MATTHEW  ISOM

 

 

I believe that what distinguishes us as a species is not our technological prowess, but rather our extraordinary ability to confer meaning on our experience and to search for clues about our purpose from the world around us

                                                                                                                                         --Sven Birkerts

 

 

 

           In 1992, while he was teaching at a small liberal arts college in New England, Sven Birkerts came to the realization that technology is radically altering the way that we experience life. He doesn’t just mean that life experiences--the things we do--were and are changing. What Birkerts is talking about is much more fundamental than that. It is the experience of living that is changing for the worse--what it means to be a human being is shifting

This realization came to him during a class discussion wherein he felt dismayed that students hadn’t appreciated the 18th and 19th Century short-stories they had read, in particular, the introspective prose of Henry James. Throughout the 20 previous years classes had dynamically discussed the ideas in these stories, with some waning in the few years prior to 1992. When the students were asked if they had struggled with the vocabulary or had gotten lost in the plot, the answer was “no” on both counts. Their reply was, “It was just the whole thing.” Then the epiphany hit him: “These students were entirely defeated by James’s prose--the medium of it” (Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies--the Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age,1994, p. 18). As he explains, “They were especially uncomfortable with indirect or interior passages, indeed with any deviations from straight plot” (p. 19).

          Birkerts cites the plot-driven nature of movies, and videogames as one of the reasons that people now have a difficult time immersing themselves in novels. The problem for Birkerts college students is that novels require the reader to get into the mind of characters and to follow the author’s ideas concerning the characters’ experiences, and they aren’t accustomed to doing that kind of thinking now that technology has permeated everyday life.  In addition to the negative influence of plot-driven movies and video games, Birkerts points to the fragmented and the non-introspective nature of reading on the Internet as a force that has changed the way that people read. The crux of Birkerts’ argument is that as our society moves away from contemplative reading of literature, we as a people lose an essential, even a critical source of meaning in our lives.

          The reason that there is so much discussion about the effect of technology on the quality of life is that the way we do things now has changed so dramatically. The amount of leisure reading has decreased 30% for those 14 to 45 years of age (Bauerlein, 2009, The Dumbest Generation); people interact with others on a much more frequent basis, sharing far more ideas than they used to; people use technology to create and share things; and most people no longer do research in libraries, but do it on the Internet instead, where reliability of sources is questionable. The list goes on, and it is as long as it is significant.

          Many people feel that these changes have been very detrimental. Sven Birkerts, in particular, feels that we are losing our ability to find meaning in our modern world. Nicholas Carr agrees, saying in his book The Shallows--What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2010) that when the nature of communication becomes fragmented, we lose depth of ideas in our pursuit of mere facts and shallow communication. Neil Postman makes similar arguments in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1995), as does Mark Bauerlein in his unamiguously titled The Dumbest Generation (2009).

          Other thinkers, most of them born a decade later than the aforementioned experts, see the positive side of change and argue that the quality of life has changed for the better. Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You (2005) posits that technology and its accompanying frenetic thinking style has actually increased our ability to problem solve, and that as we do so, we find a new level of meaning. Clay Shirky focuses more on the opportunity and means that the Internet gives people to become participants on the stage of life rather than merely being passive observers.

          To a degree, both sides are right. Clearly, life has changed--no one can argue with that. Even Johnson admits that he has to use a book to make his point that books are overrated, and Birkerts sheepishly states that he has to use computers and the Internet to get his books published. The coming of the Digital Age changed life for all of us. Quite likely we have lost a portion of the reflective life that gives us insight into the human condition. Conversely, changes in the ways we interact and participate in life have given us the opportunity to find new levels of meaning and have bettered the lives that we live.

          In his book Man’s Search for Meaning (1959), Victor Frankl says that the ultimate driving force for mankind is the longing to find a meaningful life and that this drives most everything we do. Contrary to what is commonly thought, people are not, in Frankl’s view, primarily driven by a hunger for power (Nietzsche’s Will to Power), or Freud’s concept of libido. Rather, we are driven by our  quest to make our lives meaningful and this directs what we do and, more importantly, how we understand and feel about the lives we lead. The question is, what kinds of activities contribute to the meaningful life.

