment I am working on I found myself thinking about Ong's claim that people from literate cultures think differently than people from primary oral cultures. I began to realize that, in all likelihood, the Internet (and all that comes with it) is rewiring our minds again. Knowing that we can get information instantly. Knowing that we can disseminate information instantly. Connecting with people anywhere in the world with video conferencing. These things change the way we communicate and the way we solve problems.

Writing provides us with external storage space. We don't have to keep all of our thoughts and computations in our brain. The paper is an extension of our brain. Now the Internet is one big brain extension shared by the world. When the external component of our brain has changed so drastically, the brains inside our heads must be changing to keep up.

Then the question becomes, if our brains are actually changing to better interface with advanced information technology, where does the spoken word fit in? Is there still a place for face to face conversations and live performances in the information age?

The goal of this post is to pose the question, not to answer it. I would like to do some more investigations, but I suspect I will be answering this question for the rest of my professional life. I believe the spoken word does have a place - not just because I want to, but because I still witness it's power on a daily basis. But there is no doubt that, like so many things, how the spoken word serves us today is changing and will continue to change.