2 Years of Aurora Array: or, Why I Am A Bad Blogger

I launched this blog two years ago today, so today seems as good a day as any to get it going again after a long hiatus. I have been blogging on and off since 2006, and from the beginning I have struggled with the question: "Why blog?"

At some level I am not a fan of blogs, in the same way that I am not a fan of the Internet in general. Of course, I use the Internet all the time, but only because, as with so many other aspects of modern existence, to do without would mean to live a much harder life. I drive a car for similar reasons. But if I lived, say, in Paris, where one can easily live without a car, I would gladly do so.

The same goes for the Internet. The 21st century makes life extremely difficult--and socially marginalizing--for people who would choose to forego the Internet, electronic gadgets, social media, and the like. If I were offered the chance to live in a world resembling, say, the 1970s, when the World Wide Web did not exist and nobody but a few nerds owned a personal computer, I might be tempted to give up the Information Age and its dubious merits. (Well, I actually did live in the 1970s, long ago, but there's no going back at this point.)

As a lifelong writer and reader, I have found that the Internet has made reading seem curiously flat. Perhaps it is, in part, because everything comes to you through the same screen, filtered through the same cold, sterile window, unlike the warm sensuality of books. Some dismiss such bibliophilia as "nostalgic" or "aesthetic", but to me this only shows their pitiful failure to value nostalgia and aesthetics, both of which are deeply significant, rather than superfluous, to human life.

Those are topics that would need to be explored more in depth in later posts--which indicates part of my problem with online reading in general and blogs in particular. That is, the small space (reflecting our stunted attention spans) allowed by blogging does not give adequate room to the full wanderings of thought that are allowed by the printed word. Blogging is fine for certain types of writing... journalism or reportage, for instance, which is essentially what the word "[We]blog" means... but it is antithetical to the type of unhurried, deeply focused thought to which books are eminently hospitable.

It is not just the short space provided by the blog medium, but the immediacy of blog publishing that is part of the problem. To publish now... that is the imperative of blogging. Again, this may be perfect for journalism, but hardly conducive to the extended reflection, careful crafting, and private evolution that great literature has always required. A blog is like exposing one's notes, one's random jottings and tentative thoughts, to the whole world. This may be just fine and dandy for some people... apparently for many in our exhibitionist, social media-obsessed society... but not the most comfortable zone for a traditional writer who guards his slowly-evolving work until it is ready for the light of day, fully thought out and refined into a work that is meant to be permanent and settled, with the notes only exposed much later, often posthumously.

So I have struggled with understanding what my particular purpose in blogging is, or ought to be. By nature I am not a journalist, interested primarily in chronicling and/or commenting on the specifics of day-to-day events, whether they be in the global, national, local, or personal sphere. I am instead of a more philosophical and poetic bent, which means that I focus on the big picture, reflecting on the universals and generalities of life and the world, rather than obsessing over the particulars and details of What's Happening Now. And this type of deeply reflective thinking and writing makes an awkward fit for the medium of blogging, or indeed for the Internet in general. It is a style that is much more at home in books.

Some say that extended prose (to say nothing of poetry) is going the way of the dodo, a victim of our hyperactive, information-saturated, attention-deficient times. If that is true, then real culture, too, is endangered, for culture requires leisure, which involves the ability to be still and silent and to have space for reflection and deeper, fuller kinds of perception and experience. The blog, and electronic communications in general, may have their place in our current intellectual ecology, as we speak in brief snatches to hurried passersby--but hopefully, for the sake of culture, these energetic new colonizers will not crowd out and destroy the older, more slow-moving species.

Learning Curves

There used to be such a thing as a polymath, i.e. someone who had mastered all subjects (or at least a very large range of subjects) and could be said to "know it all". A walking encyclopedia, if you will. Granted, such people were the exception to the rule (for most of human history, people with anything beyond the most rudimentary education have been the exception rather than the norm). But during the Renaissance, such an achievement was considered attainable enough that it was held up as an ideal... the "Renaissance Man", someone who was talented and accomplished in many different fields of human endeavor, not just an expert in one area. One thinks of Leonardo da Vinci as perhaps the most famous instance of a Renaissance Man. There is also the more recent example of Goethe, who is described on the back of one Penguin Classics volume as "scientist, critic, autobiographer, letter-writer, sage, statesman, conversationalist"--and all this in addition to his biggest claim to fame as Germany's greatest poet.

Many people have noted that it has become more or less impossible to attain the status of polymath in today's world, given the explosion of information and the ever-increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge that this has created. Today's academics tend to focus narrowly on one subcategory of a subcategory of a subject area. Indeed, given the sheer quantity of what there is to learn in our 21st century world, it is enough of a challenge just to become an expert in one subject, let alone all (or even just many) subjects.

