Very nice to be back on the book-reviewing routine for Boyd Tonkin, the Independent's book editor.
Here's my joint review (unedited version below - printed version here) of two books which thoroughly cover the waterfront of digital culture, but in two entirely differing moods - Nicholas Carr brooding about the net's neurological destruction of our deep reading and attention spans, and Palfrey and Gasser much more enthusiastic charters of the variety of internet usage and culture.
The Independent, Arts and Books section, 24 Sept, 2010
Pat Kane
Google announced a new refinement to its search engine last week, called 'Google Instant'. For those of a certain literary era, just beginning to get used to having a Borgesian library at their fingertips, it may prove a drop-down window too far.
Put in "po", on the way to completing the word "poetry", and the company tries to instantly guess what you're looking for - anything from "P&O ferries" to "poundland" to "Pontins". Until you get used to it (and you do), the experience feels a little insane: the spewing-forth of some vast language machine, using Burroughsian cut-up or Joycean word-association as a way-station to that elusive Jamie Oliver Elvisburger recipe.
Nicholas Carr cites this as exactly the kind of scattering of attention, and devolving of mental rigour, that we should be exceedingly alert to in our cyberculture. Described in some American reviews as the 'Silent Spring' of cyberculture, Nicholas Carr's new book attempts to put some scientific and humanistic substance into the headline claim that the internet is, literally, rotting our brains.
But whereas Born Digital is a diligent attempt to chart the digital lifestyle of Millenials, The Shallows is an impressively assembled but ultimately misguided broadside from a former tech-head and business editor. Who, I fear, might be mistaking a subjective midlife crisis for an objective paradigm shift.
Carr's psychological charge against the Net is simply put. The excess of possibilities that an average web page gives us, the way it crowds our short-term memory with scores of relatively inconsequential choices, is reverting us to our earliest human state. The average click-fest in front of our networked screens makes us into twitchy hunter-gatherers: that same propensity to be easily distracted – which saved our haunches from slavering predators on the savannah - is that which makes the hotlink and the Flash animation so compelling. Depth of thought is being sacrificed to our nervy addiction to interaction.
As is the way with evolutionary accounts of the human mind - at the very least, this is not yet a settled science - there are other explanations available. As Carr says, the dynamism of the internet has recapitulated centuries of media change over its brief 15 years. But if we need a socio-biological root for the pervasive, explosive take-up of this medium, there's a survival trait that's just as credible as our distractedness on the paleolithic plains. And that's our playful natures.
The moment of play in human (and higher mammalian) development is almost exactly homologous with the internet itself. Both allow organisms to freely and joyfully act; they create spaces for play that are open, robustly structured but distantly monitored. And both provide a mess of usable materials, by which players can test and explore both themselves and the world.
From this perspective, Carr has been cherry-picking the neuroscience to suit his neo-Presbyterian prejudice. Research also point to the “neoteny” of our brains, a perpetual youthfulness of response, which under the right conditions of surplus and security, can evade all habit and fixed behaviours – stretching way beyond the glorious, growing splurge of childhood into adulthood.
So if you zoom back a little on the internet, putting its daily churn of twinkly adaptations into perspective, it comes to look more like a glorious amplification of the creative plenitude of human nature, rather than a shallowing of our minds. Born Digital might not have the pop-science ambition of The Shallows, but it benefits from at least trying to map the fulsome diversity of lifestyles, enterprises and dilemmas that net culture generates.
Carr's mistake here is that he mistakes second-order questions about the internet for first-order questions: he raises matters of cultural etiquette to the level of species-being. For example, a well-aimed web search produces as much synoptic intellectual excitement as the inquiring student's first scan of the periodicals shelf, or the titles in a university bookshop – and this is surely no surprise, given the scholarly foundation of the internet protocol itself by CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee.
Whereas Carr cites research that seems to show academic references narrowing in the internet age, we can all turn to those ideas-portal sites - not just Wikipedia, but John Brockman's Edge.org, or Bookforum's Omnivore – which demonstrate an alternative possibility: that is, the efficient opening-up of the sequestered resources of the academy for public use.
Indeed, you find yourself applying the same principle of independent-mindedness about the web, that Carr describes as a consequence of the “deep reading” available from literature. You have to keep asserting your own positive, privately-gathered experiences, in the face of his too-neatly-marshalled neurological case.
Carr may be genuinely worried about the internet turning us all into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social and intellectual nourishment”. But I think he would do better to defend its textual and dialogical potentials, and focus his anxiety a lot more on the crude game-ifying of cyberspace - the addictions and peer suscepitibility that 'casual games' like Farmville tap into.
I know that gamer auteurs and designers are fighting this tendency, appealing to the better avatars of our nature. Carr takes a huge risk in conflating a trashy stage in the development of games culture with the essentially Enlightenment powers of the open Net. He should be more careful about what he wishes for.
Carr makes a half-point that the business model of the 'free' web - you get it for nothing, if we can capture your behaviour and sell it to advertisers - depends on the relentless interactivity of every web page. But there are armies of authors from many disciplines who say that what this intrusive click-commerce proves is actually the dot-communism of the net.
To the continuing embarassment of many, we seem to have inadvertently built a working socialist infrastructure out of code and computers, guided by the principle “from each according to their ability and to each according to their need” - and whose exemple is inspiring social change in many other non-digital areas. Again, Born Digital is more satisfyingly comprehensive here, in its coverage of the social and civic movements enabled by the Net.
Upon this commons, say writers like Antonio Negri and Yochai Benkler, capital is at best a parasitic mould, and at worst now an antagonistic subverter. See the alliances now between Google (formerly 'doing no evil'), Verizon and other major communication corporations, all of whom want to stratify the speed of the net according to your ability to pay.
Carr's undoubted fluency as a public intellectual has led him up a strange, sylvan path. What he should be doing is defending the liberal openness of public networks (the “net neutrality” issue). Instead, he's thumping his leather-clad classics against his palm, deep in the forests of his new Colorado home. Carr closes his screed by citing that dodgy old purist Martin Heidegger on the “frenziedness of technology...entrenching itself everywhere”. Heidegger: never a good moment in the old quotation game.
I saw Nicholas Carr at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where net evangelists and sceptics were both happy to swarm around a Georgian architectural utopia from am to pm, joining in the general unstoppable proliferation of book festivals across the islands. I didn't see much twittering, but all the speeches were podcasted for future enjoyment, and the local literary blogosphere was vibrantly a-hum. As those born digital might say: Whatever. It's all good.
So nothing to worry about, because plenty to worry away at, like the inescapably semiotic mammals we are. As the dearly departed Scottish national makar (or poet) Edwin Morgan would have said, there's “nothing not giving messages”. It's a shame that Nick Carr seems to be so tired of the carnival of communication, whether it comes as inert wood-pulp-and-ink, or flickering glass and plastic.
And as for the cluttered web page inhibiting our reading? I just saw a button in my browser called 'Reader', which turns a busy site into an elegant screen-full of Times New Roman. You have to admit: as an infernal desire machine, the Net always seems to be on permanent 'recieve'. They'll give us the Google Dilatory option, eventually.
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