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.
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This is really interesting, but there seem to me to be differences in digital and oral communication. First, in face-to-face, we don't have the anonymity that exists on the internet. While some neighbors DO shout at each other and mud-slinging is sadly more common than we might care to admit, the social media world allows us to say things with at least partial impunity. Maybe Golding (Lord of the Flies) had it right that when social structures are removed, we all become base and animalistic, but I think society has evolved those structures to facilitate conversation and argumentation within socially acceptable bounds. We may develop those online (perhaps we already are), but I don't think we're there yet.
ReplyDeleteSecond, face-to-face communication involves kinesics, proxemics, and myriad other nonverbal cues that have yet to be replicated online. While streaming video (Skype,etc.) give us some of those, such as vocal intonation and facial expression), and we've developed a lexicon of emoticons and cyberspeak to augment the emotional depth of online conversations, online communication is still an impoverished form, in my opinion.
Third, online communication has a permanence that face-to-face does not, and the implications for what is said and who can see it and who can repeat or forward it are somewhat different from oral language. Sure the gossips can pass along who said what, but it is one person as a time, not millions at a time. While there is certainly value in reaching the masses with important information, is it equally important to reach the masses with unimportant information...trash in, trash out? Of course, there's an elitist subtext to this, that anyone has the right to determine what is "important," but at some point those decision do get made. In oral cultures, one would walk away from a conversation, ignore a person, etc. I guess the same thing happens in online social contexts, but those comments are logged and captured in a way that oral conversations are not.
Perhaps it's true that digital culture will mirror oral culture in some forms, but I would be careful not to look for too many similarities; I think digital culture will be its own beast, to be tamed or not as time unfolds.