elainegrey

A friend i met in LJ land, back during its heights, who moved out through a number of different platforms as his topics changed and shifted, just posted a ten year anniversary post at his typepad hosted blog.

He referenced a book titled The Shallows, and i followed his offered link to read the book blurb.

Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.

I immediately turn defensive at this: I am NOT loosing MY capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection!

But i do know i am loosing things. Not that i ever had much capacity for spelling, but what i had is probably shot. I don't think i bother with memory for details like addresses and phone numbers and last names past the first few letters needed for the corporate address book to auto-complete the name. The "handles" that are normally exchanged in speech, proper names, are replaced with keys, simple associative terms that are required to fetch a bundle of responses from my digital notebooks. On the other hand, i was bad at remembering names before the internet and computers came along to help me.

I suspect it is not the internet that shapes the ethic, but the ethic that shapes the tool. There is nothing about the structure of the web that enforces short, brief content. I remember, though, early web design exhortations about keeping key content "above the fold" and insisting that people can't read long content on the web. Yet i read entire novels on the web, back when that meant sitting at a desktop CRT (thank you Gutenberg Project). I don't believe can't: i will believe that the ethic of business encouraged developing a clicky-clicky burst communication style. By "ethic of business" i also interpret the "need to figure out how to make money with this thing" also know as "How do we monetize this?" The answer was advertising, which was already eating at long-form entertainment on TV, cable, radio, and magazines. Oh, magazines! The 90s and the heyday of targeted content, when another medium that demonstrably suits long form content disolved into
short, shallow tidbits in a sea of advertisements.

No, i blame advertising on creating The Shallows. I believe The Shallows are out there, but i believe that the perplexing fiscal agreement of the United States consumer is what drives it. "We" care passionately for our entertainments and our information and our connection, but instead of paying for those things, we let others pay for them in exchange for our attention.

Why do we insist on getting for free what we care about? Why are we the product -- the advertising clicks, eyeballs, attention -- and not the patrons?

I suddenly wonder about a King James Bible interrupted every other page with advertisements. I bet i can experience that with a free app from my mobile object's market.