iGoogle, iDumber

Neil Postman’s critique, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, went eerily close and decades short of our present digital land of milk and honey. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman showed how popular culture, filtered through the whir of television’s dazzling offerings, had made entertainment, rather than reason, central to our perception of and ability to describe the world. Think sound-bite. Think couch potato. Think generation-of-would-be-philosophers-turned-Simpson’s-fans. Think Pre-Internet. Think Dystopia, Part I.

The Brave New World was here, and it was the eighties.

To Postman’s estimation, the American capacity to comprehend complex ideas had deteriorated from the time when people learned to rationalize and think through ideas by reading books. Instead, with the TV news hook Now this, any manner of disconnected ideas might be strung together by talking hairdos with little time for reflection and plenty of eye-catching visuals.

Fast-forward and meet Generation Google. If television had helped to wither our analytic minds, I fear the present toll taken on the hippocampus by my dear friend, the search engine. Consider how many times a day a word, or date, or name slips from your mind’s grasp. Where once you might spend a full minute, even days pining after the misplaced idea, with a click, click, click, Professor Google provides the answer. 

Perhaps I should have called this post True Confessions of a Google Addict, because over the course of the last few years, I’ve grown ever more dependent upon my pal Google. Do you remember that dull throb you used to get when you tried to recall foggy bits of information? I don’t. My hands are already reaching for the computer before my brain engages. Then, soon after I have my answer, I quickly forget the whole business. 

Yesterday, in a moment that could have been the prophesy of Aldous Huxley, I actually forgot what I was searching for before I got the browser window opened, shrugged and gave up.

Postman considered how American speech shifted from the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates to that of Now this tele-speak. In Lincoln’s time, even those who were largely illiterate and who might own one or two books at most, could follow a sentence strung with clauses like pearls:

It will readily occur to you that I cannot, in half an hour, notice all the things that so able a man as Judge Douglas can say in an hour and a half; and I hope, therefore, if there be anything that he has said upon which you would like to hear something from me, but which I omit to comment upon, you will bear in mind that it would be expecting an impossibility for me to cover his whole ground.

Can you fathom a line like that being aired by any television program short of the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart chiding, “Huh? You mean he talks a lot? Couldn’t you just say so?”

But if Postman is right, and even the words we chose and the sentences we can comprehend were being pared down by a popular culture ruled by T.V., what then for the internet age? Much has been said about how the quality of our lives has been impacted by the ever-pinging gadgets that now keep us connected (see William Powers’ Hamlet’s Blackberry), but what happens to a nation that can’t read a blog post at over 800 words, that haikus tweets in 140 characters or less, that uses SEO to manipulate page ranks and bounces from page to page seemingly ad infinitum. Like Nicholas Carr asked a few years back, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

If television captured us with pretty pictures and charming faces, this latest stage in our development does so in a way we sometimes feel we can’t turn off. More than just the allure of the shiny gizmos that hold our social networks, real work and (at least my own case) memory bank—there is such comfort in virtual existence. Things feel safer there. Ideas are saved and stored, and I don’t have to bother with them.

There have always been, and likely will always be, detractors of new technologies. There’s always some wild-haired naysayer frantically waving his hands in the air, warning that the human race will forever be scarred by sliding contentedly into tomorrow. Of that, I’m not so sure.

But what does seem to happening is a transition from being sorters and storers of information, to primary consumers. The amount of information we devoir daily would have been staggering to someone living during the time of the Lincoln. They had time to listen to Lincoln’s lollygagging description of Douglas, whereas I, like many of my contemporaries, with our pinging calendars and jam-packed virtual and terrestrial days, move like Pac-Man (or Ms. Pac-Man, if the bow fits), wholesale swallowing shiny bits of information as they appear. It’s the difference between a five-course meal and a hot dog eating contest. In the end, the latter wins for quantity, even if the quality is something we’d rather soon forget, like the waning fifty-two words of a too-long blog post.