Stupid’s Not Quite The Right Word…

It’s unfortunate Nicholas Carr’s new article in the Atlantic is titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?, because the headline is inviting some pretty easily-dished-out ridicule. The title should have been, Is Google Making Us…Different?, as that’s the argument Carr is putting forward. So when Carr points out the Internet makes it much easier to “skim” articles, Blaise Alleyne asks why this is “chilling” (a word not even used by Carr, but instead comes from a snarky post on Radar Online) and “problematic.” Carr doesn’t say that — he doesn’t say skimming is “bad.” What Carr says is:

But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.

…Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

Similarly, Mathew Ingram questions the “skimming activity” reference as well:

So let me get this straight — students skim things when they’re researching topics? Wow. That’s a real bombshell there. And the news that people skim information on the Internet doesn’t seem all that earth-shattering either; after all, there’s about a billion times as much info out there (broadly speaking) as there was a decade ago. Of course people are skimming.

Both critiques miss an essential element to Carr’s argument: medium theory. The simple version of this is McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” and as Carr points out, it’s not just the act of “skimming” that’s the issue, but the media through which we conduct this activity:

Reading…is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains…We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Carr points to another example of how another technology (McLuhan, in fact, viewed all technology as “media”) , the mechanical clock, changed our sense of self:

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away…In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.”

I actually don’t think there’s much controversy about his overall premise — is there doubt that technology changes us, the way we think, and they way we think of ourselves? The work of McLuhan and Walter Ong is especially insightful here. The advent of the printing press, for example, transformed the act of reading from something “oral” and outward (even after writing, during what Ong and McLuhan call “manuscript culture,” reading was often done aloud) to something “interior.” Ong, in Orality and Literacy, describes the world of orality by asking us to “imagine a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything.” For oral cultures, phrases such as “look up” or “take a note” or “read through” are empty, as they are visual metaphors, rooted in literacy and writing.

Technologies of literacy have always impacted our subjectivity, and today’s digital media are no exception.

This is what I think makes Carr’s article so powerful, that he’s articulating something we all know and sense. Can we really spell all that well anymore, when our spell-checkers do it for us? Can we write in cursive, when we now type our expressions (danah boyd has noted this…)? Can we continue to remember, when wikipedia does it for us?

Carr:

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

…Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.

That’s the essential argument. That’s the question Carr is asking — how are we being reprogrammed?

In the end, I have no problem with critiquing Carr’s work. In fact, he asks his readers to be skeptical of his skepticism, likening himself somewhat to a modern-day Socrates, who bemoaned the advent of a new technology (writing), but missed the many ways literacy would expand human knowledge. But if we’re going to critique his work, we should at least not miss the essential message, even if the headline stupidly uses the word stupid (Carr never uses this term in his piece…). Carr doesn’t “hate the Internet,” and I think to set this article up as a Keen-style piece of pessimism is a bit unfair, and misses the point.

Yes, the headline is bad. And yes, Carr is something of a professional contrarian, but he’s asking the right questions, and provoking a discussion that’s not really happening outside of academic circles right now.

If he is a professional contrarian, he’s one I don’t mind having around…

[Update] Carr points to a thoughtful response from Jon Udell.

The Orality of Twitter

I discussed the orality of blogging in a previous post, but, in certain ways, the social media service known as Twitter is something much closer to the world of orality.

Oral cultures distinguish themselves, obviously, with an absence of the written word. Ong, in Orality and Literacy, describes this as trying to “imagine a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything” (p. 31). For oral cultures, phrases such as “look up” or “take a note” or “read through” are empty, as they are visual metaphors, rooted in literacy and writing. Oral cultures center existence within sound – McLuhan’s “ear man.” Spoken language becomes a “mode of action,” bounded with magical qualities; words represent power. Oral cultures rely heavily on mnemonics and formulas to develop memory systems, as knowledge cannot be written down and persisted.

The focus on sound and memory, at the expense of the visual, creates a different kind of sensory configuration within an oral culture. Now, of course, this is not to suggest the tweets on Twitter exist outside of the realm of the visual. And our senses — long trained in the ways of literacy — are nothing like those of a non-literate culture.

But engaging Ong’s intriguing idea of “secondary orality,” how media has the potential to extend us outward (McCluhan’s “global village”), provides something of a theoretical space to consider the “orality” of social media. Ong has stated:

Oral communication is all immediate, in the present. Writing, chirographic or typed, on the other hand, comes out of the past. Even if you write a memo to yourself, when you refer to it, it’s a memo which you wrote a few minutes ago, or maybe two weeks ago. But on a computer network, the recipient can receive what is communicated with no such interval. Although it is not exactly the same as oral communication, the network message from one person to another or others is very rapid and can in effect be in the present. Computerized communication can thus suggest the immediate experience of direct sound. I believe that is why computerized verbalization has been assimilated to secondary ‘orality,’ even when it comes not in oral-aural format but through the eye, and thus is not directly oral at all. Here textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange. To handle [page break] such technologizing of the textualized word, I have tried occasionally to introduce the term ‘secondary literacy.’

