it’s taken me awhile to write the second installment of this critique (part 1 here) because i’ve been wrestling with how to expand the terms of the discussion. i’ve been reading the various reviews and discussions and even listened to the recent MIT symposium on the book. all of the critical energy is spent asking whether the conclusion — that modern electronic media is raising IQ and certain problem-solving skills– is based on thorough or good science; if it’s “true” or not.
whether people end up believing that Johnson is 10, 20, 30, 70 or 90 percent right about the effect of media on IQ and problem-solving skills, they mostly accept his boundaries of the subject. i seem to be coming at it from another direction. the problem for me isn’t Johnson’s conclusion which i think is “sorta correct’ but rather that by defining the question of media’s impact so narrowly the overall effect of his argument is to turn people away from much deeper questions about the role of media in shaping how we see the world and how we behave in it.
i believe that the shallowness of the debate around Johnson’s book is an excellent example of ways in which the effect of popular media has indeed been “bad” for us, not good. whether our IQs have gone up or not, the failure of most television and games to deal with moral complexity and the increasing tendency of TV news to entertain rather than inform have had made other more significant changes in our behavior — most significantly we are increasingly unable or resistant to look deeply and all-sidedly into important questions.
more tomorrow.
Category Archives: culture
chicago law faculty starts blogging
Law professors at the University of Chicago have launched an experimental faculty blog to connect with students, the legal community, and the world at large. They’ve chosen a good moment to jump into the public sphere, when the Supreme Court is in flux. I wouldn’t be surprised if this spurred similar developments at other universities.
The University of Chicago School of Law has always been a place about ideas. We love talking about them, writing about them, and refining them through open, often lively conversation. This blog is just a natural extension of that tradition. Our hope is to use the blog as a forum in which to exchange nascent ideas with each other and also a wider audience, and to hear feedback about which ideas are compelling and which could use some re-tooling.
Though a growing number of scholars have embraced blogging, the academy as a whole has been loathe to take treat it as anything more than a dalliance. But a few more high profile moves like the one in Chicago and university boards may start clamoring to jump in. Perhaps then there can begin a serious discussion about legitimizing blogging as a form of scholarly production, and even as a kind of peer review. It’s not that all academics should be expected (or should want) to become high-profile public intellectuals. Fundamentally, academic blogging should be considered as an extension of “office hours,” a way to extend the dialogue with students and other faculty.
But there’s a definite benefit for the public when authoritative voices start blogging about what they know best. It’s refreshing to read sober, deeply informed reflections on the Miers nomination and surrounding questions of judicial philosophy written by people who know what they’re talking about. It helps us to parse the news and to tune out some of the more worthless punditry that goes on, both in mainstream media and in the blogosphere. Less noise, more signal.
Of course, experts can get noisy too. I was thrilled when Paul Krugman began writing his column for the NY Times — here was someone with a deep grasp of economics and a talent for explaining it in a political context. But as Krugman’s audience has grown, so has his propensity to blow off partisan steam. To me at least, his value as a public intellect has waned.
“everything bad is good for you” is really bad
just finished the second book discussion at the institute. first was neil postman’s building a bridge to the eighteenth century. second was steve johnson’s everything bad is good for you in which johnson presents a contemporary refutation of postman.
johnson’s basic premise seems harmless enough. games and tv drama are getting more layered, more complex. the mental exercise is likely making our brains more nimble, might even be improving our problem-solving skills. OK…
but how can you define good and bad simply in terms of whether one’s brain is better at multi-tasking and problem-solving. i’ll grant that this shift in raw brain power might make us more effective worker bees for our techno-capitalist society, but it doesn’t mean that the substance of our lives or the social fabric is improved.
we don’t need cheerleaders telling us everything is fine — especially when in our gut we’re pretty sure it isn’t. we need to look long and hard at the kind of world we are building with all this technology.
johnson’s book has been widely praised, making it all the more important to hold it up to careful scrutiny. over the next several days we’re going to launch a serious critique of “everything bad is good for you.” please feel encouraged to join in.
