I was on the verge of ending this blog. First, after pouring my heart out in a profound meditation on traffic management the other day, a friend put the following comment on my Facebook page:
You so need to get out more!
(I wouldn’t normally repeat personal comments, but this was already alarmingly public in the first place.)
Second, and much more seriously, I read this article by Todd Gitlin about the effects of using the Internet. Gitlin reviews Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. It’s a challenging thesis. It’s not just that the Internet dumbs information down (it’s easy to respond to this by pointing to the profusion of intelligent content on the net). It’s that the way we read and process ideas on the Internet is actually making us less able to think and reflect in any meaningful way.
So no matter how profound the ideas in this blog, it is just contributing to the cultural malaise of our times. That’s the suggestion. Do you agree? I don’t mean “is this blog in particular contributing to the malaise?” I mean “would we be better just switching off the computers and going to the library?”
It’s worth quoting a few paragraphs.
Carr grabs our lapels to insist that the so-called information society might be more accurately described as the interruption society. It pulverizes attention, the scarcest of all resources, and stuffs the mind with trivia. Our texting, IM-ing, iPhoning, Twittering, computer-assisted selves—or self-assisted computing networks—are so easily diverted that our very mode of everyday thought has changed, changed utterly, degraded from “calm, focused, undistracted” linearity into “a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts.” Google searches, too, break our concentration, which only makes matters worse: “Google is, quite literally, in the business of distraction,” Carr writes. Because we are always skimming one surface after another, memories do not consolidate and endure. So we live in a knife-edge present. We turn into what the playwright Richard Foreman called “pancake people—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.” We collect bits and the bits collect us.
Worse still, no one has dragooned us into the shallows. Nobody is forcing us from pixel to post. We are our own victimizers, because we crave interruption. When we grow up texting every few minutes, legato—which now feels like an eternity—yields to staccato. Taking a break during the writing of this review, while watching a recent Lakers-Suns playoff game, I observed a couple of women in four-figure courtside seats behind the Suns’ bench working their thumbs on BlackBerries as the camera panned over them. Maybe they were live-blogging, or day-trading on Asian markets.
With so many interruptions so easy to arrange, Carr argues, it is no wonder that we cannot concentrate, or think straight, or even think in continuous arabesques. Where deep reading encourages intricacies of thought, the electronic torrent in which we live—or which lives in us—turns us into Twittering nerve nodes. The more links in our reading, the less we retain. We are what we click on. We no longer read, we skim. With Wikipedia a click away, are we more knowledgeable? Or even more efficient? Multi-tasking, Carr quotes the neuroscientist David Meyer as saying, “is learning to be skillful at a superficial level.”
After all, the brain that has been re-wired online governs us offline, too. The more we multi-task, the more distractible we are. But aren’t we more sophisticated at “visual-spatial skills”? Sure, but at the price of “a weakening of our capacities for the kind of ‘deep processing’ that underpins ‘mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection,” writes Carr, quoting a Science article that reviewed more than fifty relevant studies.
And so we devolve inexorably into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.” These sweet tidbits are rotting our mental teeth. This is so, Carr maintains, because “the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions,” and that consequently, “with the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use.”
Hi Fr Stephen,
Other than the things I have written to you recently, I din’t think you need to get out more. I think you are a shining example of how the Roman Catholic Church should be getting out to the people. You use Facebook, you obviously have a good working knowledge of the Internet and other technology which empowers you to address a far wider audience than your predecessors and, indeed, some of your brother Priests today. Furthermore, you address a very broad range of topics in your blog which suggests to me an interest in those things. Don’t be put off if someone suggests they are ‘geeky’ interests – we are all entitled to our idiocincratic interests!
You use all the technology at your disposal to spread the Good News and also to promote people’s interest in other areas. For example, I don’t live in London and so I am unable to visit some of the galleries or displays you mention, or to be aware of the traffic calming measures in Kensington. Moreover, you use your education and wide reading, along with your teaching skills to raise awareness in others of such things as they may never otherwise be aware. Examples I can think of are philosophy and the Jesuit’s early work in China.
Please don’t give up the blog Fr Stephen, you’re doing a brilliant job!
Please dont end this blog too. We have choice. Choice to read what we want to read by people that stimulate, educate and inspire us. People that I know to be safe and good people to be inspired by. Education and interaction that otherwise would be beyond my circumstantial grasp. I follow just 3 blogs.
At times we frustratingly do not have choice, we are trapped by circumstance, or by the past, or by our heritage, even by our future. At times we have our hands metaphorically chained behind our backs.
But for half an hour a day (sometimes longer) the internet can reconnect us to ourselves, re-establish and reinforce our core beliefs, beliefs that otherwise can be shunned or unshared. As long as the path we follow is authentic and true to ourselves and is in harmony with our lives then I know from experience that this kind of communication can inspire far deeper thought especially when one is less articulate in conversation.
And most especially when one has many little ones to nurture and pass on her wisdom x
Father Stephen:
I do hope that you do not end this blog. Yes, I agree that use of the internet can be mind numbing, but countless other things can be as well. The person who takes an activity to the extremes is the one with the problem, not necessarily the activity in itself. Your posts and comments are thought provoking, and I am fortunate to have found this blog.
Thank you again
Bo
If people like you quit, who have the knowledge and wisdom to see matters from a deeper perspective than most, who is going to draw our attention to problems such as this one. Please, please don’t!
I think the internet can be used for good or for ill, but that does not mean it is definitely bad for your mind. As with anything taken to excess, or used unwisely, the internet can cause problems. I worry, sometimes, when I see people making comments on Facebook every 10 minutes when they ought to be revising for exams, or just getting out more. I worry when friends seem to be addicted to things like Farmville (that’s on Facebook too). But overall I believe the internet is a force for good.
One of the adults with Learning Difficulties I work with was preparing to move to a L’Arche community in another part of the country and she was delighted when we were able to show her a photo of the house she is moving to on Google street view. She proceeded to explore the area, found the local Catholic Church, the workshop, and other significant places in the town. She was being well-prepared for this move anyway, but this just added another layer to her security about a major change to her life. I cannot see how we could have done this in any other way, and this is just one simple example.
I know I’ve been very intermittent in my blog writing, but it is not something I want to give up entirely. Please don’t give up yours, as I really enjoy reading it.
A blog is just an electronic media platform. In itself it is neither good or bad in a moral sense. What makes it good or bad is the type of content in the blog.
Back in the day of Archbishop Sheen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c99to97XYG4), TV was the electronic media platform. Now it is TV and the internet. No doubt if he were alive today, he would be using the internet – not worrying about the particular type of media he uses, but the quality of content on that media platform. I can’t think of a Catholic who used electronic media for communicating the great message of Christ better than Sheen.
I get value from your blog (thank you). Rather than thinking about the media platform (about whether you should continue or not), why not think about the content, instead (and the way that content is communicated i.e. long, decent, well thought-out, well put-together content etc ..). God Bless.