But there is another factor that further complicates the picture and adds to the difficulty of knowledge mastery, and that is the ever-accelerating rate of change in today's culture. In the past, once you mastered a subject, you didn't need to learn a whole lot more to remain a master in that field. Today, in many areas, there is no end to the learning required to stay on top of the latest developments in the field. This is especially true of technology, of course, but applies to varying degrees in other areas as well.

One problem this creates is that depth of learning becomes far less important than learning just enough to keep up and continue to function without falling piteously far behind the curve. After all, what good is it now if you became an expert in a 1995 version of a certain software package or programming language that has changed dramatically since then, but which you failed to keep up with? Many types of knowledge have an increasingly short shelf-life and become obsolete almost as quickly as they become "necessary" to maintaining one's professional expertise and skill set. Why should we invest the time and energy in learning the latest thing in depth when the knowledge will be useless a year from now? Why not learn just enough to get by? It's sort of like cramming for a test just to pass the test, without caring if we retain the knowledge for the future or truly learn something deeply. After all, how can we explore the ocean depths when we have to spend all of our time just treading water? Better yet, why should we care to learn something deeply when the knowledge will be worthless a year from now?

The end result of this ephemerality of knowledge is that expertise and depth in a given subject area is becoming less and less possible with each day that goes by. But perhaps more to the point, it is not so much impossible as it is increasingly irrelevant. Much knowledge in today's world is only "knowledge" for a brief time, then is discarded like yesterday's newspaper, as relevant and useful as last week's weather forecast, as sought-after as the last decade's fashions. Under these conditions, why invest more time and effort into learning something than you really have to?

Let Us Pause for Thought

In this article, David Levy discusses the Memex, a personal information device imagined (but never built) in 1945 by pioneering computer scientist Vannevar Bush. However, unlike most commentators on the Memex who celebrate its role as a forerunner of the personal computer, hypertext, and the World Wide Web, Levy looks at the legacy of Bush's idea in a different light: its effect on thinking and learning. Levy's assessment is ironic, for, whereas Bush's whole purpose in conceiving the Memex was to solve the problem of information overload, the information technologies that have been inspired by Bush's idea have ultimately served to make an already tremendous problem many times worse.

The problem, as Levy points out, is not merely that the volume of information available has exploded, but that the nature of networked, hyperlinked information, and our constant immersion in it, makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find the time and space in which to reflect upon and contemplate that information. This issue has been addressed by a number of writers, but Levy takes the admirable step of bringing in the German philosopher Josef Pieper to help enlighten the problem for us. Leisure--the time and space for stillness and reflection--is the ground from which knowledge and wisdom can grow. Our modern mental landscape, however, is cluttered with weeds. Who has the time, in a world of incessant "information", to stop and think?

Library of Congress All Atwitter

In what is surely one of the most bizarre historic preservation decisions ever made by a government agency (even by government agency standards), the Library of Congress is saving for posterity every tweet ever tweeted on Twitter.

Now why our national library would deem worthy of preservation in perpetuity every single 140-character-or-less burst of communication "tweeted" since the service began in 2006 is beyond me. Would they, if they could, save every letter ever written? Every telephone conversation? Every email? Every blog post and comment? Every Facebook status update?

Of course, many of the above-mentioned communications are meant to be private, while Twitter updates are public by definition. Then again, history has a way of making all surviving recorded communications, however private their origins, fall into the domain of scholarly and/or public knowledge.

But the more relevant question to ask here is: Why? Which is not to doubt that some Twitter communications may be worthy of remembering and would be of potential value to historians and other researchers--but every single one?

This goes against every principle of archival preservation, which is decidedly not about saving everything, but about selecting what is worthy of being preserved for future generations. The LOC seems to be taking the intellectually lazy approach to preservation. It is acting like a hoarder, obsessively saving every little scrap, however worthless or forgettable it might be.

Perhaps future historians, confronted with millions upon millions of tweets, will say, "I'm sorry, but that's a little too much information."

The Irrelevancy of the iPad

At right: The original iPad.

There has been much hype about Apple's latest toy, the iPad (which is being released today), just as there is about every new gadget that comes out. Since the 1990s, there has been an almost continuous stream of hype and giddy optimism about computer technology in general, and an ongoing myth about how the Internet, the iPod, smart phones, Facebook, blogs, etc. are "revolutionizing" our turn-of-the-millenium world. There can be little doubt that we are living in the midst of a technological and cultural revolution in the strictly objective sense (i.e., that things are changing a lot, and changing fast), but it is another question entirely as to whether this revolution is completely good or beneficial.

I can already hear the impassioned screams of "Luddite!" at merely questioning the complete goodness and beneficence of the current digital revolution, as though I were committing a grave sacrilege against the all-knowing god of the microchip. But technology is our invention and our servant, at least that is what it is supposed to be, and we certainly have the right to question our own creation and to evaluate it soberly (which doesn't mean blindly demonizing it any more than it means blindly exalting it).

