![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
What internet are these people on?
Dec. 16th, 2009 11:29 amApparently, the internet is destroying our brains by denying us the ability to appreciate and comprehend a story.
That's the message of a review on the website DoubleX of Douglas "Generation X" Coupland's new novel Generation A. I don't know how much of the reviewer's take would be supported by the novel itself. I haven't read it. So to be perfectly clear, I'm addressing the content of the review here.
It opens thusly:
Now, I know that despite what I do for a living, not everybody sits there and reads "stories", per se, on the internet... though that certainly is one of the oldest and best-established uses of the internet, which grew out of primary textual mediums and grew into An Actual Thing during an age when most people didn't have the pipes to make really effective use of pages that were heavy on any medium besides the written word.
However, this seems very much to be "going overboard". The mention of Mad Men is almost a perfect (if likely unintentional) winking example of what Steven "Berlin Is Not A Nickname" Johnson wrote about in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. TV shows are increasingly giving us complex, multithreaded, ongoing narratives, and they aren't alone. We live in an age of increasing narrative complexity and sophistication... though that's not saying anything exceptional about our age. It's simply the arc of history. Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, for instance, is a more sophisticated work of literature than anything attributed to Homer. It contains greater levels of detail in a single scene than the Book of Genesis affords the entirety of creation. It does this not because it's an uh-maaaaay-zing book but simply because it employs more complex narrative devices than the "And then, and then, and" style that characterized much of the history of human literature, before folks like Geoffrey Chaucer started getting frisky with form.
Isaac Asimov wrote some amazing books that are very readable, but their length and depth of detail seems paltry and their writing style seems primitive scant decades later. Mark Twain did not aim his writing at an audience of schoolchildren, but that's primarily who reads his work today.
I hope nobody thinks I am faulting Mr. Clemens or Dr. Asimov. I am doing that no more than I am praising Ms. Meyer... I regard each of those men as possessing of a distinctive and peculiar genius, but each generation of humanity is limited to what they can build on the accomplishments of those who came before. Each time a writer successfully increases the sophistication of the state of the art of writing, each time one helps to push the envelope in some small way, that writer increases the appetite of the audience for more sophisticated narratives and also helps show the way to them.
So what does Generation A, a modern novel with what we can presume to be a modern level of sophistication, have to say about modern reading habits?
The reviewer quotes this without context. The book is set in a recognizable near-future. Maybe Douglas Coupland has invented (I won't say predicted) a future where people buy commercial pop lit out of an obligation to have them on their shelves, much like some people allegedly do with Great Works Of Literature. (I don't know if anybody actually does. In my family, we read them.) I don't know. The author of the review, though, describes it as a "zingy" indictment of modern commercialization and its ills.
As they say dans la belle internet, "Lolwut?"
I can be a little out of touch with the dominant culture, but do people really order the latest hot release from Amazon because their email tells them to and then not ever bother to read them? Who has the money to do that? I'm sure there are people who are honestly that mindless in their buying habits, but the stuff people are getting rich selling them ain't books.
Amazon has its faults and its failings, but one of them isn't somehow destroying literacy and the ability to coherently follow a narrative by selling books.
And as for the rest of the internet... or the rest of culture... I can't believe that humanity is losing its ability to follow narratives. We are strangled by this ability on a daily basis. It's why we see conspiracy theories. It's why the news media refers to its focus as "stories" rather than "events", why it focuses the way it does, why it follows people who aren't really that relevant until the constant focus has made them relevant and then long past the point of relevancy. They aren't following the person, they're following the story, because that's what they've found keeps their audience interested.
Or look at American Idol. I don't watch it, I don't like it... but the narrative is an inherent part of its formula and its appeal. If it were just a talent competition, nobody would care nearly as much, and they wouldn't become so invested in its participants. The producers frame it all to help bring the narrative to light, and the media and the bloggers and the people at home all work together to shape the story.
The review suggests that the book depicts a world where stories have given way to anecdotes, because of the internet. That's silly... people don't follow personal blogs for the bite-sized anecdotes that make up each entry. If that were the case, there wouldn't be any reason to keep coming back to the same blog. Suggesting that they do is like worrying that the novel, being made up of individual scenes that are not usually complete stories, is going to destroy our ability to understand a story.
Narrative is all around us, even when it isn't. Our need for narrative has driven the development of written language from tally marks and arbitrary symbols to phonetic alphabets that could be used by almost anyone. The internet's development has been shaped by that need and will continue to be shaped by it. It's not going anywhere.
That's the message of a review on the website DoubleX of Douglas "Generation X" Coupland's new novel Generation A. I don't know how much of the reviewer's take would be supported by the novel itself. I haven't read it. So to be perfectly clear, I'm addressing the content of the review here.