          Typical lists of ways to find meaning tend to fall into two camps. The first has to do with doing things of significance that make us happy, and the second has to do with rising above the goings on of this world, often doing less but feeling more. The first group includes activities like spending quality time with family and friends, taking risks, finding meaningful work, creating things you’re proud of (often collaborating with others) and performing acts of service. The second group deals with the inner life and includes things like letting go of material possessions, leading a less complicated and frenetic life, meditating and listening to your inner voice, viewing others with compassion, and generally finding a higher, spiritual way of living that gives purpose to life. Those who argue that technology has diminished the level of meaning we have in our lives base their ideas on the values of this second way of finding meaning. Birkerts’ idea that technological media have diminished our level of understanding of life is firmly placed in this camp.

          Literature is about getting into the thoughts of a character in the hope that you will find something more in life, some insight into the big picture. In Birkerts’ words, “What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny, [that] God or no God, life has a unitary pattern inscribed within it” (Birkerts, 1994, p. 85). In short, reading helps people form a “conception of the individual and his relation to the world” (p. 15). Even Johnson acknowledges that the type of reading one does on the Internet has profound limitations. He says, “You can convey attitudes and connections in the online world with ease; you can brainstorm with twenty strangers in a way that would have been unthinkable just ten years ago. But it is harder to transmit a fully fledged worldview.” For this, he continues, you must “immerse yourself in a book [where] you enter the author’s mind and peer out at the world through their eyes” (Johnson, 2005, p. 186).

          In Birkerts example of his students who could not follow an author’s subtle and complex points in a work of literature, we see that society is, to an extent, losing an aspect of deeper meaning in life. As he says, “The point is that the collective experience of these students, most of whom were born in the early 1970’s, has rendered a vast part of our cultural heritage utterly alien. That is the breaking point.” He continues, “What is at issue is not diction, not syntax, but everything that diction and syntax serve. Which is to say, an entire system of beliefs, values, and cultural aspirations” (p. 19). In short, worldview is diminished and cultural identity is compromised. And if a significant part of what it is to be human was being lost for 19 year-olds in Birkerts’ class in 1992, how much more severe is the problem now that those people’s children are beginning to enter college twenty years later?

          Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows--What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2010), agrees that technological media are diminishing people’s understanding of life. For Carr, one of the most damaging aspects of the Internet is the way that it demands to be read--in little bits and pieces. He quotes Dr. Bruce Friedman who says, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print” (p. 7). Carr elaborates saying that “his thinking has taken on a staccato quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. Friedman’s concluding comments are, “I can’t read War and Peace anymore. I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it” (p. 7). If it is true that a worldview can only be transmitted through sustained reading and concentrated effort, it appears that members of modern society will not be have the same overarching understanding of “the way things are” that their predecessors did. And to Birkerts that means that we will lose our understanding of the “organic relation” mankind has to his world wherein everything is “surrounded by an aura of importance [and] actions and decisions are felt to count for something” (Birkerts, 1994, p. 19).

          As early as 1985, Neil Postman sensed that our society was losing its interest in the type of deep thinking that leads to understanding of issues concerning mankind. He felt that whereas in the Walter Cronkite era news dealt with discussion and development of ideas, “beginning around 1980 news agencies decided to focus more on entertainment than ideas. Postman illustrates this in a chilling example of a news program dedicated to discussing the movie The Day After (1983) which caused a national uproar. The movie was too real to life for a country still not quite out of Cold War paranoia. The IMDB.com plot summary reads thus: “The Russians use a nuclear ballistic missile against a West German city, and then attack a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf. The Americans strike back by hitting a Soviet ship, and then the Russians hit NATO regional headquarters with a nuclear warhead” (IMDB.com, 2013). ABC felt that the ideas in this plot were so frightening that the American public needed some serious news coverage to ease the collective national anxiety. Thus, they dedicated a special broadcast with the best spokesmen they could find to cover key perspectives on the issue: Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, General Snowcroft, William Buckley, and Elie Weisel. Ted Koppel moderated the discussion.

