Pictures, Icons, Headlines, Hypertext, Captions and Images Versus the Printed Word

My last blog post dealt with how the digital age is changing the way we acquire and appreciate music. Matt Allison, Phil and, I think, Sara carried that discussion into the issue of how the web is changing our relationship to books and print media. Over the two months since that discussion I've been particularly tuned into cultural commentary on the issues surrounding the intersection of print culture and the emerging digital age. I've been considering the plausibility of claims that the stimuli of the emerging visual/digital age is perhaps inferior to the act of earnest reading of good books. Without doing any focused research, I've happened across quite a bit of discussion on this subject in my usual media perusing. Below are highlights I've excerpted from magazine articles, podcast programs, radio programs and books. The first is taken from the cover story of the July/ August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, titled "Is Google Making us Stupid?"

"Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory," writes Nicholas Carr. "My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

Carr makes some provocative claims in his piece, many of which I was ready to take as legitimate without much qualification. But if Carr's premise tends toward the sensational--he makes several references to HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey as a cautionary example of where our web-based artificial intelligence might be taking us--Dana Gioia's arguments for the detrimental effects increased internet use might be having on our minds seem grounded in more rigorous research. Gioia, the director of the National Endowment for the Arts, has spent the past four years conducting extensive research on the decline in reading among Americans. Gioia's research has been particularly interested in how infrequent readers, who use the internet on a regular basis, are weakening some of their minds' most vital cognitive functions.

In a recent "Mars Hill Audio Journal" segment host Ken Myers comments on the NEA's report, discusses its findings with Gioia, and also quotes a blog entry by Japanese visual artist Makoto Fujimura written in response to the implications of those findings.

"The report documents a disturbing decline in reading habits of Americans over the past twenty years or so," says Myers. "Some cultural observers have suggested that this decline in reading is evidence of a broader loss of interest in verbal communication due to the fact that we're now much more adept at visual communication."

Commenting on what Myers calls an "alleged verbal/ visual tradeoff," Fujimura says "some, I am sure, will point out that the mode of communication has shifted from the antiquated print culture to our current internet society. Now we have a visual culture and are taking in information differently. But taking in mere information does not mean we are deeply engaged with the content. We may be able to scan for multifarious sensory input, and gather unreliable but perhaps important bits and pieces in our junkyard of amassed headlines, but the type of mental wrestling that reading a good book brings are irreplaceable."

"The internet," says Gioia, "is without question the most powerful informational technology that's been invented since the phonetic alphabet. The problem is that what the internet seems to do, judging from our data, is give you information in pictures, captions, headlines, icons--pieces of information. It's clear that what reading does is something different.

I think it has at least two enormous impacts. First of all, reading requires sustained, focused attention. The development of a line of information across a great span of time-- ten minutes, a half hour, an hour-- which allows you to convey information of complexity or interrelatedness that would be very difficult in a more atomized medium. Secondly, since reading does not give you the image, the background music, these things that film, television, and increasingly the internet does, it requires you to use your memory, your imagination. So it develops a sense of creativity and (I think this is the crucial element) a degree of inner life that does not seem to come from the other media as powerfully.

Now this is a bold claim, but I would maintain that every other piece of data in this report suggests that this hypothesis is accurate. Whey else would people who read volunteer at nearly four times the rate of people who don't read? Why would the poorest people in America who don't read do volunteer work at twice the level of the richest people who don't read? Why do readers vote more? Why do readers become invovled in almost every type of civic and social activity at a higher level than people who simply watch television and go to the internet?

Now the interesting thing is that people who read do absolutely everything that people who don't read do. They watch TV, they play video games, they go to the internet, they listen to radio, but they balance those things, and they read. They also seem to have more human time in a funny way than non-readers. It's interesting, we have a lot of data that just shows you that somehow reading awakens you not only to a deeper sense of yourself, but to a deeper sense of the reality of other people's lives.