Terminology aside, it’s clear Ong was formulating something that connects our communicative and technological present to our oral past. With Twitter, there is a parallel to the world of orality in both the ephemerality and the immediacy of the words spoken from user to user.

Unlike a blog, where every blog post and comment is persisted in a database, tweets, for the most part, come and go. There is no long-term storage of posts in Twitter — services such as Tweet Scan can tease out a couple weeks worth of tweets (see here for my most recent), but something I “said” last year? Not there. The words spoken on Twitter are, by nature of the service itself, ephemeral.

And, of course, that’s not the intention behind Twitter. It’s something more like chat — real-time, less permanent…the immediacy of the technologized word.

This, then, is the orality of Twitter — like the spoken word, fleeting, ephemeral, lingering only in our memory.

The Orality of Blogging

The work of medium theorists, such as Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, has helped awaken us, or, rather, reacquaint us, with our oral past. It is a past that is elusive to those steeped in literacy – Ong, in Orality and Literacy (1982), describes the difficulty trying to “imagine a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything” (p. 31). For oral cultures, phrases such as “look up” or “take a note” or “read through,” phrases which are commonplace and taken for granted today, are empty, as they are visual metaphors, rooted in literacy and writing. Yet the history of oral cultures is rich and extensive, as Ong notes only a fraction of the languages spoken have a literature, and even now, “hundreds of languages in active use are never written at all: no one has worked out an effective way to write them” (p. 7). For oral cultures, speech and sound are primary – this is McLuhan’s “ear man.” In these societies, spoken language becomes a “mode of action,” bounded with magical qualities; words represent power.

Today, even with literacy rates relatively high within American culture, there is a still a lingering oral component within language:

But, in all the wonderful worlds that writing opens, the spoken word still resides and lives. Written texts all have to be related somehow, directly or indirectly, to the world of sound, the natural habitat of language, to yield their meanings. ‘Reading’ a text means converting it to sound, aloud or in the imagination, syllable-by-syllable in slow reading or sketchily in the rapid reading common to high-technology cultures. Writing can never dispense with orality. (Ong, 1982, p. 8)

Similarly, McLuhan (1962) notes for a phonetic alphabet culture, “…there is constant pressure from the subliminal fact that written code carries for the reader the experience of the ‘content’ which is speech” (p. 72). This legacy of our oral past is retained, for example, in culturally significant events, as an officiant who performs a wedding ceremony, a juror who proclaims a defendant’s innocence or guilt, or a President who declares war on another country. Words today are more than simply textual representations of thought; they have preserved the sense of magic and power that was integral to the age of primary orality.

This, then, is the starting point for an examination of the orality of blogging. For the blog is not simply a print medium, not simply textual, but a medium of speech, a collection of conversations (or, in blogger terminology, “comments”) in cyberspace. The words on a blog are more than words; they have power. They represent social acts and practices, and, in this manner, blur the boundaries between the written and oral media spaces within which blogs are situated.

The orality of blogging also creates community. Unlike Putnam’s (1995) bowling metaphor, there is no “blogging alone,” as bloggers, through their conversations, create social bonds in cyberspace. In a similar vein, medium theorists studying oral cultures find that words bring people closer together. Ong (1982) notes the “interiority” of sound, as the spoken word “manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as person, the spoken word forms human being into close-knit groups” (p. 74). For McLuhan (1964), oral man lived in a “seamless web of kinship and interdependence” (p. 50). The world of orality is rooted in sounds, in language, and words that invite participation and community, illustrated here with a post by a Daily Kos blogger:

It turned out that even though I was Wicked Smart, there were others here not only just as smart and aware as I, but some even smarter and more aware than I! I had one convo that went roughly like this. Paraphrased of course…

Me: Well, I disagree!!! I have studied extensively, as an avocation, the way the human brain works.
Other Guy: I am a Neuro-Surgeon
Me: oh.

But I also found PLENTY of folks who were ready and willing to help me…to overlook my ignorance and newness and point me in the right direction to become a productive member of the community. I learned to be a little humble and to listen to those who had been here longer and knew the ropes. Eventually the community accepted me wholeheartedly and gradually I reclaimed my imperious arrogance…..but now molded and modeled to community standards. (buhdydharma, “New Users Guide To DKos”)

If we think of blogging, and perhaps social media in general, in this light, as something more than a textual medium, something closer to our oral past, this opens up many possibilities. If we think of what we do online in terms of “conversations,” then it’s easier to see the social side of these media. Just as, in the real world, what we say and do makes us who we are, what we post, and blog, and create in the virtual world is part of us. While our online interactions are “virtual,” they are real – people are using social media to bond, to explore their identity, to advocate their politics. We’ve even seen the all-too-real downside of social media, with news media reports of cyberbullying, and the sometimes-tragic results.

This idea of orality, and the connection it creates between our non-literate past and our technology-mediated present, helps explain much of why we find social media so very compelling.

Keitai Stories and McLuhan

This morning on the BPP, author Barry Yourgrau was in to discuss his “keitai stories,” an emerging form of fiction specifically written for mobile phones. (Keitai is the Japanese word for mobile phone, and its culture is highlighted in Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs.)

