Strategically Communicating

Reading the first chapter of “The Shallow” is a relief. I have to admit I hate reading books. I hate what some books are doing to my brain. I feel they waste my time and energy; what can be said in one page needed a chapter!

But I’m not the only person who hates reading books at least not among Arab people.

Arab individual on average reads a quarter of a page a year compared to eleven books read by an American according to a report released this year by The Arab Thought Foundation’s Fikr . It also said that an average Arab child reads “six minutes” a year in comparison to 12,000 minutes his Western counterpart spends.

The report also said that the minimum average time that youth spend on the Internet is 365 hours a year.

http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/07/14/226290.html

These figures may be frightening to some but I think it’s a promising sign for good change through the use of the Internet as a resource to gain more knowledge and develop social interaction skills.

The Middle East has a high rank of internet and smartphone usage. http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/2012/05/europe-and-middle-east-leading.html

The Arab Spring would not have happened if that fact wasn’t noticed. I can’t count how many books there that talk about the bad conditions and corruption in the Arab countries but none of those books were able to improve  anything.   The internet users, who haven’t read them, make that change.

Is there any book that was able to change people’s way of thinking in the past five years ?
Is social media the new books? 

I was fascinated by the insights “The Shallows” gave into the history of literature. I knew the basics, but didn’t realize, for instance, that syntax and punctuation were a relatively recent addition. I also didn’t realize that words didn’t used to be separated by spaces. “The Shallows” posits that because syntax, punctuation, and word separation didn’t used to exist, people weren’t able to read deeply. Instead, they spent the majority of their energy deciphering what the words actually were, and less time contemplating the deeper meaning of the words.

At first, imagining a world where sentences weren’t structured with punctuation, syntax, and word separation sounded impossible to navigate. But then, I realized that many of our new communications do just that. Texting has all but eliminated punctuation. In a world of 140-character tweets, syntax often gets left behind in favor of fitting everything in. And hashtags have eliminated spaces between words. #havewestoppedthinkingaboutthedeepermeaninginwords?

” Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski, ” Nicholas Carr writes in his book The Shallows. Is it really fair to blame lack of ones attention solely on technology?  I simply don’t believe that’s true. It is not the Internet we need to fear, but the demands of our society. Life in the 21st century, in the west particularly, is about efficiency. It is about accomplishing more in less time. It is this problem that makes us jump from one page to another in search of quick answers so we can get on to the next thing on our list. Therefore, we settle for quantity over quality and with no time for digestion, thorough analysis is out of question. As an example, lets look at this very reading. As a graduated student, I am expected to finish this book in two weeks while also attending to other academic and life obligations. Am I going to scan it or read every page of it? Do I have time to dive deep into the concepts and discourses? While I would love to, I simply don’t have the luxury of time. The shortness of our attention span and our dependency on the Internet is less a problem of cyber take over and more a matter of our society’s intensified hunger for economical “upward mobility”.

So the question is, how do we find the balance?

Carr makes clear in Chapter 4 of The Shallows that we’re such a stimulus-based species it’s actually quite unnatural for us to expect to be good at “deep reading”—In fact, “to read a book was (is) to practice an unnatural process of thought”.   Since “the natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness,” (64) we’re apparently to have learned the “mental discipline” required to focus on printed text.

Prior to writing Imagine, author Jonah Lehrer wrote the New York Times book review of The Shallows.  He summarizes Carr’s position—“The online world has merely exposed the feebleness of human attention, which is so weak that even the most minor temptations are all but impossible to resist,” and then proceeds to disagree—pointing out that the “preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind.”   Lehrer cites studies about increased prefrontal cortex activity and improved visual attention from video games.

What do I care if my prefrontal cortex is firing like the Fourth of July if what’s represented is actually just the technologically evolved devolution of primal hunter/gatherer skills that are fast becoming obsolete?  While I understand that we may be naturally better at the skills Lehrer defends technology for, could it be Carr’s mental discipline that separates us from other species?

While reading the first six chapters of The Shallows; What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, I was struck by Carr’s quote of McLuhan comparing human beings to “the sex organs of the machine world.” The determinist view that humans are meant to continue to create and grow more sophisticated tools and technology until humans are no longer need  is a terrifying thought.

Though this idea is extreme it isn’t unreasonable. From medicine to manufacturing, we are already seeing the role of the human decrease dramatically and the role of machine increase.  With this change comes a lot of opportunity. Below is a clip of Steve Mahan, a blind man who is given personal freedom and opportunity through the Google Self – Driving Car.

This technology is amazing, but does it come with a price? I can’t help but think it won’t be too long until we go from the self – driving car to this…

Okay maybe this is a little dramatic, but it doesn’t seem that far fetched anymore. Will we let it get to this point where technology surpasses humans and is viewed as the ultimate truth? What do you think our world will look like?

In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr writes about the evolution of information distribution in its many forms, noticing shifts in relationships between authors and readers. He points to a Wallace Stevens poem, “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” for its commentary on deep reading, and acknowledges how the Internet has created shorter attention spans, drastically cutting deep reading experiences out of daily routines.

Carr writes, “The bond between book reader and writer has always been a tightly symbiotic one, a means of intellectual and artistic cross-fertilization. The words of the writer act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies” (74). It is interesting to examine how e-books, online newspapers and magazines, Twitter feeds and Facebook posts allow for a layered, non-linear distribution of words, images, and sounds that has turned reading into a community-based, networked system.

While these social spheres can foster intellectual debate, collaboration, and a myriad of back-and-forth exchanges, I wonder if that sacred balance between author and reader has been disrupted.

I have always been drawn to the quiet calmness that books provide, but find myself enmeshed in an online world out of necessity. It is stimulating and informative and engaging…but reading from a screen will never trump the personal satisfaction of being alone with a physical book with nowhere to go but onto the next page.

Do you feel that online reading has diminished individual deep thinking and reflection? Why or why not?

Before writing The Shallows; What the Internet is Doing to our Brains the author Nicholas Carr posed a question in The Atlantic magazine. “Is Google making us Stupid?” he asked. Like many people who now spend a lot of time on the Internet, Carr was once an avid and deep reader who felt himself changing.  “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” he said. 

Besides anecdotal accounts that we all may identify with, Carr references a study from 2007 by the University College of London that examined the online habits of library users. The study, conducted over five years, found that Internet users bounced around a lot amongst pages, but when they did stop, they rarely read more than one or two pages of the site, and they rarely came back to pages they visited.  As a result, the Google Generation,  as they are called, lacks analytical skills necessary to assess the information they find on the Internet, said Information Week.

I believe that the original study conducted in 2007 is sorely out of date since five years has passed and “power browsing” is much higher due to more mobile devices and tablets with Internet capabilities available to information consumers.  The study found back then that “everyone, not just young people, prefers easily digestible chunks of information, rather than the full text, ” and that “Society is dumbing down.” (Information Week) 

Do you think we’re smarter or is society dumbing down?