Alan Jacobs

OK, the idea that kids these days are “digital natives” is a nice, self-serving fairy tale. It makes tech-lovers feel good, because they feel like they are at the front of a curve. It makes educators feel good, because then they don’t have to teach a complicated and multi-level sets of skills and knowledges that they don’t have a strong grasp on themselves. It makes government types feel good because they don’t need to devote resources to it. It makes the kids feel special, and kids need that. The problem is, of course, that it’s pretty much false – saying kids are “digital natives” because they can text, send email, and use facebook (all services provided by profit-driven companies, who love this false paradigm as well), is like claiming that kids these days are all automotive engineers because they have driver’s licenses.

I teach freshmen. Most of them have the barest idea of how to use the Internet except for simple, pre-packaged tasks. They have little concept of wider issues, like selecting a tool outside of their very limited set of daily resources, dealing with privacy (which they care very much about, but don’t have the understanding to guess how to deal with it), or asking questions about the purpose of the technology. And these are the reasonably well-off kids who have had access to the web for most of their lives. Students from less advantaged backgrounds have greater hurdles.

So, yeah, forget this idea of “digital natives.” Now, a library could help them get closer to that ideal, but we are busy closing the libraries becaue the “digital natives” don’t need them. And who, I wonder, benefits from a large mass of people who can’t do anything except what the tools they are sold let them?

We live in a time when many religious people feel fiercely threatened by science. O ye of little faith. Let them subscribe to Scientific American for a year and then tell me if their sense of the grandeur of God is not greatly enlarged by what they have learned from it. Of course many of the articles reflect the assumption at the root of many problems, that an account, however tentative, of some structure of the cosmos or some transaction of the nervous system successfully claims that part of reality for secularism. Those who encourage a fear of science are actually saying the same thing. If the old, untenable dualism is put aside, we are instructed in the endless brilliance of creation. Surely to do this is a privilege of modern life for which we should all be grateful.

To see just how our wires are rewiring us, a group of four neuroscientists at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) recently recruited 24 people, ranging in age from 55 to 76, to undergo brain imaging while they engaged in an Internet task. Half of the participants were considered Net Naïve, meaning they went online just once or twice a week, and half were Net Savvy, meaning they went online at least once a day. All the participants had their brains scanned during two tests: a traditional reading condition, in which they read text presented in the format of a book, and an Internet condition, in which they performed a Web search then read content displayed on a simulated Web page.

On the traditional reading task, the Naïve and Savvy groups demonstrated more or less the same brain activity, as one would expect. Each group used regions of the brain connected to language, memory, and of course reading. During the Web task, however, the neural activity between the two groups differed strikingly. When Naïve participants examined a Web page, they used the same brain regions as during traditional reading. When the Savvy group used the Internet, a number of additional brain regions were activated — including those linked to decision making and complex reasoning. The Savvy group demonstrated twice as much neural activity as the Naïve group: 21,782 voxels of the brain scan to 8,646, for those keeping score at home.

Waging Guerilla War Against Distraction

Invasion of the Space Invaders, then, is the madwoman in the attic of Amis’ house of nonfiction; many have heard rumors of its shameful presence, but few have seen it with their own eyes. I recently discovered a copy in the library of the university where I work, and I don’t think the librarian knew quite what to make of my obvious excitement at this coup. (“Wow,” I said, giving a low, respectful whistle as she handed it across the counter. “Would you look at that?”) It’s a deeply strange artifact: an A4-sized, full color glossy affair, abundantly illustrated with captioned photographs, screen shots, and lavish illustrations of exploding space ships and lunar landscapes. It boasts a perfunctory introduction by Steven Spielberg (“read this book and learn from young Martin’s horrific odyssey round the world’s arcades before you too become a video-junkie”), complete with full-page portrait of the Hollywood Boy Wonder leaning awkwardly against an arcade machine like some sort of geeky, high-waisted Fonz. We’re not even into the text proper, and already its cup runneth over with 100-proof WTF. — Mark O’Connell

A man, then, who portrays human beings excessively and extravagantly. A man who portrays human beings in hell. And yet when we read [Dickens], it does not read like bad news. What does he have to say at the end of the day about redemption? In some ways not a great deal. Or rather there is a tension again and again in his books between a carefully, neatly resolved happy ending, and an immense burden of recognised, almost unbearable, unresolved suffering. He achieves the balance of those two most perfectly, for one reader, in Bleak House, where the past tense of Esther’s narrative is balanced by the present tense of unhealed suffering, the rain still falling on the Lincolnshire wolds. But in that book, which one reader at least thinks is perhaps his most profoundly theological—though he wouldn’t thank me for that—we have one of the strangest, most shocking images that he ever gives us of compassion and mercy, and that is the figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock. At the very end of Bleak House, left alone in his decaying mansion, holding open the possibility of forgiveness and restoration, ‘I revoke no dispositions I have made in her favour’, says Sir Leicester, with his typical dryness, about the wife who has fled from him in guilt and terror. And in that appallingly stiff phrase we hear something of the hope of mercy. Almost silent, powerless, Sir Leicester after his stroke, dying slowly in loneliness, and stubbornly holding open the possibility that there might be, once again, love and harmony.

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Add to that the e-book’s ease of transport, its international vocation (could the Iron Curtain have kept out e-books?), its indestructibility (you can’t burn e-books), its promise that all books will be able to remain forever in print and what is more available at reasonable prices, and it becomes harder and harder to see why the literati are not giving the phenomenon a more generous welcome.

W. W. Norton: Slate Reviews ‘The Lifespan of a Fact’, Then Fact-Checks Review

Last week, here at Wheaton College, we had a chapel service led largely by African-American students. In the last year or so it’s become common for some of our students to live-tweet chapel services, sometimes with earnest gratitude but more often, of course, with snark — and this particular chapel got an extra helping of snark, much of it either subtly or overtly racist. The students who led the chapel were wounded. Who in their situation would not be? To lead a worship service is to put yourself in a particularly vulnerable place; for your fellow students to take advantage of that to mock you is pretty nasty, and it’s nastier when they’re mocking you precisely for those traits that put you in a very small minority on this very white campus.

Those who know the students who were mocked should offer all the support they can; those who know the students who wrote the offensive tweets should encourage them to repent and apologize. We should all offer up prayers for reconciliation. Our President or Chaplain should say, “Please stop tweeting in chapel, and please stop using chapel as a venue for commentary.”

And then, I think, most of of should be quiet. That’s not what our administration is encouraging us to do: all faculty have been asked to explore the “issues” arising from this sad situation in class. I probably won’t; I’ll probably point my students to this post instead.

Maybe I shouldn’t even be writing this post, because I don’t think that words serve us very well in these situations. What people who want to “talk it out” rarely realize is that “talking it out” provides so many opportunities for posturing, signaling, and grandstanding. See how seriously I take racism? See how angry it makes me? See how humble I am, when I acknowledge that I too have been guilty of racism?

My preference is to offer words only to those who ask for words, because prayer is more valuable than talk. But who knows, maybe I’m fleeing from an uncomfortable topic. I just know that I have used a great many words on these issues over the years, and I’m not sure that many of them have helped anyone. I think we need something other than a “talking cure” for racism, snark, and general uncharity.