Yourgrau, describing the compact and concise style of writing required to pull these stories off, noted how the simplicity of the form created an engaging experience, as, with its lack of information, the reader needs to use his or her imagination to fill out the narrative.

This lack-of-data-ness is an example of what media theorist Marshall McLuhan called “cold media“:

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.’ High definition is the state of being well-filled with data. . . . Hot media are low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. . . . The hot form excludes, and the cool one includes.

This somewhat arbitrary and long misunderstood concept is still useful when thinking about how media works, especially regarding the participatory impact of the kind of social media we use today. The sparseness of apps like Twitter, constraining users to express their thoughts in 140 characters or less, often results in tweets that are extremely witty and poetic (“tryin to prove something my intuition is telling me“). Similarly, bloggers, who interact pseudonymously, with only their words to create their common bonds, manage to, for example, have a real impact on our politics.

The bare-bones face of social media — a web browser, a cell phone screen — hardly inhibits people from using these sites to interact, and, in some ways, may actually encourage it. Without imagery, without in-person non-verbal cues, we need to engage each other, one tweet at a time.

Yourgrau, over at Huffington Post, quotes a conversation with a friend, and notes a rising concern about this short form and its impact on the literary world:

He echoed the unease expressed by Moto–but had a different take. “Editors and writers in Japan,” said Roland, “are quick to note that keitai novels are not conventional literary novels. They feature shorter sentences, slang, insider references, and fast, easily digestible soap-opera oriented plots, and their characters are usually young, romantic and disenchanted–like the very readers who are buying and downloading them.”

Keitai novels are therefore not considered ‘real novels.’ “And the fear,” said Roland, “is that technology is changing the content, leading it into ruin.”

This echoes a common fear about text messaging, how it is corrupting the English language.

What’s next? Twitter is ruining the art of the conversation?

Old Media Never Die, Part II

To follow on this recent post, two stories of note. First, paper airline tickets are finally a thing of the past, the medium of paper being replaced with bits and bytes. (Of course, Jet Blue has never had anything but e-tickets.) The paper ticket is gone, but “the ticket,” as a concept, moves to digital.

More interestingly, researchers are attempting to capture the world’s quickly-fading oral languages, which are becoming extinct at an astoundingly fast rate, something like one every two weeks:

The researchers, focusing on distinct oral languages, not dialects, interviewed and made recordings of the few remaining speakers of a language and collected basic word lists. The individual projects, some lasting three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of recording speech, developing grammars and preparing children’s readers in the obscure language. The research has concentrated on preserving entire language families.

Over at the National Geographic’s “Enduring Voices” site, there is much more about this effort. And while the Times article doesn’t mention it specifically, I think we can assume that digital technology is being used to record, catalog, and index these dying languages.

Oral cultures can continue to live on, digitally.

Old Media Never Die

Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture, remarks that “old media never die.” Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, has this to say on the matter:

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. Manuscript culture had sustained an oral procedure in education that was called “scholasticism” at its higher levels; but by putting the same text in front of any given number of students or readers print ended the scholastic regime of oral disputation very quickly. Print provided a vast new memory for past writings that made a personal memory inadequate.

Of course, McLuhan was speaking to medium theory’s zoomed out, larger perspective, the “break boundaries” in society that move us from media paradigm to media paradigm. Jenkins’s point is zoomed in: the move from 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs is much smaller in scale.

But perhaps the question today should be posed differently? In the age of participatory culture, it’s not that media is being replaced as it is media being confused: mashed up and remixed, to the point that we don’t know what to make of it. A recent example is “Quarterlife,” a new series debuting on MySpace:

Hollywood has been dipping its toe in original online content. Two seasoned producers are about to take a full plunge.

‘); } //–> Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick — who have made films like “Blood Diamond” and “The Last Samurai” and whose ABC series “Thirtysomething” helped to define television drama in the 1980s — have made a deal with MySpace, the online social network owned by the News Corporation, to produce an original Web series called “Quarterlife.”

Mr. Herskovitz described “Quarterlife” as a regular television series, made by network-caliber writers, directors and production crews…A day after their original MySpace posting, the episodes will be available on quarterlife.com. A week later, they will be generally available on the Web. And, if all goes as planned, they will eventually find their way onto conventional television screens.

What’s becoming apparent is that our need (is “desire” a better word?) to categorize media — this is television, this is Internet — is quickly becoming irrelevant. These boxed-in descriptions of media no longer work, no longer apply. Is Quarterlife television? Online? Both? Neither?

From our vantage point, the impact is not that clear. There’s certainly something happening, some sort of societal change is taking place; whether it’s of the same magnitude as print displacing our memory, as McLuhan notes, I’m not sure…

Spaces such as YouTube and MySpace are essential parts of our participatory culture, and yet Quarterlife is an overt attempt to co-opt some of new media’s democratizing potential. That’s why I’m not so sure — it seems like a power struggle at this point, and it’s not clear who will win.

Quarterlife is simply, “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”