the future of the institute
lately i’ve been thinking about how the institute for the future of the book should be experimental in form as well as content – an organization whose work, when appropriate, is carried out in real time in a relatively public forum. one of the key themes of our first year has been the way a network adds value to an enterprise, whether that be a thought experiment, an attempt to create a collective memory, a curated archive of best practices, or a blog that gathers and processes the world around it. i sense we are feeling our way to new methods of organizing work and distributing the results, and i want to figure out ways to make that aspect of our effort more transparent, more available to the world. this probably calls for a reevaluation of (or a re-acquaintance with) our idea of what an institute actually is, or should be.
the university-based institute arose in the age of print. scholars gathering together to make headway in a particular area of inquiry wrote papers, edited journals, held symposia and printed books of the proceedings. if books are what humans have used to move big ideas around, institutes arose to focus attention on particular big ideas and to distribute the result of that attention, mostly via print. now, as the medium shifts from printed page to networked screen, the organization and methods of “institutes” will change as well.
how they will change is what we hope to find out, and in some small way, influence. so over the next year or so we’ll be trying out a variety of different approaches to presenting our work, and new ways of facilitating debate and discussion. hopefully, we’ll draw some of you in along the way.
here’s a first try. we’ve decided (see thinking out loud) to initiate a weekly discussion at the institute where we read a book (or article or….) and then have a no-holds discussion about it — hoping to at least begin to understand some of the first order questions about what we are doing and how it fits into our perspectives on society. mostly we’re hoping to get to a place where we are regularly asking these questions in our work (whether designing software, studying the web, holding a symposium, or encouraging new publishing projects), measuring technological developments against a sense of what kind of society we’d like to live in and how a particular technology might help or hinder our getting there.
the first discussion is focused on neil postman’s “Building a Bridge to the 18th Century.” following is the audio we recorded broken into annotated chapters. we would be interested in getting people’s feedback on both form and content. (jump to the discussion)
podcast: discussing neil postman’s “building a bridge to the 18th century”
(Annotated audio recordings of this discussion appear further down.)
On the dedication page of “Building a Bridge to the 18th Century,” Neil Postman quotes the poet Randall Jarrell:
Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn’t know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.
Though often failing to provide satisfying answers, Postman asks the kind of first-order questions one hears all too infrequently at a time when technology’s impact on our social, political and intellectual lives grows ever more profound. Postman has been accused of deep reactionism toward technology, and indeed, his hostility toward computers and telecommunications betrays an elitism that discredits some of his larger, and quite compelling observations.
In spite of this, Postman’s diagnosis is persuasive: that the idea of technological progress bequeathed by the Enlightenment has detached from reason and become a runaway train, that we are unquestioningly embracing new technologies that unleash massive change on our family and communal life, our democracy, and our capacity to think critically. We have stopped asking the single most important question that should be applied to all new technological innovations: does this technology solve a problem? If so, then at what cost? To whose benefit? And at whose expense?
Postman portrays the contemporary West as a culture without a narrative, littered with the shards of broken ideologies – depressed, unmotivated, and therefore uncritical of the new technologies that are foisted upon it by a rapacious capitalist system. The culprit, as he sees it, is postmodernism, which he lambasts (rather simplistically) as a corrosive intellectual trend, picking at the corpse of the Enlightenment, and instilling torpor and malaise at all levels of culture through its distrust of language and dogged refusal to accept one truth over another. This kind of thinking, Postman argues, is seductive, but it starves humans of their inspiration and sense of purpose.
To be saved, he goes on, and to build a better future, we would do well to look back to the philosophes of 18th century Europe, who, in the face of surging industrialization, defined a new idea of universal rational humanism – one that allowed for various interpretations within its fold, was rigorously suspicious of religious or any other kind of dogma, and yet gave the world a sense of moral uplift and progress. Postman does not suggest that we copy the 18th century, but rather give it careful study in order to draw inspiration for a new positive narrative, and for a reinvigoration of our critical outlook. This, Postman insists, offers us the best chance of surviving our future.
Postman’s note of alarm, if at times shrill, is nonetheless a refreshing antidote to the techno-optimism that pervades contemporary culture. And his recognition of our “crisis in narrative” – a formulation borrowed from Vaclav Havel – is dead on.
September 19: Bob, Dan, Kim, and Ben discuss Postman’s book at our new Brooklyn office (special prize if you pick out the sound of the ice cream truck passing by).