Spending nearly four years working through this data, I have fundamentally changed my own opinions of reading. I would have thought early on that reading was a largely private and personal activity, something that was very important for nourishing your innner life, developing ideas, or maybe increading your sense of your own individuality. It is now absolutely clear to me that while all of that is true, that's only half the picture.

Reading is actually an enormously powerful social activity that tends to, by awakening a bigger sense of your individuality and your individual destiny, also encourages you to link with other people. For example, a novel, by meditating on the daily existence of another fictional person in their quotidian existence--socially, psychologically, economically, in terms of their race and gender and social class--gives you the imaginative ability to make a sympathetic projection into the reality of someone else's life. That changes your relationship to other people forever. There's a great awakening, almost a religious experience, that happens in people's imaginations."

Robert Harrison, in his program "Entitled Opinions," broadcast live from Stanford's KZSU, claims that "the act of reading makes the same sorts of demands on us that life does, namely to make sense of things where any number of meanings are possible, and where final meaning is lacking. How can we presume to know ourselves if we don't know how to read? I mean read carefully, complexly, alertly, with the lightfootedness of the dancer instead of the heavy plod of the logician?

We live in an age that hates ambiguity and militates against uncertainty. The more complex the world becomes the more we seek out easy simplifications. We want a clear distinction between good and evil. We want to judge before we understand. Literature doesn't let us get away with that, at least not when we meet it on its own terms.

I think it's because we're so much in favor of anything that reduces and simplifies that so many of us these days prefer movies to books. The difference between a book and a movie is the difference between a cube and a square. If you cast a light on a cube and project its shadow on the wall, you reduce it from a three dimensional object to a two dimensional square. While the square is comprehensible from the perspective of the cube, the reverse is not true. The square cannot comperehend the cube's third dimension.

The same applies to books and movies. Movies, for the most part, take the cube of literature and project it onto a screen where it becomes a square. And we sit there in the projection hall, like Plato's prisoners in their cave watching shadows flicker across the screen, and we're content with the show. Literature, which gets inside our heads, is sometimes too three dimensional for us."

C.S. Lewis, in his essay "On Stories," points out how "Mr. Roger Lancelyn Green, writing in English...remarked that the reading of Rider Haggard had been to many a sort of religious experience. To some people this will have seemed simply grotesque. I myself would strongly disagree with it if 'religious' is taken to mean 'Christian.' And even if we take it in a sub-Christian sense, it would have been safer to say that such people had first met in Haggard's romances elements which they would meet again in religious experience if they ever came to have any. But I think Mr. Green is very much nearer the mark than those who assume that no one has ever read the romances except in order to be thrilled by hair-breadth escapes. If he had said simply that something which the educated receive from poetry can reach the masses through stories of adventure, and almost in no other way, then I think he would have been right. If so, nnothing can be more disastrous than the view that the cinema can and should replace popular written fiction. The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world. There is death in the cinema."

Ammon Shea, interviewed on NPR's "Morning Edition" last Friday, took a year recently to read the entire Oxford English Dictionary--all six volumes. Shea, saddened by the feeling he gets when finishing a good book, decided to read a book that promised to hold out its ending for twenty-one thousand, seven hundred thirty pages.

"It was such a moving experience," he says, "It felt very similar to reading a great work of literature, coming across these great English words hidden in the depths of the English language. One thing that I find so interesting about coming across these forgotten words is that I'll think about the thing they describe more often....For instance, the beautiful word 'petracore,' which describes a sort of warm lonely smell that comes off the pavement when it first rains. I've always loved that smell when it first starts raining. I don't talk about it quite as much, but I think about it often when I come across that gentle smell wafting off the ground."

When asked if he ever thought of buying the OED on CD-Rom and reading it on the computer, Shea replies: "I did try to read straight through the OED online, however I just felt physically ill. A large part of the appeal of this project was just that I love reading, the tactile sensation of turning one page to the next and feeling my fingers across them; I love feeling the weight of the book in my lap; I like the way the books smell, that's a huge part of it. In fact, the first thing I do with a new book is I like to open it up and take a sniff of the pages. These are all sensations you can get from a book that you can't get from a computer."