As I've said before, computers have produced many benefits for society, and the iPad will surely prove to be a useful tool for many people, but it will not help to advance human knowledge and intelligence any more than the computer already has. And it is questionable how much the computer has done to advance human knowledge and intelligence (in many ways, it seems to work against it, but that is a topic for another post). The only real advantage for knowledge that networked digital technology provides--and it is a big one--is that it greatly aids in the dissemination of information, and makes it easier to find things. But it does nothing, and even harms, the ability to actually gain knowledge or to enhance intelligence. We have already reached the apex of mind-enhancing technology. In fact, we reached that point centuries ago. This great advance was called the codex (known more popularly as the "book"). Gutenberg's printing revolution greatly enchanced this technology and made it more widely accessible, but we haven't really improved on it substantially. Even before the invention of the codex in the early Christian era, however, human knowledge and intelligence thrived and advanced, and culture blossomed and flourished. Wisdom never needed technology, still doesn't, and never will.

In our oh-so-enlightened and sophisticated 21st century, we like to look back at the "naive" utopianism of the 1950s, with its faith in space exploration and household gadgets, and even to look back in scorn at disastrous 20th century attempts to "modernize" our cities and our food. But we ourselves have our own starry-eyed utopianism, and that is our optimistic faith in computers and all the associated digital technologies that promise to make our lives complete. Perhaps, in 2050 or so, our children's children will look back on us and see us as laughably naive, or perhaps even resent what we did to ruin our cultural landscape and obesify our intellectual lives with our blind digital faith.

In the meantime, whenever I enter the marketplace of the microchip, I will follow the example of my teacher Socrates and be amazed at how many things I don't need.

The Internet and Intelligence

And here we have a rather interesting survey on the question of how the Internet will affect human intelligence over the next decade. An amazing 76 percent of the respondents (who were not a sampling of the public at large, but a select group of professionals and "experts") believed that the Internet will "enhance human intelligence" over the next 10 years. These people agreed that "as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information, they become smarter and make better choices".

Wow. I hardly know where to begin. The shortest and simplest response I can give is that this notion strikes me as being incredibly naive. This must be based on the overwhelming evidence that people have already begun to get smarter and make better choices over the last 15 years or so. (Yes, that is irony you detect.)

Two different people quoted in the article clarified this idea by stating that, while individuals would not necessarily get smarter, "as a society, we’ll get smarter collectively".

Okay. I have to confess it's not exactly clear to me what it means to say that society will "get smarter collectively". I suspect that this does not merely refer to the increase in information, which has been happening since the beginning of time, nor that these folks literally believe in a hive mind. I'm assuming they mean that the average intelligence of human beings will increase during the 2010s.

All I can say is that the 3/4 of these "experts" who subscribe to this view seem to have a pretty narrow idea of what intelligence is, if they believe it is something that can be increased by having access to lots of information. Much more intelligent is what Nicholas Carr, author of "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", said on the matter:

What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.

More on that later.

Information Overload

In this article it is suggested that the idea of the Internet causing information overload is a myth, based on the fact that people have raised concerns about the deleterious mental effects of new technologies throughout history. It tells of Conrad Gessner, the 16th century Swiss scientist who compiled the Bibliotheca universalis, an index of every book that was available at the time, who worried that such an abundance of information was "confusing and harmful" to the mind. The article goes on to suggest that since someone felt this way about the world of printed books back in the 1500s, our own 21st century concerns about information overload are just as unfounded.

But wait. We are assuming that Gessner was wrong about the problem of information overload in his time. And we are concluding from this that we, too, must be mistaken about information overload caused by the Internet age. Well, what if Gessner was right to realize that the vast world of printed books was too much for any one human mind to handle? And what if the exponential expansion of Web sites and other media in our own time has only made an already monumental problem a thousand times worse?

In terms of human brain capacity, we are no more intelligent than our Cro-Magnon forebears (who were not grunting troglodytes but articulate human beings with finely crafted tools and weapons, religious beliefs and practices, and sophisticated art). Google may not be making us stupid, but it is not making us any smarter either.

The ironic result of our millenia of accumulating human knowledge is that the individual human being can know less and less of the knowledge that is available to the human race as a whole. This is a simple mathematical fact, given that the body of human knowledge keeps growing while the capacity and capability of the human brain remains constant.

So, while it might have been possible for a Cro-Magnon sage in a fire-lit Ice Age cavern to know basically all that a human being was capable of knowing at that point in time, the ability of any one person to master all of human knowledge has gradually shrunk to the point of impossibility (which it had reached at least by the invention of the printing press, if not sooner).

In short, the Information Age has only accelerated the further diminishment of the individual human being's knowledge as a proportion of all available human knowledge. Perhaps Google really is making us stupid.