The Blind Giant (13 page)

Indeed, the development of the modern mind – and perhaps even our modern concept of individuality – can in some ways be seen as starting with the written word. Abstracted thought, reflected in the new medium of letters, is one of the defining characteristics of the world we inhabit today. And, as you will know if you’ve seen a showman memorize a deck of cards in a few seconds or heard an imam who does not speak Qur’anic Arabic recite the Qur’an from memory, we can still learn the trick of extreme memorization. One way to do it with a deck of cards is to make a narrative out of the numbers and images as they pass by, telling a memorable story rather than trying to retain a random slew of numbers. (In the case of the Qur’an, Islamic tradition holds that the language is so perfect, proceeding directly from the divinity, that the verses are uniquely memorable and impossible to counterfeit.)

The ability of the brain to acquire new skills is phenomenal, but
neuroplasticity is not exclusively a blessing. It’s also the key to any number of bad habits, bad personality traits and some addictions, and – like technology itself – it’s subject to a sort of lock-in, where pathways become so well-trodden as to be hard to vary. (That said, even the most ingrained habits can ultimately be overcome and replaced with new ones.) The fear expressed by critics is that long periods of time using computers will cause the brain to adapt itself to the demands of the digital world rather than the real one – or, I suppose, rather than the one that is not inherently structured around digital technology. Instead of
learning to respond to cues from face-to-face interactions, people will become used to dealing with text: a profound distinction, as sense inputs are handled in a different area of the brain from cognitive skills. More, human interactions until now have featured enormous amounts of tacit communication in the form of body language, tone, eyeline and even scent. There’s a great deal going on that is not conveyed by the technology we have now, which is why online poker players do not generally make the transition to the in-person gaming table without some problems: the in-the-flesh game is more about tells and giveaways, subtle personal indicators of confidence or bluff, than it is about knowing the odds.

Furthermore, runs the objection, digital interactions require – and hence promote – different mental skills; in general, memory is less important (Socrates would not approve) because information can be cached, searched and recalled in the machine. Nicholas Carr makes reference to a scene from the life of Johnson, where the good doctor identified two types of
knowledge: ‘We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.’ What interests me here is the definition of the first sort of knowing. Conventionally, in the traditional textual way of learning, we learn, if not by rote, by acceptance of authority. We acknowledge the primacy of the teacher and take in not only the information they impart but also their value judgement of it, their perception of its reliability and context. Students are encouraged to consider the biases of reported facts and sources after taking them on board.

It seems to me, though, that the digital environment fosters a far less trusting approach. It is not in the first instance important to know what some guy called
Nick Harkaway thinks about the facts, but rather to figure out what they are and then consider whether Harkaway’s opinions are significant or useful. Rather than learning by rote from a single source, Carr’s ‘power browsers’ are assembling their own narrative from a variety of sources.
It’s both pre-emptive de-spinning of material – we live in a world where almost nothing is not spun – and the creation of a personal viewpoint rather than the incorporation of someone else’s.

For those who fear this shift, the gap between the digital and the traditional is profound: Birkerts, seeing reading as an act of translation from the act of looking at printed text to an immersion in the flow of ideas and narrative it conveys, wrote that print communication is active, requiring close engagement from the reader. More, the communication between reader and author is private and disconnected from the world – a kind of perfect connection degraded only, presumably, by the inevitable incompleteness of the acts of transmission and translation; no writer is so good as to convey meaning without room for misunderstanding, and no reader so empathic as to receive what is written without further mistake. Physical reading is also measured in a physical journey through the book, page by page, and a temporal one from beginning to end which is in accordance with the human experience as it is lived.

By contrast, digital communication is inherently public, part of a larger network. Information can be taken in passively, or interacted with, neither of which is the same as the self-created immersion of the traditional form. The order of digital text can readily be rearranged,
hypertext allowing different paths through a document. A greater emphasis is placed on impression and impact than logic. The branched, lateral nature of digital text affects how it is received, which is not similar to the way we live through time, but more like the rapid, convoluted succession of images and events in a Tarantino movie. That may make it less suitable for reading a conventional fictional narrative – in which case the publishing industry will either be relieved to find paper
books still sell or appalled as conventional written fictions cease to be part of the culture – but it’s not clear to me what it means for non-fiction. It suggests that books are no longer read so much as they are filleted, consumed and repurposed.

As a writer, I find myself wondering whether the traditional version of the author/reader relationship is truly so private as Birkerts believes. All reading takes place in the net of human interaction: literary critics have argued for years about the extent to which the experience of reading, say,
Charles Dickens is altered by the numerous film adaptations and references to his work in popular culture. Reading
A Christmas Carol
after having seen Bill Murray play Scrooge is not the same as reading it beforehand. More, books are – and have long been – discussed in literary salons, in book groups and around the family table. Books exist to be experienced and that experience is not complete until it is shared; we’re a more profoundly collaborative species (though perhaps not culture) than we generally imagine. It seems to me that the inherently connected nature of the digital realm that Birkerts talks about is not so much a difference of type as a difference of speed. The pace of analogue discussion is slow, and the number of people involved in the conversation tends to be limited by physical space. Digital, by contrast, allows the same comment to be seen, considered and discussed by an unlimited number of participants at one time. Everything moves faster. That, of course, does make the experience different – but it doesn’t make it entirely foreign.