          Postman did not see much discussion, however. In his eyes, the program, although ostensibly a serious attempt to help the American public, was ultimately unsuccessful because it was set up to be more entertainment than informed discussion. In Postman’s words, “There was no discussion as we normally use the word. Even when the ‘discussion’ period began, there were no arguments or counterarguments, no scrutiny of assumptions, no explanations, no elaborations, no definitions” (Postman, 1985, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 90).  Postman goes on to explain why it is that a TV broadcast by America’s greatest minds was unable to be anywhere nearly as meaningful as a written article covering their ideas would have been. Postman says “It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business” (p. 92).  Postman’s point here (and the point of the book as a whole) is that our society has given up depth of thought and meaningful discourse for the titillation of entertainment. And, as he says in the forward to his book, it is not the dangers of an Orwellian society that we need to fear, but those of Huxley’s Brave New World. “In Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think” (p. xix).

          Many people do not see things as Birkerts, Carr, and Postman do. More contemporary thinkers feel that technology brings a new level of meaning to our lives. This type of meaning is not found while sitting alone in an armchair in front of a fire with a thought-provoking book or thinking about what Elie Weisl is saying to Henry Kissinger. It is participatory. Of the meaningful life, Clay Shirky says, “To participate is to act as if your presence matters” (Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 2010, p. 21). Coupling this idea with one of Steven Johnson’s, we see a more contemporary view of meaning coming from participation with others. Johnson says that the driving force for humanity is to “project your identity onto a place to work through the story of your life as it unfolds” (Johnson, 2005, p. 119). For Birkerts the place is an interior one, within the mind as the reader attempts to understand and envision a better life, assuming that he is not perfect but that he can come in touch with the “big picture” through reading. This is in keeping with the second way of finding meaning in life. For Shirky and Johnson, the “place to work through the story of your life” is literal, or as literal as a Facebook interaction or sharing of products such as the famed Shareware product the Linux operating system. In this place people do things more than they ponder them. They are active participants.

          Interestingly, although Shirky, Johnson and Birkerts et al. feel that the ultimate need and driving force for people is to feel that their lives have meaning, these two groups view the influence of technology in diametrically opposed ways. In particular, their views of the changes in modern man’s approach to reading are different. Birkerts feels that when people, as a society, stop reading literature their lives lose a great deal of meaning. Shirky and Johnson see little loss in the change if it leads people to more active intellectual lives (and in fact Shirky once said, most likely in partial jest, that "No one reads War and Peace . . . it's too long, and not so interesting [and people have] increasingly decided that Tolstoy's sacred work isn't actually worth the time it takes to read it)". The fundamental difference between these two camps lies in what the meaningful life is. For Birkerts, it comes through reflective, deep thought which wanes when mankind stops reading books. This loss isn’t as simple as missing out on the opportunity for an afternoon’s deep discussion of a book in a college course; what is lost is an essential aspect of what it is to be human. In Birkerts’ words, “How it is that the world greets the senses differently--is experienced differently [and] how the feeling of life has changed” (Birkerts, 1994, p. 21). Shirky completely disagrees as he views the new approach to making a meaningful life one of action, interconnection, and production.

          To better understand what Shirky is talking about, it is helpful to look at a comment made by Postman wherein he says, “How often does it occur that information provided you on the morning news, or in the morning newspaper [or in Yahoo News] causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or  provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?” (Postman, p. 68). Shirky says that it happens all the time, and that TV and the Internet are completely different media as far as the participatory life goes. Whereas many people see time spent on the Internet in the same terms as time spent on TV--a passive waste of time as they “surf” the Net--Shirky feels the opposite. He suggests that the Internet invites people to participate in life, to “take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve” (Shirky, 2010, p. 21). Thus, Shirky’s view of the Internet, it is almost a word for word negation of what Postman saw in the medium of TV.