1. Bob’s preface – thoughts about how we do business at the institute (1:56) (download)
2. Ben’s first impressions – childhood under threat… Dan’s first impressions into discussion – a Clinton-era book, sets up a rather straw man caricature with the postmodernists, but society’s need for a narrative is compelling – why the Christian right has done so well… Postman seems to be assuming that progress is a law, that there is a directed narrative to history – problems with how he treats evolution. (6:43) (download)
3. Bob: Postman is much better at identifying problems than at coming up with solutions. Which is what makes him compelling. His stance is courageous. People assume with technology that just because something can be done it should be done. This is a tremendous problem – an affliction. If you could go back in time and be the inventor of the automobile, would you do it? People get angry at the responsibility this question imputes to them. How can we put these big questions at the center of our work? (13:34) (download)
4. Another big question… “An electronic community is only a simulation of a real community”? Flickr, Friendster, Howard Dean campaign? What is the vehicle for talking about this? What format is best for engaging these questions? Looking for new forms that illuminate or activate the questions. (15:43) (download)
5. Where/who are the public intellectuals today? [The ice cream truck passes by.] Strange bifurcation of the intellectual elite – many of the best-educated people most able to deal with abstraction make their living producing popular media that controls society. (10:07) (download)
6. Is capitalism the problem? Postman’s bias: written language will never be surpassed in its power to deal with abstract thought and cultivation of ideas. But we are arguably past the primacy of print. What is our attitude toward this? (9:39) (download)
7. What opportunities for reflection do different media afford? Films on DVD can be read and reread like a book – the viewer controls, rather than being controlled – a possibility for reflection not available in broadcast. What is the proper venue for discussing this? Capitalism is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. How do we create, if not a mass agitation, then at least a mass discussion? Tie it to the larger pressing problems of the world and how they will be better addressed by certain forms of discourse and reflection. Averting ecological catastrophe as one possible narrative – an inspiring motivator that will get people moving. How do find our way back into history? (10:09) (download)
8. What should we read next as counterpoint/antidote to Postman? The Matrix – are we headed that way? (12:33) (download)
9. How do we organize new kinds of debates about technology and society? Other issues to be addressed – class, race and gender inequality. (11:26) (download)
more shrinking newsrooms: “the perennial gale of creative destruction”
“Mercury News plans to shrink newsroom by 52 jobs”:
The newspaper whose newsroom topped 400 people at the height of the dot-com economic boom in Silicon Valley could not avoid downsizing to reflect a local economy that never recovered. But the larger problem…is that the stock market offers no slack to news organizations in less profitable years….
…Two weeks ago, the publicly traded Knight Ridder, the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain, announced that earnings per share would fall 20%, which it attributed to higher paper costs and health insurance premiums.
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy:
The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation-if I may use that biological term-that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in….
Every piece of business strategy acquires its true significance only against the background of that process and within the situation created by it. It must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction; it cannot be understood irrespective of it or, in fact, on the hypothesis that there is a perennial lull….
marketing books on mobile phones
Harper Collins Australia’s new MobileReader service beams information about new titles and authors, and even book excerpts, to a cellphone. They’re beginning with promotions of Dean Koontz, Paul Coelho and others.
(via textually)
Three Books That Influenced Your Worldview: The List
Yesterday I was thinking about the fact that books were the crucial element in the formation of my world view and wondered if that is the case with younger people. My guess yesterday morning was that people over 40 would easily come up with a list of books that influenced their way of looking at the world. Also – and this was probably the key idea I was testing – I assumed that when baby boomers came of age, specifc books (let’s say a dozen titles) were a crucial element in a shared cultural zeitgeist. By contrast, today I don’t see particular titles dominating the scene as they did 35 years ago.
Well . . . turns out I was pretty much wrong, at least as far as the 100+ people in my 40+ and 35- sample groups were concerned. Very few titles made it on to more than one list and I don’t see dramatic differences in the lists based on age.
One remarkable fact which you’ll notice when you look at the lists is the fantastic diversity in print culture. One can only dream that we will one day have such rich variety among works which are born digital.
This experiment of course hints at the bigger question: are books as important today in terms of forming world view as they were 35-40 years ago, and if not, what is taking their place? Most importantly: if not, what effect does the shift in dominant media have on the creation of world view?
If this gets anyone’s juices flowing, we’d love to have suggestions about how to explore these questions further.
Continue reading for the list…