I also question the linear nature of human experience that Birkerts leans on so hard. Our memories are intensely selective. You probably don’t remember brushing your teeth every morning and evening this week in great detail. Each of those moments most likely blends into one general recollection of slightly uncomfortable, humdrum mintiness. Similarly, you tend to allow the details of your commute to fade away each day. You may even drift off while it’s happening.
Albert Einstein once observed that relativity was to be found in the fact that putting one’s hand on a hot stove for even an instant seemed endless, whereas a long time spent with an attractive woman seemed to pass impossibly quickly. Our experience of time is more like a
movie – maybe even a choppy, disconnected one – than we generally acknowledge, and our subsequent memories are edited by us so that we recall the important bits and leave the dull parts behind.

For Carr, the consequences of our love affair with digital technology are clear. He points to a 2008 study by Professor
Gary Small of UCLA’s Memory and Aging Centre. ‘Book readers,’ Carr explains, ‘have a lot of activity in regions associated with language, memory, and visual processing, but they don’t display much activity in the pre-frontal regions associated with decision making and problem solving. Experienced Net users, by contrast, display extensive activity across all those regions when they scan and search web pages.’ Reading a
hypertext page is a constant process of evaluation and judgement as well as comprehension; a cycle of reading the text, seeing a link, evaluating the likely level of interest at the other end of it, judging whether or not to click on it, then returning to the origin text (or not). The problem is that that moment of evaluation, however brief, apparently kicks the brain out of the immersive mode of reading. Societally, we are spending less time reading conventionally, and hence less time in the cognitive space that Carr is anxious to preserve.

If this is true, it seems to be partly a matter of choice; the simplest solution, if you’re concerned, is to read a text stripped of links, and to take pains to make space in your day for uninterrupted reading. Other solutions exist for work; for a while now, some writing software has included the option of a kind of ‘quiet room’ – a working environment that shuts off access to the distractions of the Internet. If it transpires that the brain is rewiring itself away from traits we need as a consequence of digital technology, and this is detrimental to the way we live and think, surely that high-powered evaluation and decision-making skill we will have acquired will help us to see the obvious remedy: a balance of modern text, complete with connections, and the more traditional variety without them.

If necessary, in future, we can pick different production tools and different media for different tasks. In a sense, I’ve been doing exactly that in preparing this book, switching between Scrivener (the writing software I use for work) and a pen and paper, reading some items online or on a digital reading device, and others on paper. If
neuroplasticity is sufficiently extreme as to put the architecture of the human brain and the mode of living we currently have under threat or strain, then we can simply change it back. The time frame Professor Small noticed was measured in days, rather than months, and neuroplasticity flexes in both directions. An early experiment by Dr
George Stratton, detailed at the Third International Congress for Psychology in 1896, involved wearing special glasses that inverted the wearer’s vision. After a few days, the brain adapted, and the wearer was able to see and move around as normal. Removing the glasses then caused a confusion akin to putting them on in the first place, but, again, the brain was able to re-train in less than a week.
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For adults, then, this isn’t such a problem. Once we know we need to, we can simply re-learn a necessary skill. After that, retaining it becomes a question of going to the reading gym to resist the spread of nasty mental flab. The problem is more serious with children becoming adapted to digital rather than analogue modes of living. Will they develop a desire to create a habit of ‘deep reading’ they’ve never experienced? And if so, how? Or does it become a matter of parents insisting on it in the same way they insist on dental hygiene?

That discussion aside, it pays to remember that these changes in the brain would be specific to an individual. They would not be passed on genetically, and they would not occur in places where digital technology is less common. In order to gain dominance in a society – to become the basis of a new form of society – they would have to be supported by a perfect lock-in of social and political norms. That’s not impossible; if a given way of being appears more attractive than available alternatives, it will
be adopted. It’s not so clear that such a state would be stable, though, especially if it resulted in a society that was unable to relate to itself, distracted and fragmentary and consequently unable to innovate or to produce work at a high economic level – unless such a society became in some way useful to a financial cycle. In that case it might be perpetuated.

All the same, it seems implausible to me, given the patchwork nature of the world in general and individual societies in the specific, that the negative effects of digital technology could become entrenched to the point of affecting us on a species-wide basis. My original nightmare scenario would require a number of unlikely events to occur in perfect synchrony: the adoption of digital technology across the globe; social pressure to abandon other pursuits and concentrate on the screen derived, probably, from a financial and manufacturing system that could function and thrive in such an environment; cheaper digital devices and fewer disposable digital devices and software; a global diminution of interest in sport and religion; and so on. Vastly more likely in my opinion in the long term, if we don’t take steps to avoid it, is the emergence of a world like the one depicted in Ernie Cline’s
Ready Player One
, in which a global underclass lives in poverty and privation made somewhat endurable by access to an online game. Our present way of living lends itself handsomely to a sharp division between haves and have-nots, and I don’t see any obvious block to the creation of a class of workers lulled by the opiate of the Internet.

But even if that is true, it need not be permanent. It will be a created and a volatile situation. We’ll have the opportunity to go back, and the means. The question is whether we will choose to do so.