Tyler Cowen, whom I hop-skipped to via Arts & Letters Daily, argues interestingly for multitasking, online culture, and reduction in the status of the printed word in a new article "Three Tweets for the Web." I especially like his comparison of cultural delivery to long distance romances and marriages -- you used to have to work hard and travel far distances to "get culture" but now it's always there when you wake up in the morning. This also made me think of my new (scary?) habit of checking email on my phone before I get out of bed.
As ambivalently pinioned as I am between classic ideas of culture and postmodern pastiche, I want to argue against Cowen. In most places, I can't. I think the only red flag I can let myself raise is . . . is all culture good for us? I don't think it is. If it's being delivered to us in staccato bursts from all sides, where do we get the apparatus we need to thresh, interpret, and select.
I think I know what he'll say. "I wrote 3000 words on the benefits of quickly digesting culture, and you wrote a three-paragraph blog post siding with 'taking your time'. Who wins?"
Cowen has a good point about how we are all better informed in the Internet age. Armed as such, the individual is surely more powerful. Ease of collaboration only amplifies this power. The key factor here, asserted by Cowen later in the article, is the intellectual ability to piece together all the snippets of information gathered over time. Another major assumption is that these snippets are of any value.
ReplyDeleteHe briefly speculates, without support, that young people are perhaps losing this ability. I consider myself pretty young, and I think this is undeniably true. I skipped over every other paragraph in this article, not by conscious decision but by habit, because the article was taking too long to digest. I still got the point. I also learned this habit in school reading text books though. Understanding the first sentence of each paragraph was a good indication that the rest of the supporting sentences were unnecessary. I'm fine with this habit until I read a novel, and find myself doing the exact same thing. It's very frustrating to have to concentrate on reading the words in order...and reading all of them.
Younger generations are missing the ability to develop our critical thought process, since this process is neglected in the instant gratification cultural media model. Perhaps we will become more reliant on collaboration to piece items together? The old idea that the sum of the parts being greater than the whole.
A semi-related side-note. A coworker friend of mine just stopped by my office talking about how he'd registered a domain name for a new Web site idea. The site has to do with samples from songs and movies. The name for the site is very clever and came from a friend in the U.K. who he's never met.