Yes, But

Some well-reasoned and well-researched ideas are so obvious they bring out the contrarian in me. It seems too easy to note the changes brought about by social media. Or to state it more bluntly the damages visited upon us by the new technology. How our attention span has been shortened, how we live in a glut of distractions and our critical thinking has been compromised. Moments of contemplation engendered by books have been sacrificed by our new habit of tweeting, skimming and truncated messaging.

I want to say, yes, but to all the above.

The book I’m reading by Maryanne Wolf is called Reader, Come Home. One should never argue with a neuroscientist. She could probably tell me which synapse in my grey matter needs remedial help. In fact, she brilliantly describes the area of our brains which have adapted to sequential reading and now are threatened by extinction if we yield to this newfangled way of receiving information or possibly, knowledge and, dare I say, wisdom.

Perhaps it’s a matter of attribution. Wolf ascribes all our highest qualities such as empathy, deep reflection and philosophical thought to print technology. Without it we might return to grunts in caves. Wait, stop the world, if that were true I, too, would want to grab the wheel and change the trajectory of spaceship Earth.

I think not. I submit that post-literate society is more akin to the pre-literate one where the world is seen as a mosaic. Visual stress from literacy is yielding to a sense of acoustic space and a wider inclusiveness. Certainly, empathy was not invented by Guttenberg or the books that followed. A case could be made that the centuries of print had negative consequences. Print technology altered the ratio of our senses. It discouraged memory and oral disputation. The single POV is fixed as in perspective, fostering an atomized Western man, individualized as a solitary reader. Specialization and disassociation of action from feeling created Western power and efficiency. Arguably, this led to the nation state and imperialism, as McLuhan suggests.

David Hockney commented, Surface is an illusion but so is depth. He was referring to visual arts and I believe it has implications for the way young people approach social media. A new way of seeing and processing has been created. Disparate images as iconography along with words and symbols in a field approach replaces the linear sequential lines in a book. Life does not happen in sequence; it comes at us as a simultaneous happening. Young minds are trained to make sense of these surface stimuli in ways that we, steeped as we are in the serial logic of print, cannot take in.

Maryanne Wolf correctly calls these years a hinge moment in time. Those of us raised with books are adrift or at least straddle the two ways of perceiving just as those born into the digital age are still largely educated with books as the standard source of accessing the vault of history. Accommodations must be made but to suggest that the demise of literacy will take down humanity, is, I believe, a needless grieving.

If it seems that the social order is frayed by tweets and bytes it is also enhanced by new kinships and an unimagined connectivity. Collage has displaced figurative painting. Digressions and meta narratives are more common now than straight ahead plotting.  When John Coltrane was asked to describe his style, he said he starts in the middle of a sentence and moves in both directions at once.

Just to be clear, I have no love for social media or the new technology. There was a time when necessity was regarded as the mother of invention. In these unparalleled times invention is now the mother. Build it and they will buy it and make it a necessity. I, too, have had exasperated moments when I have to gnash my teeth and gird my loins trying to wend my way through a landscape of bots. The point is not whether we love the Internet but it has us by our vitals. Better to make nice.

I sense that the digital age has forged new neural pathways and unleashed creative forces as yet unrecognized by those with noses in books.