There is currently a great deal of fanfare and criticism in the press over Clay Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, which celebrates the Internet’s achievements. The Boston Review sums up the book’s intriguing argument:
“Just as gin helped the British to smooth out the brutal consequences of the Industrial Revolution, the Internet is helping us to deal more constructively with the abundance of free time generated by modern economies. Shirky argues that free time became a problem after the end of WWII, as Western economies grew more automated and more prosperous. Heavy consumption of television provided an initial solution. Gin, that ‘critical lubricant that eased our transition from one kind of society to another,’ gave way to the sitcom. More recently TV viewing has given way to the Internet. Shirky argues that much of today’s online culture—including videos of toilet-flushing cats and Wikipedia editors wasting 19,000 (!) words on an argument about whether the neologism ‘malamanteau’ belongs on the site—is much better than television. Better because, while sitcoms give us couch potatoes, the Internet nudges us toward creative work. That said, Cognitive Surplus is not a celebration of digital creativity along the lines of Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman or Lawrence Lessig’s ‘remix culture.’ Shirky instead focuses on the sharing aspect of online creation: we are, he asserts, by nature social, so the Internet, unlike television, lets us be who we really are.” (“Sharing Liberally,” http://bostonreview.net/BR35.4/morozov.php).
The Los Angeles Times contrasts the book with Nicholas Carr’s thesis in The Shallows, which argues that
“even as we may be developing finer motor skills through constant Internet navigation, we’re losing the ability to focus for the significant periods of time necessary for deep thinking. . . . ‘[T]he news is even more disturbing than I had suspected,’ he writes. ‘Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators, and Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.’ Even more, he continues, ‘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.’ Carr has synthesized a wealth of cognitive research to illustrate how the Internet is changing the way we process information. ‘The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention,’ he points out. He is particularly disturbed by the Internet’s effect on our relationship with reading: ‘[I]n the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers,’ he argues, ‘we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us.’” (“What is the Internet Doing to Us?”, http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/jun/27/entertainment/la-ca-carr-shirky-20100627)
We have all been thrown into a communications revolution that seems to be advancing faster than we can make sense of it, and only time will tell what the sum of many of our technologies are doing to us while we‘re along for the ride. Yet we need to be attentive to communication about these unfolding matters as much as the unfolding matters themselves. Shirky and Carr are representative of the way a lot of discourse about the Internet is getting carved out between these two poles, so I’d like to highlight one idea that seems to be missing on both scores:
Shirky’s argument lacks a sense of the Internet as an individual activity and, more so, Carr’s argument lacks a sense of books as social activities.
This is not to argue that Shirky is wrong about possibilities for sociality on the web, nor to deny Carr the deep and needed solitude that books ought to provide. Rather, I think these debates we’re seeing unfold—and the policies they may entail—would be greatly advanced by examining how the Internet can be an individual activity and reading books can constitute a social activity.
The very words “Inter” and “net” don’t exactly help us see how the “web” may foster solitude; the terms assume we are all invariably connected. But solipsistic shopping sprees and Internet addiction camps testify to the medium’s individualizing possibilities (http://www.pewinternet.org/Commentary/2007/November/Boot-Camp-for-Internet-Addicts.aspx). We can be clicking around an electronic cave as much as we’re addressing and being addressed by others online. Similarly, books often get cast as “solitary” and “single-minded,” but can equally been seen in terms of “deep engagement” and being “other-minded.” In The Company We Keep, Wayne Booth set forth an underused but highly heuristic image of the book as a conversational friend, given the medium’s ability to put one in dialogue with the extended and carefully chosen thoughts of another human being.
In other words, much current talk presumes the Internet necessarily opens discursive space for others while books provide a minimal mode of civic engagement. It strikes me that thinking a bit more about reverse assumptions would help Shirky better theorize the counterintuitive constraints under which creative efforts always operate (see Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity) and help Carr frame his efforts in terms more conducive to where he seems to want to go: rather than focusing on others’ absence/presence, it may be that one’s way of being with others matters most.
