Lessons on how to concentrate on long texts online must be included in the curriculum
At the beginning of every semester, the journalism students I teach
lament the difficulty in reading long texts and focussing on the meaning
of the words in front of them.
“I get my news from Twitter,” one
of them said, as if Twitter were a news source and not a social
networking website with aggregating capacities. News distributed on
social networks is news often reported by someone somewhere in a
newspaper, on a television website, or a blog. Social networks condense
the meaning of the news article into 140 characters (now upped to 280),
leaving little meaning there.
Class assignments are long articles
to be read on the course’s website. Students have to understand,
research, comment and critique — all online.
Halfway through the
semester, I notice that all their skills improve. They articulate
better. They research with depth. Clearly, the capacity to absorb the
material studied has expanded. This is because it is forced to expand,
in order that they get good grades.
The medium is the message
Students
are encouraged to contribute their opinions and ideas to the lively
topic of how the Internet is changing our brains. We discuss, for
example, how Socrates in Phaedrus said the alphabet would bring
an end to our capacity to memorise ideas. How, since those days of
ancient Greek wisdom, the advent of a new medium has always generated
new, at times useful, Cassandras. Fear of the new: neophobia.
We also discuss the ideas of Nicholas Carr, who, in his book The Shallows — How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, described
what the loss of the kind of deep thought we reach with focussed
reading can do to our minds. We look at what Camille Paglia says about a
society obsessed with images: it can sink in the present without
understanding the context and the meaning of what is really happening in
that present. Pierre Bourdieu dissects the impact of TV on culture,
explaining how talk shows threaten science and academia, for example.
Deleuze, Derrida, Baudrillard — all the complicated French minds are
summoned to make things even harder and to explain how our perception of
reality is altered by a new medium. But, mostly, we gaze into the
prophetic views of Marshall McLuhan and his “medium is the message”
mantra. It’s not what you say that has a real impact on society, it’s
the medium you use which will alter everything in society, especially
perceptions. And thus, in the Internet’s case, our capacity to focus on
reading.
Feeling versus knowing
Our constant
usage of the Internet threatens our reading capacity, it is commonly
said. It results in our decreasing capacity to concentrate, think and
understand things as we were used to. And while the decision-making part
of our brain works in overdrive by clicking, skimming, browsing,
liking, sharing, bookmarking, it is true that we are choosing faster,
but we are not understanding in depth what we chose and why we chose
what we did.
In class, we’ve discussed what we’re looking for when
we’re on the Internet, which is almost always. Although we may think we
are looking for information, news, novelties, we realised that it
mostly boils down to emotions. We tell ourselves we’re looking for data
and facts on which to base our opinions. But once we ask ourselves the
simple “why?”, the deep answer is not “in order to know,” but “so that
we can feel.”
Novelties. We seek the quick, constant gratification
of empty news, not having time to understand their meaning in our
lives. The power of news then — the power to inform, to put a new shape
to the concepts in our minds — gets lost. We feel, but we do not know.
And if we don’t know, it’ll be even easier to manipulate us.
The
motto of the zeitgeist is images, not words. But images have a
double-edged power. We click and see a man squatting to protect his
genitals from attacking dogs in an American prison. We click and we see a
rockstar twerking in hot pants. Twerking, torture, pain, dance,
glamour, cruelty — it’s all the same. On the same screen. Quickly
alternating. It’s the Internet.
“It is making us feel jaded,” admitted one student.
Proposing solutions
In
this open laboratory of thought about the impact of the Internet on our
brains and our capacity to absorb knowledge, we force ourselves to
understand and we push to discuss and propose solutions. And we have
reached a simple proposal based on these premises: isn’t reading taught
in classrooms? Aren’t we accompanied on our first steps to understand
the meaning of letters, words, ideograms? As much as reading on paper
needs to be inculcated in order to be mastered, so does e-reading.
We
have many techniques to propose to the Ministry of Human Resource
Development. They can be applied at the same age when children learn to
read. Provide a screen and connectivity, Mark Zuckerberg, sure. But dish
out funds to teach us how to connect, research, discover, and also how
to disconnect, reflect, focus, until we’ve finished reading a long text
online. How to click on hypertext only once we’ve reached the end of an
article and then, and only then, we may go back to deepen our
understanding, to search for more knowledge. This is how we will be able
to prove that reading online is just as good as reading on paper: by
learning how to do it right.
Yes, you can read long texts online.
Deep reading. But you have to learn the self-discipline needed to absorb
the information and make it become knowledge. The way children are
reprimanded if their attention wanders off while reading on paper as
they learn how to focus, the same can be explained when training to
e-read. Turn off the 3G or WiFi and keep your eyes on the screen until
you’ve reached the end of all these paragraphs. Then explore the Web for
more. In order to deepen our independent gaze into reality, we must be
helped to wade through the metastasis of communication surrounding us,
so we may battle the anorexia of true information: knowledge.
The Hindu Newspaper
November 28, 2017 00:15 IS