It opens thusly:
You know the feeling. You sit at your computer, a dozen windows open on your screen, skipping and clicking among them. You read a paragraph of an article, check movie times, and skim a few news headlines, all while chatting with a friend about your take on last night’s Mad Men. An e-mail pops up and you click over only to find it’s another Amazon promotion. You think for a second that you should unsubscribe, but didn’t you already try that and maybe you can’t unsubscribe from Amazon, and didn’t you mean to buy that book your friend just mentioned?! Suddenly you hit an overload moment and screech to a stop. Wait a minute, you wonder. Is the Internet destroying my brain? It’s not that the information you’re taking in is necessarily trivial—you might be reading about, say, climate change in one of those windows—it’s the way you’re receiving it, in fragmented bits, that frays your consciousness.
More and more, we’re allowing fragments of information to fill our brains, instead of the extended narratives that have long sustained our imaginations and our intellects. Of course, the history of culture is rife with such warnings and often they utterly missed the point of whichever creative development (the novel! photography! movies!) they reviled. And it’s possible to go overboard.
Now, I know that despite what I do for a living, not everybody sits there and reads "stories", per se, on the internet... though that certainly is one of the oldest and best-established uses of the internet, which grew out of primary textual mediums and grew into An Actual Thing during an age when most people didn't have the pipes to make really effective use of pages that were heavy on any medium besides the written word.
However, this seems very much to be "going overboard". The mention of Mad Men is almost a perfect (if likely unintentional) winking example of what Steven "Berlin Is Not A Nickname" Johnson wrote about in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. TV shows are increasingly giving us complex, multithreaded, ongoing narratives, and they aren't alone. We live in an age of increasing narrative complexity and sophistication... though that's not saying anything exceptional about our age. It's simply the arc of history. Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, for instance, is a more sophisticated work of literature than anything attributed to Homer. It contains greater levels of detail in a single scene than the Book of Genesis affords the entirety of creation. It does this not because it's an uh-maaaaay-zing book but simply because it employs more complex narrative devices than the "And then, and then, and" style that characterized much of the history of human literature, before folks like Geoffrey Chaucer started getting frisky with form.
Isaac Asimov wrote some amazing books that are very readable, but their length and depth of detail seems paltry and their writing style seems primitive scant decades later. Mark Twain did not aim his writing at an audience of schoolchildren, but that's primarily who reads his work today.
I hope nobody thinks I am faulting Mr. Clemens or Dr. Asimov. I am doing that no more than I am praising Ms. Meyer... I regard each of those men as possessing of a distinctive and peculiar genius, but each generation of humanity is limited to what they can build on the accomplishments of those who came before. Each time a writer successfully increases the sophistication of the state of the art of writing, each time one helps to push the envelope in some small way, that writer increases the appetite of the audience for more sophisticated narratives and also helps show the way to them.
So what does Generation A, a modern novel with what we can presume to be a modern level of sophistication, have to say about modern reading habits?
“Amazon increases the need of humans to own books, but not necessarily to read them.”
The reviewer quotes this without context. The book is set in a recognizable near-future. Maybe Douglas Coupland has invented (I won't say predicted) a future where people buy commercial pop lit out of an obligation to have them on their shelves, much like some people allegedly do with Great Works Of Literature. (I don't know if anybody actually does. In my family, we read them.) I don't know. The author of the review, though, describes it as a "zingy" indictment of modern commercialization and its ills.
As they say dans la belle internet, "Lolwut?"
I can be a little out of touch with the dominant culture, but do people really order the latest hot release from Amazon because their email tells them to and then not ever bother to read them? Who has the money to do that? I'm sure there are people who are honestly that mindless in their buying habits, but the stuff people are getting rich selling them ain't books.
Amazon has its faults and its failings, but one of them isn't somehow destroying literacy and the ability to coherently follow a narrative by selling books.
And as for the rest of the internet... or the rest of culture... I can't believe that humanity is losing its ability to follow narratives. We are strangled by this ability on a daily basis. It's why we see conspiracy theories. It's why the news media refers to its focus as "stories" rather than "events", why it focuses the way it does, why it follows people who aren't really that relevant until the constant focus has made them relevant and then long past the point of relevancy. They aren't following the person, they're following the story, because that's what they've found keeps their audience interested.
Or look at American Idol. I don't watch it, I don't like it... but the narrative is an inherent part of its formula and its appeal. If it were just a talent competition, nobody would care nearly as much, and they wouldn't become so invested in its participants. The producers frame it all to help bring the narrative to light, and the media and the bloggers and the people at home all work together to shape the story.
The review suggests that the book depicts a world where stories have given way to anecdotes, because of the internet. That's silly... people don't follow personal blogs for the bite-sized anecdotes that make up each entry. If that were the case, there wouldn't be any reason to keep coming back to the same blog. Suggesting that they do is like worrying that the novel, being made up of individual scenes that are not usually complete stories, is going to destroy our ability to understand a story.
Narrative is all around us, even when it isn't. Our need for narrative has driven the development of written language from tally marks and arbitrary symbols to phonetic alphabets that could be used by almost anyone. The internet's development has been shaped by that need and will continue to be shaped by it. It's not going anywhere.
