Clay Shirky vs. Nicholas Carr

by Clay Shirky via RSS


I think Carr’s premises are correct: the mechanisms of media affect the nature of thought. The web presents us with unprecedented abundance. This can lead to interrupt-driven info-snacking, which robs people of the ability to find time to think about just one thing persistently. I also think that these changes are significant enough to motivate us to do something about it. I disagree, however, about what it is we should actually be doing.

Carr quotes Maryanne Wolf’s assertion that deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking. It’s hard to know what to make of this claim; there are a host of people, from mathematicians to jazz musicians, who practice kinds of deep thought that are perfectly distinguishable from deep reading. Similarly, there are many kinds of reading for which the internet has been a boon; it would be hard to argue that the last ten years have seen a decrease in either the availability or comprehension of material on scientific or technical subjects, for example.

But the anxiety at the heart of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” doesn’t actually seem to be about thinking, or even reading, but culture.

Despite the sweep of the title, it’s focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life. You can see this in Carr’s polling of “literary types,” in his quoting of Wolf and the playwright Richard Foreman, and in the reference to War and Peace, the only work mentioned by name. Now War and Peace isn’t just any piece of writing, of course; it is one of the longest novels in the canon, and symbolizes the height of literary ambition and of readerly devotion.

But here’s the thing: it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting.

This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream. Much of the current concern about the internet, in fact, is a misdirected complaint about television, which displaced books as the essential medium by the 1970s.

As a consolation prize, though, litterateurs were allowed to retain their cultural status. Even as television came to dominate culture, we continued to reassure one another that War and Peace or À La Recherche du Temps Perdu were Very Important in some vague way. (This tension has produced an entire literature about the value of reading Proust that is now more widely read than Proust’s actual oeuvre.)

And now the internet has brought reading back as an activity. As Carr notes, “we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.” Well, yes. But because the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we’d been emptily praising all these years, the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture is now becoming clear.

And this, I think, is the real anxiety behind the essay: having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace.

Carr quotes Richard Foreman, who rightly observes that the ‘complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality’ is at risk. But I worked with Foreman in the early 90’s, when I was at another theater company down the block from his, and heard him make another relevant observation, in response to a question about why his plays weren’t “realistic.” The implication was that if his plays were wordy, abstract, and dense, it was because he was being intentionally difficult; his reply was that different themes require different forms and vice-versa, and that he didn’t write like Eugene O’Neill because he was working on different themes than O’Neill.

This link between form and theme is true of any medium. Making the net’s intellectual ethic as valuable as it can be will mean, among other things, securing for ourselves an ability to concentrate amidst our garden of ethereal delights. No matter how we solve that problem, though, it won’t bring back the cathedral-like model. On the network we have, the bazaar often works better than the cathedral, from the individual mind to the overall culture. Getting networked society right will mean producing the work whose themes best resonate on the net, just as getting the printing press right meant perfecting printed forms.

Carr is correct that there is cultural sacrifice in the transformation of the media landscape, but this is hardly the first time that has happened. The printing press sacrificed the monolithic, historic, and elite culture of Europe by promoting a diverse, contemporary, and vulgar one. That upstart literature has become the new high culture, and the challenge today comes, yet again, from the broadening of participation in both consumption and production of media.

Given this change, the question we need to be asking isn’t whether there is sacrifice; sacrifice is inevitable with serious change. The question we need to be asking is whether the sacrifice is worth it or, more importantly, what we can do to help make the sacrifice worth it. And the one strategy pretty much guaranteed not to improve anything is hoping that we’ll somehow turn the clock back. This will fail, while neither resuscitating the past nor improving the future.

This is what I find so puzzling about Carr. Unlike know-nothing critics of the medium, like Michael Gorman, Sven Birkerts, or Andrew Keen, Carr understands the net as well as anyone writing today. Yet his contrarian stance is slowly forcing him into a caricature of Luddism, increasingly unable to offer much of a suggestion for what to do next. A few years ago he could write, of Wikipedia, “Certainly, it’s useful—I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject.” Fast forward to the middle of 2008, and he is decrying not just Wikipedia, but Google, the Industrial Revolution, and even the invention of clocks. I doubt Carr thinks European society was actually better before widespread time-keeping (and therefore before the printing press), but even pseudo-Luddism is a waste of his intellect.

William Sayoran once remarked, “Everybody has got to die … but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” Luddism is a social version of that, where people are encouraged to believe that change is inevitable, except, perhaps, this time. This wish for stasis is bad for society, though not because it succeeds. The essential fact of Luddite complaint is that it only begins after a change has already taken place, so Luddites are mainly harmless whiners (except, of course, for the original Luddites, who were murderous thugs.) The real problem is elsewhere; Luddism is bad for society because it misdirects people’s energy and wastes their time.

The change we are in the middle of isn’t minor and it isn’t optional, but nor are its contours set in stone. We are a long way from discovering and perfecting the net’s native forms, what Barthes called the ‘genius’ particular to a medium. To get there, we must find ways to focus amid new intellectual abundance, but this is not a new challenge. Once the printing press meant that there were more books than a person could read in a lifetime, scholars had to sharpen disciplines and publishers define genres, as a bulwark against the information overload of the 16th century. Society was better after that transition than before, even though it took two hundred years to get there.

And now we’re facing a similar challenge, caused again by abundance, and taking it on will again mean altering our historic models for the summa bonum of educated life. It will be hard and complicated; abundance precipitates greater social change than scarcity. But our older habits of consumption weren’t virtuous, they were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access. Nostalgia for the accidental scarcity we’ve just emerged from is just a sideshow; the main event is trying to shape the greatest expansion of expressive capability the world has ever known.

* * *