Sven Birkerts in the Digital Age

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Sven Birkerts wrote an article in the American Scholar called "Reading in a Digital Age" where the tagline claims that his essay discusses "why the novel and the Internet are opposites and why the latter undermines the former and makes it more necessary." My meditation here begs to differ. The novel and the internet are not opposites; one informs the other and makes both necessary. There are things I like about Birkerts; he is a careful and thoughtful reader of books. I appreciate what he reads. I appreciate his reveries about books, binding, and paper. I like his reading lists. He reads authors that matter. That said, I would not turn to him to understand the internet, hypertext, or what is happening in social media and its connection to writing.

His arguments tend to be false dichotomies. It is not either/or. The internet is used for one thing and novels are used for another. How is one the opposite? Is a sailboat the opposite of a car? Information on the internet tends not to invite sustained meditation and reading on a linear level. It is organized as a series of connections, and this is how most people read. The mind links information, previous readings and experiences into a reading of the text. A lovely old leather bound book is still, in the end, a hypertext in the mind of the reader - even if that process is slow, thoughtful, and meditative. With that said, I can find the complete works of Dickens on the internet, download them and read them in a slow and thoughtful way.

Birkerts also indulges in the "digital natives" argument about technology - that young people get it (and are therefore cyber-addled cretins) and older people don't (and are therefore thoughtful and meditative). The problem with this argument is obvious to anyone not working in the Ivy Leagues - it is a class issue. I have many students in the community colleges who have had a limited exposure to technology. Their lack of critical thinking skills comes an education system that has seriously failed them and from the teachers who have forgot to keep up in their field who are supposed to teach them those skills. Students are stuck with teachers who think the only way to transmit information is through a two year old, $140 textbook. If a student can get though a class while surfing the internet, that curriculum needs to be revised.

I am currently using the internet to write a novel. It is not a book of postmodern fractured narrative (although I appreciate that approach) but a thoughtful examination of identity, projection and art. I am using Wikimedia to research examples of art that I am exploring, Google Docs as my word processor, and an online concept map program to outline the work. I don't do this because I am trying to use the latest technology (cool factor) but because I have a full-time job and have to be able to write and work anywhere on a moments notice; time spent at home, a break at work, a fleeting moment in a cafe, or an hour in the public library. Technology allows me to merge those moments fairly seamlessly. Yes, I would like a room of my own or an office somewhere, but that will have to wait for another lifetime. My room of my own exists virtually and asynchronously.

I know plenty of people who are proficient in the world of novels and the world of technology and the internet. I can show you hundreds of examples in Facebook - a community where hundreds of authors share information, announce readings, and despair of their vocation. A friend of mine who I consider highly proficient in technology (one of the first people in our little state college to work with researchers abroad via modem) is also a man who is in the middle of reading all of Balzac's novels. This represents nearly a hundred and twenty volumes of text.

What I find interesting about Birkerts' writing style is that all of the novels, magazine articles and movies that that he names feel like mere name dropping: they do not move his argument forward, support his argument, or at least, they do not tell us exactly why novels are the opposite of the internet. The article that he mentions on neuroscience is a single article and not a sustained argument based on even a casual review of the literature. I want to read those books and articles, but for now, they seem to be a distraction, like so many blips and beeps on the screen. In the end, he admits that he reads for entertainment - he doesn't say it that way - he uses words like "resonance."

So why is the novel the opposite of the internet? Is it because one is easier to read lying down?

The same human mind that came up with La Comédie humaine also came up with the internet. The connections between the novels and the internet are more important than the differences. Humans are connective thinkers. A direct example of this kind of thinking is in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Each sentence requires a knowledge of Medieval and Renaissance medical history, religious lore, literary history, and Latin - all in the same sentence! How can you read one paragraph of that book and not know that Wikipedia was inevitable?

What Can't We Do

According to Google Analytics, four visitors to this blog over the last three months have visited via dial-up modems. For their sake, I am typing this very slowly.

There are a lot of reasons not to use technology for teaching and learning. Especially in a place like Humboldt County. There are some places here that are inaccessible. There are some that do not have electricity. The technological infrastructure is weak. There are places where there is not a lot of high speed computers available to the general public. But this shouldn't mean that we shouldn't work on that infrastructure.

For some reason, some think that technological solutions have to have the same effect for all people in all circumstances or they are not solutions. That is like saying that we shouldn't teach reading because many of our students do not have access to books, books are expensive, and some students will require glasses in order to read them. So unless books are free and your reading program includes universal health care, we can't teach reading.

Online learning is not new. I understand the fear of technology, the stress when confronted with change, and the anxiety that a sense of a loss of control can cause. But we have a responsibility to our students to pass on the critical thinking skills necessary to use technology wisely and skillfully, not to pass on our fear, stress, and anxiety.

The digital divide will not be conquered by stopping in our tracks, and we can't go backwards. The same critical thinking skills we used in the old media are applicable in the new.

Revisting the Digital Divide

Image by Dillon K. Hoops via Flickr

I was looking back at some bookmarks and materials that I had on an old computer and it was fascinating to me how the questions around technology have changed. When educators were talking a lot about the "digital divide" back in the early 2000s, the questions were around how were we going to get these expensive machines and infrastructure to the poor. They needed lots of power, cables, expertise and money. Computers were huge and expensive and they still can be today. But we now define a whole other class of machines as computers, including phones, netbooks and PDAs. The most important of these right now are the phones. According to a report by the International Telecommunications Union back in March of this year, at the end of 2008 there were there were an estimated 4.1 billion phone subscriptions world-wide, compared with about 1 billion in 2002. And the definition of a phone has certainly changed since 2002. Phones now play media and connect to the internet and allow for a whole new kind of connection to learning materials. We no longer need to distribute media through CDs or laser discs. Data storage and new kinds of programming (java, ajax, web2.0 tools, etc.) combine to make distributing media easier than ever. Technology is still not absolutely universal, but the wide variety of tools that are now available for communication, the availability of netbooks for under $200, the low-cost of connectivity via WIFI and phone networks means that the real digital divide is one of the imagination. We need to bridge the gap between how we think of learning networks and teaching and the wide variety of tools and technology that are now available.