SacredFacts

Web culture v. slow reading: does your brain hurt?

If you havn't picked up on it already you need to sort out your rss feeds. But there's been a really interesting debate breaking out about whether the internet changes the way you think. I've missed the moment but have been meaning to join in for a week or so. It started with Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic suggesting Google (now a synonym for the web) might be making us stupid. Actually his argument is more subtle but reflects what a number of others have observed: regular web reading and browsing makes it harder to concentrate on a tough read in a book. Among those to pick up on it were Bill Thompson who seems to conclude that rather than changing our brains, online culture simply makes us lazy. Along the way he cites John Battelle's repudiation of Carr and cites Susan Greenfield's book suggesting that screen culture is less enriching than the pages of a book. A theme picked up by John Naughton in The Observer, and doubtless a few others I've missed, who suggests it's not a question of good or bad - just evolution.

Nothing very new here. My father had a book given to him as a boy on "the Art of Reading" - collected lectures from Arthur Quiller Couch - in an attempt to encourage concentration and serious study and combat what he called his "butterfly mind" (he would have been at home on the web). Serious instruction is an impulse which still lingers in some quarters.

For my part, I definitely find it harder to read than I used to but put that down to lack of time and fatigue. My kids spend less time reading than I did at their age - but then they have much more choice. I do think that the linking culture on the net, whilst wonderful, encourages a superficial engagement with subjects rather than immersion. (Take this topic for example!).
When I read a book I also make connections, but they take longer and are deeper to come to fruition. So reading Tony Judt's latest book on the Twentieth Century, for example, will take me a week but will plant thoughts and connections which will take several more weeks to uncover or get round to reading in turn. But I will understand a lot more than I would from scanning some links and Googling. No problem with enjoying the benefits of both of course.
Maybe after calls for slow-food and slow-journalism it's time to remind ourselves about slow-reading.

Lost in Translation

I`ve been in Paris for, among other things, a meeting of European broadcasters and the EBU. However, while here I did an interview with Le Figaro. The reporter was charming and apparently fluent in English, although her notes did resemble a mind map more than perfect shorthand. I ran through the BBC`s global news services - 33 radio services, BBC World TV, the internet, and our plans for broadband and for Arabic and Farsi TV. Very straightforward. So I was a little surprised when Le Figaro announced we were launching 33 new TV channels! Needless to say, no correction has been forthcoming even online where it would be easy to do.   It took them three days to get around to a correction. Too embarrassing for them perhaps? There`s a lot to be said for Teeline... I also dropped in to look at France 24. They have great offices, better studios than BBC World and were trés charmant complimenting the BBC as standard setters.

The either - or fallacy

The "Us v Them" formulation is only one of a number of examples of how polarized positions can represent a fallacy - and pollute argument as a result. It's a characteristic of modern public debate and one which nearly always misleads, politicises unnecessarily or simply confuses. It could be right v left, liberal v conservative, right v wrong, black v white, good v bad..or Us v Them. It's a tactic which allows people to define the opposition in a way that can then be attacked, simplify issues to their most basic constituents, force people to jump one way or another - all with the intention of massing support on one side of an argument. It's a tactic beloved of lobby groups and spin doctors seeking to herd opinion in a particular direction* - and as such I have always felt it is contemptuous of public opinion. It's also, I think, starting to feel like a very tired way of conducting any kind of public debate. I'm certainly tired of others telling me what I stand for and getting it completely wrong. The world is simply more complex and more subtle than the either/or formulation will allow. And solutions lie in the middle, with innovation, adaptation, bridges, adjustments and sometimes compromise, not in stark extremes. Which is why, of course, zealots want to exclude the middle. So I make no apology for occupying the middle ground (for want of a better phrase) uncomfortable, unfashionable or even unattractive as it may sometimes be.

(*I remember once talking to a very successful campaigner who told me he designed campaigns around stark choices. "A black and white photograph may seem to be shades of grey but if you focus right in you will eventually find a black spot sitting next to a white spot - and that's where you mount your campaign", he said. I remember thinking that was undoubtedly a good tactic, but that the real world contained many more colours, greater subtlety and was more interesting as a result).