The Spring 2010 issue of The American Scholar has a fascinating pair of articles that each, in their own way, address different aspects of the same fundamental questions that continue to haunt me: the effects of technological change on attention (and I use that phrase as a shorthand for the complex, multi-faceted and multi-directional interplay of technology and a particular sphere of human activity, not as a reference to technological determinism) and what I often call our "creative landscape."
In the first article, "Solitude and Leadership" (actually a lecture given to first year cadets at West Point), William Deresiewicz discusses the necessary– and potentially eroding– skill of concentration. He argues for the necessity of slow, independent thinking, of solitude, of the hard work of thinking things through. He writes:
… that’s the third time I’ve used that word, concentrating. Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube– and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too– are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself.
After noting that "solitude doesn’t have to mean introspection," and that there is a valuable "solitude of concentration," Deresiewicz quotes from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and then elaborates:
"Your own reality– for yourself, not for others." Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people– you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that "he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions."
Parts of the lecture overstate the case– such as when Deresiewicz sharply notes:
This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 "friends" that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.
But it’s well worth your time and, dare I say, concentration.
The second piece– which directly follows Deresiewicz’s article in the print edition– is Sven Birkerts’ "Reading in a Digital Age". As usual, I find Birkerts’ vision of the world alternately insightful and limited (his book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in a Digital Age should be required reading for anyone with an interesting in technology and the written word), but always well-written. I admire Birkerts’ earnest and genuine thinking on the matter, even if there are multiple layers of irony in his early disclaimer when it comes to how he addresses these topics w/r/t his young students who, through their actions, have prompted his own thinking:
I wrap my pronouncements in a preemptive irony. I could not bear to be earnest about the things that matter to me and find them received with that tolerant bemusement I spoke of, that leeway we extend to the beliefs and passions of our elders.
Birkerts’ primary points involve the proposition that we are living in a time in which our facility for imagination/metaphor are on the decline and the necessary skill of contemplation– which we see on display in the form of the novel– is being undermined by the Internet.
Birkerts writes:
Metaphor, the poet, imagination. The whole deeper part of the subject comes into view. What is, for me, behind this sputtering, is my longstanding conviction that imagination—not just the faculty, but what might be called the whole party of the imagination—is endangered, is shrinking faster than Balzac’s wild ass’s skin, which diminished every time its owner made a wish. Imagination, the one feature that connects us with the deeper sources and possibilities of being, thins out every time another digital prosthesis appears and puts another layer of sheathing between ourselves and the essential givens of our existence, making it just that much harder for us to grasp ourselves as part of an ancient continuum. Each time we get another false inkling of agency, another taste of pseudopower.
Reading the Atlantic cover story by Nicholas Carr on the effect of Google (and online behavior in general), I find myself especially fixated on the idea that contemplative thought is endangered. This starts me wondering about the difference between contemplative and analytic thought. The former is intransitive and experiential in its nature, is for itself; the latter is transitive, is goal directed. According to the logic of transitive thought, information is a means, its increments mainly building blocks toward some synthesis or explanation. In that thought-world it’s clearly desirable to have a powerful machine that can gather and sort material in order to isolate the needed facts. But in the other, the contemplative thought-world—where reflection is itself the end, a means of testing and refining the relation to the world, a way of pursuing connection toward more affectively satisfying kinds of illumination, or insight—information is nothing without its contexts. I come to think that contemplation and analysis are not merely two kinds of thinking: they are opposed kinds of thinking. Then I realize that the Internet and the novel are opposites as well.
I find both of these articles intriguing due to the slight spin they put on my own hobby horses. First, framing the discussion in terms of concentration rather than just attention, as I have previously done, and second, considering the activity and effect of the novel as a product of contemplation and how that might be considered opposite the Internet. Food for thought.
