In today’s New York Times, Neal Gabler sounds the death knell of the period of great ideas. Citing headlines in a recent Atlantic Monthly edition as evidence for an increasing cultural drive for information over ideas and analysis, he makes the case that the Internet and social media go hand-in-hand with a “post-idea” world.
He writes:
“In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas.”
Now, however:
“It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world. Even though there are sites and blogs dedicated to ideas, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, etc., the most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas. It is largely useless except insofar as it makes the possessor of the information feel, well, informed.”
In fact, he goes so far as to say that tweeting is “anti-thinking.” This isn’t the first op-ed I’ve read about the evils of social media (and certainly not the first I’ve read in the NY Times, interestingly) – it reportedly destroys real relationships in favor of short, superficial ones, allows us to embrace our supposedly postmodern desire to be ignorant, and contributes to our ever-shrinking attention spans.
The problems with these op-eds are similar.
1) The problem of the Golden Age: First, there never was a Golden Age of humans being informed and analaytical beings with strong positive social relationships. Whenever an article features a Golden Age argument, you can be sure the author is arguing against a foil. Throughout most of history, and still in many parts of the world today, education and access to scholarly news has been restricted to those with money and access. Social relationships were often characterized by race, gender, and class hatred, and plain old abuse and meanness. I have yet to see any op-eds against social media citing research illustrating that social media is truly bad for humanity. It changes things, but change itself doesn’t prove much. One cover title from the Atlantic Monthly certainly doesn’t count as anything more than very loose circumstantial evidence.
2) Reason and Religion: Gabler laments the end of the Enlightenment in favor of religious dogma, superstition, etc – but its precisely Enlightenment thinking that turned the Bible, in America, into a book of literal data compared to a more nuanced view by previous theologians. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. You can google it and read the whole book, unlike the people who lived during Shakespeare’s time). We pride ourselves on our rationality but the truth is rationality is flexible and vulnerable. It can be trained to work in various ways, and people can reason to absolutely wrong and/or unethical conclusions. We can be trained to have warped or stunted rationality. Enlightenment emphasis on data and observation has led to some pretty negative consequences in terms of American religion. And so also social media can be used to promote human rights or xenophobia.
3) Twittering away attention spans? Does the brevity of Twitter and some other social media applications generate shorter attention spans? Again, I’d like to see evidence. I’d also like to see evidence that as a culture, or even species we ever had greater attention spans than what we have today. The fact that some people in history memorized entire books says as much to my mind about the lack of available books than it does about the culture valuation of attention. Moreover, some studies have shown that social media apps in the workplace contribute to productivity, because the multi-tasking brain stays active and people are juiced by some enjoyable breaks.
The real issue, to my mind, in enhancing analytical behavior and demand for good ideas is the educational system. We have to be trained to think in a number of ways – to absorb information, to produce new and creative ideas, and to communicate those well. If I were a teacher, I would use Twitter as a way to teach people to state a thesis, and use online education technologies to enhance the learning experience outside the classroom. While some people are fortunate enough to have good teachers, we don’t as a society value it enough to redo the system and make teaching a high-value, high-powered career.
But in the meantime, we can at least have our horizons expanded by new ideas from around the world. And we use our social networks (like Facebook, where I was alerted to this NY Times article) to get opinions from our trusted friends and acquaintances on topics ranging from economics to astrophysics – and yes, what Kate Middleton wore today. I can read about her online and then turn to an article about the new space-time invisbility cloak. Frankly, I feel pretty lucky.
