Text is not Dead

The Onion has posted a disturbing article. I just want to start by saying that I used to have a pet ferret. He was fascinated by anything shiny- a mirror, silver marble, or ball of aluminum foil. Cats are different; they lose attention quickly and become bored with both human and object. Ferrets, however, will remain captivated.

I haven’t decided exactly how to feel about what the Onion has reported. But, we as shiny-object loving humans, spend 90% of our waking time staring at glowing rectangles. These rectangles aren’t just the computer and the television, but it also includes the iPod, Blackberry, cell phone, and any glowing electronic billboard (Time Square).

“From the moment they wake up in the morning, to the moment they lose consciousness at night, Americans are in near-constant visual contact with bright, pulsating rectangles,” said Dr. Richard Menken, lead author of the report, looking up briefly from the gleaming quadrangle that sits on his desk. “In fact, it’s hard to find a single minute during which the American public is not completely captivated by these shining…these dazzling….”

“I’m sorry,” Menken continued. “What were we discussing again?”

According to the report, staring blankly at luminescent rectangles is an increasingly central part of modern life. At work, special information rectangles help men and women silently complete any number of business-related tasks, while entertainment rectangles—larger and louder and often placed inside the home—allow Americans to enter a relaxing trance-like state after a long day of rectangle-gazing.

We had to know this was coming. I stare at a computer all day at work. Then, I come home to my more friendly glowing box where I check email, pay bills, read my news, update my Facebook, and write. I actually feel different when I read a book with pages and a hard cover (kind of nostalgic). If I’m too tired for any of the above, I have been known to relax in front of my other glowing rectangle. I know I’ve fallen under the trance of the electric light. I manage to spend a great deal of time interacting with the three-dimensional world. However, I can feel the pull of the glow. Are we responding to an increasingly active and technologically advanced environment, or, are we ferrets getting lost in our play with the aluminum foil ball?

We discussed this video in my Rhetoric class. I think it’s relevant to our culture and illustrates just how far we’ve come from interacting through instant messages. It’s worth checking out.

The Machine is Using Us

As I join the blogosphere, I imagine myself to be an ant, carrying 10 to 15 times my own weight, scrambling with others to build the impossibly large anthill. Am I important in some way? Probably not that important. Am I special? To me, a few others, and hopefully my readers I am. Am I contributing? Absolutely! I am a part of one of the most modern and accessible discourses in current culture (culture being a very flexible and intangible term because what is relevant now may not be so in a month, a week, or a few hours).

I came of age in a time of adaptation and electronic evolution. One year, I was typing papers on what my friends and I thought was an advanced word-processor, and with much talk but little warning, we welcomed a computer into the home like a new pet. And the Internet 1.0 became an overwhelming phenomenon when I was an adolescent. The mere existence of the Internet was something about which people heatedly debated.  I frequented chat rooms (yes, I was one of those- but I was young and therefore cannot be blamed). This new medium was perfect for a quiet but verbal person. Shortly after the computer joined my family, my parents learned the magnificence of shopping online. Isolation was a dark shadow creeping over our existence. Why leave the house when, like never before, everything was home?

I further pondered this social effect on people while in college. I lived on campus with people who all were within four years of my age, and the dorms were segregated by gender. The IM opener, age/sex/location, took on a slightly twisted element. If I wanted to get to know people based on those trivial commonalities, I was already living in a social utopia. If I wanted to meet a guy, I could always take the long, lonely walk to the next building over. However, people sat in their shoebox-sized rooms typing away to someone with whom they imagined a connection. I was afraid for my friends, lost in some false matrix-like world held together by machines and unreliable, sometimes slow connections.

I am no longer afraid. For years, I have boldly gone where everyone else has gone before, Facebook, Linkedin, and yes, even Twitter. I’m cured! Well, more accurately, I have seen the unlimited potential of Web 2.0. It’s no longer about isolating oneself and communicating in abbreviated sentences with someone whose identity is as fluid as conversation. Now, we live in an almost too personal time. Not only can I reconnect with an old college friend, but also, now I can know when she’s doing her laundry, when she changes her relationship status, and anything else she cares to share. We are not quieted, isolated, unchallenged beings having relationships with the computer screen. No- we can be connected to new and old friends and long distance family. Making friends is not necessarily about being in the right place and in the right mood. It’s as uncomplicated as going to MeetUp and finding a group of people who share one’s interests and meet in real 3-dimensional life.  At the MeetUp site, a person can find a group sharing one or any combination of commonalities (movies, wine, hobbies, book genres, and dogs – little shout out to my doggy playgroup). And, the best part is that we can still shop from home.

Wikipoogle- why go anywhere else? If Wikipedia has an article regarding that topic, googling it will show it without asking you to scroll past five entries. The two entities are partners in the page-rank war. They are the power players. Google is ten years old, and Wikipedia is seven; in Internet years, this relationship has lasted quite a while. Our daily life has morphed into a break-neck-paced, visually overwhelming stream of information plugging into a person using all outlets. Our desk computers, laptops, phones, Blackberry’s, and PDAs keep us connected quickly and constantly. When something happens, whether that something is Anna Nichole Smith’s untimely death or McCain’s VP pick, the internet shows no prejudice, and it delivers the news before the story is even complete.

How does this evolution affect the ever-changing Internet surfer, who googles his or her way along the campaign? The average attention span of someone searching for something on the Internet does not allow him or her the willpower and stamina to view all the endless pages of a search result. Getting to the end of the pages on a popular topic, such as Obama, holds the same futile mystery as finding out what is on every channel when someone has the three-hundred-channel cable package. We just can’t know everything, and we couldn’t begin to try. It’s information overload. Therefore, we reluctantly trust the wisdom of Google to provide the most reliable and best sources on the first or second page. As a student, would you do a research paper using books someone else checked out of the library, sources someone else decided were the best, these few choices from walls and walls of titles. Why do we trust a search engine to do the same? The answer is because Wikipedia speaks the fast-pasted language of the time-constrained surfer who still needs to know. It has everything and links to everything it used a source. It’s quick, convenient, easy to remember, written on a below average reading level, and generally holds short entries that don’t try the attention span.

The Google generation bred the demand for a source such as Wikipedia. Nicholas Carr writes on the need to explore the way the Internet and this media is programming the users in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He cites Maryanne Wolfe’s notion that deep reading is tied to deep thinking. Deep reading is of course nonexistent and entirely unnecessary when reading, more like skimming, the information surrounded by ads, pop-ups, games, and links, blinking and glowing in competition for the viewer’s attention. The pervasive thread in his piece is that the human brain is exposed to the google power, which will spawn “hyperactive, data-stroked minds,” which will lead to a race of what Richard Foreman calls the “pancake people… spread wide and thin.”

Dawn Teo writes in her post on the Huffington Post that Americans are widely under-informed about the election. She writes to promote the idea that political activists must accept this fact and share the light, so to speak. Essentially, she supports her stance that Americans are disengaged with the web traffic map. The blogs, political columns, and You Tube serve as distractions from the main sources of valuable information. The informed must reach out to the uninformed, the ones who lean on Google and Wikipedia.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? Well, no, it’s making us adapt to an instant information-charged life. And that doesn’t necessarily make us smarter.