andrew.pilsch.com

The July issue of The Atlantic arrived at my parent’s house today. It contains a Nicholas Carr essay entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. The article is worth a look (in a twist, it isn’t on the Internet yet), but it isn’t anything particularly profound. Basically, his argument is that the Internet, and especially Google, is replacing the way our brains are wired with a more parallel approach to information acquisition, information processing, and information retention. I would imagine that most people who blog, rss, and otherwise live the Web2.0 lifestyle (I think “rss” should be a verb) have, if they stop to think about it, noticed that this change is occurring. While I’ve read three books this week, that’s my job and I’ve noticed that it’s getting harder for me to focus on it now that I’ve got so much information competing for my time.

The thing is, though, I live in an information ecology that doesn’t normally value this style of thought. Instead, the English Department continues to value the long, complex, linear narratives that dominated our cultural mind before television and that Carr says are passing away. Frankly, I don’t think this is really how the story goes: television clearly killed the book and, as Carr also points out, people are reading more, now, than they were 20 years ago. This fact troubles a lot of people (again, Carr says that this reading is a new and different kind of reading that removes a lot of the contemplation of linear text consumption), but I see it as positive. Also, when I make this claim about text and English Studies’ relationship with it, I don’t just mean on a profound level: I’m interested in how many of colleagues’ eyes glaze over when I start excitedly babbling about RSS readers and Twitter. On some fundamental level English Studies has never understood the Internet.

As weird (I was going to say bad) as the new patterns of reading appear (at least to old school, linear authors like Carr and myself), I think the fact that people are reading again, at all, is a really positive and exciting thing. Clar Shirky’s ideas about television are true. It is a waste of time. I think blogging and rssing, though, aren’t wastes, as such. The number of new ideas I’ve been exposed to this week is greater than what I could have gotten from the three books (although, reading Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality, Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix Plus makes that almost an untrue claim, but that has more to do with what I read). The problem comes in figuring out how to synthesize this information. Sure, I’ve fired off a lot of pithy (in my mind) “tweets” about this stuff on Twitter, but does that really count? Also, I’ve posted about some of it on this blog (and could do a better job, I would imagine), but these media don’t count as work in the information ecology of a graduate-level English department. We still highly value linearity.
This dichotomy between what I feel and what I do is starting to become a crisis: as I gear up to write a long, linear book that somehow synthesizes my interests in science fiction, rhetoric, and technical communication at the twilight of the current age of mankind, I wonder: “Why?” Can a textual form that everyone seems to think is outmoded capture what it means to suddenly think in parallel (as Carr claims the Internet has done)? If not, what would such a form look like? The answer isn’t hypertext, as people like Jay D. Bolter have talked about it, as that form is largely a joke and an attempt to wield old forms onto the new logic of the Internet.

I’m partly thinking about exploring these issues in my English 015 class this summer, but I’m not even sure what this new kind of thinking will mean in a composition classroom. I think one thing I’m going to do is talk about how to read linearly (which is something that we seem to be forgetting as a culture) as well as how to write in parallel. I plan on using Twemes to get the students on Twitter and talking about class. I have some new media texts to present, so we’ll see if this can help resolve some of these issues, but, frankly, I worry about the future of this field, in general.
We claim in composition studies that we are teaching our students to write, but what good does it do to teach a model of writing that no longer matches the information ecology that exists outside of our insular world? Further, how do we teach composition as a discipline that is behind the times, in terms of the cutting edge of text? I don’t necessarily have the answers for these questions and I don’t think that as a discipline we will understand the forms these answers must take for a long time, but I think we need to at least try to keep a few steps ahead of our students. I think this approach should be implemented, as our society is still going through a shift in the way it deals with these information technologies: despite that most of my students have Facebook accounts, I’ve never had any who (to my knowledge) blog (I’ve only had a few freshmen who even knew what blogging was). These changes are not yet complete, but if we don’t want to get left by the wayside, I think we should start thinking about what composition means in the era of the 140 character “tweet.”

Image Credit: Sunset in Criação Velha, Pico Island Azores by Ulrich Thumult.