          Shirky gives numerous examples of people of all ages taking action they would not have been able to take in pre-Internet days, and finding greater meaning in life as they do so. None is better than his example of the Grobanites. Just as the name sounds, the Grobanites are “groupies” who follow the wildly popular singer Josh Groban, attending his concerts, talking about him on Facebook, and even banding together to buy him birthday presents. And it was a birthday present for Groban that kick started what has now become a truly significant charitable organization known as Grobanites for Charity. The idea for the charity sprang from a discussion group wherein a Grobanite named Julie Clarke “suggested passing the hat and making a charitable donation in his name” as a gift for a multi-millionaire who has everything money can buy.

          The Grobanites (mostly teenage girls) were able to contact one another (they were “friends” in the Facebook sense, two full years before Facebook was founded) and collect over one thousand dollars. Groban was delighted, and the girls, encouraged by the success of their endeavor, made another donation for his next birthday. This time they started off by hosting an online charity auction and an amateurish website set up by a nineteen-year-old girl. As Shirky puts it, “They raised $16,000 in a few days--an order of magnitude more than they’d raised for any other event. Then they had another auction. And another. Over the course of a year, they raised $75,000 . . .” (Shirky, 2010, p. 67).  This was Groban’s birthday present the following year.

          Soon the power of social networking sites enabled multitudes of Grobanite girls to eagerly talk among themselves about an issue they felt passionate about. Instead of being passive automatons passively sitting in front of the TV watching reruns of sitcoms, these girls were spending their free time doing something to make a difference. The thrill of making a difference in the world spurred on the Grobanites and they founded Grobanites for Africa, which fights poverty and the effects of AIDS. Many other causes were founded as well, and as of 2012, the Grobanites had raised over $1,000,000, 100 percent of which was donated to charities. 30 years ago teenagers would never have been able to perform this kind of meaningful service. Even 15 years ago they wouldn’t have. What made this possible? It is the very thing that Nicholas Carr says is making the rising generation shallow--the Internet. The Internet is able to do this because it connects like-minded people in ways that were never possible before. In 1990 groupies like the Grobanites might  have met in the school cafeteria--10 or so students in all--but they wouldn’t have had the critical mass to raise significant amounts of money for a cause. The Internet, however, “gave them an environment to solicit like-minded Grobanites” (p. 69)--huge numbers of them. Why is it that a huge group of teenagers would want to go to take the time and effort (and even donate money) for a non-paying cause is difficult for many people to understand. Our society has spent so many decades asking the question “What’s in it for me?” that it is difficult for most to understand why people would spend hours doing work for free when they could be putting in the same amount of effort and make hefty sums of money for themselves.

          Part of the answer lies in the fact that people like Grobanites don’t view what they do as “work”--it’s considered fun. It’s rewarding to them because it is a meaningful activity. Shirky says that a few other principles underlie the success of ventures like Grobanites for Charity. These reasons are connected with the types of things that typically bring meaning into people’s lives. Shirky says that people long to feel competent, that they can be successful even though much of the world might not see them as such. Grobanites can feel successful if they can convince a few other people to donate to their cause. In fact, they can feel successful even if they only post a link to the Grobanites for Charity site on Facebook and have people join it, comment on it, or even just “like” it, to use the Facebook term. Thus, these teenagers can find the satisfaction of actively doing something to find meaning. They might not spend nearly as much time reading as Birkerts, Carr, and Bauerlein would like, and so they likely lose some of the understanding of the human condition (what Johnson calls the worldview that is best conveyed in books). One has to wonder, though, if perhaps a very deep (maybe deeper) understanding of compassion and life purpose might be gained by actually performing acts of service rather than simply learning about it.

          Numerous other examples abound of people using the Internet to change the world. A website called “PatientsLikeMe.com gives millions of people the chance to share with others the things that their doctors have told them about their particular diseases. In Shirky’s example patients suffering from a rare form of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) are able to bring together substantial amounts of data and medical opinions that would have otherwise been impossible (not just difficult) for even doctors to find in pre-Internet days (Shirky, 2010, p. 156). In another example, when four fanatical Islamist suicide bombers coordinated an attack on the London metro, “[w]ithin minutes of the bombs going off in the London transit system, someone created a Wikipedia page . . . [and] the page received more than a thousand edits in its first four hours of existence as additional news came in [and] users added number pointers to traditional news sources” (Shirky, 2008, Here Comes Everybody, p. 117). In this example, as in countless others since, the contributions of what was previously referred to as “the common man” gave society more up to date news and in some cases more subjective and insightful news coverage than would have been available otherwise.

As a final example, when violence erupted during the aftermath of a rigged election in Kenya in 2007, one person named Ory Okolloh was able to start a blog to document what was happening, a blog that ended out lessening the violence inflicted by the government upon its citizens. When she invited others to post comments, photos, and videos of violence on her blog, the government realized that the whole world was now watching and the suffering of the people lessened (Shirky, 2010, p. 18). Clearly, the people in all of these examples improved the quality of life for countless others and, in so doing, found a greater sense of meaning in their own lives.

          Has our society lost its ability to find meaning in life, or has it gained an element of meaning? For those who do not read, perhaps Birkerts is right and they have lost some of their understanding of what it means to work through the human drama, understanding what life means. He says that “[t]he soul needs silence, time, and concentration--precisely what is required by the counter-technology of the book” (Birkerts, 1994, p. xv). Doubtless, society has become busier and filled with more distractions as we frequently check text messages, Facebook, and other electronic communication. And this has damaged our ability to reflect while sitting, say, at the edge of Walden Pond. At the same time, another depth of meaning has been added for people who use technology, even Facebook, to connect with fellow human beings, sometimes in acts of profound and life-altering service. Those who still choose to read challenging works of literature like War and Peace can find the depth of meaning that Sven Birkerts talks about. And those who use technology to make their mark felt on the world, even if it’s simply posting a thought-provoking link on Facebook, gain a sense of meaning. And if they actively participate in causes like Ushahidi, PatientsLikeMe, or the Grobanites, they can find a great sense of meaning.

           Let me conclude by sharing a thought experiment concocted by Steven Johnson. Although it was written with a sense levity, it hits upon a truth concerning media and their limitations as well as their strengths. He invokes Marshall McCluhan saying “the problem with judging new cultural systems on their own terms is that the presence of the recent past inevitably colors your vision of the emerging form, highlighting the flaws and imperfections” (Johnson, 2005, p. 18). He goes on to say,

           “Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: video games [and the Internet] were invented and popularized before books . . . what would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say abut this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this: Reading books chronically understimulates the senses . . . books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices. Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interacting with other children . . . But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion--you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one” (Johnson, p. 21).

           Thus, it is easy for the older generation to look at the new digital technologies of the Internet and the cell phone in terms of ways that they might threaten the quality of life. And they give little thought to the idea that the new technology could offer true benefits to society, let alone life-changing benefits. Similarly, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, for those who have grown up with the new technology to imagine that they are missing a life enhancing opportunity. Most likely most of them are, but still a significant number of them read many challenging works of literature and gain the enlightenment and understanding that Birkerts is talking about. And at the same time, these readers now have the added benefit of new levels of meaning that can be found in the participatory culture of the New Millennium. In the final analysis, we have to ask ourselves how the changes brought about by the Technological Revolution have benefited the common man. And the common has left his position in front of the television and has connected with the world that opened up at the dawning of the New Millennium. Just how much he will make his mark on the world remains to be seen.

 

 

References:

 

Bauerlein, M. (2009).  The dumbest generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future. New York, NY: Penguin.

           

Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. New York, NY: Norton & Company.

 

Johnson, S. (2005). Everything bad is good for you: How today’s popular culture is actually making us smarter.

New York, NY: Penguin

 

Postman, N (1985). Amusing ourselves to death—Public discourse in the age of show business.

New York, NY: Penguin

 

Shirkey, C. (2010). Cognitive surplus--How technology makes consumers intocollaborators. New York, NY: Penguin