With lazy approach we start to filter texts for usefull content. Longer texts is harder to filter. Also, to be effective we have to determine usefullness of the text as quickly as possible. Short texts survive just because we read them all before we understand that they are useless. Personally, I can read sci-fi books for 10 hours straight, but have troubles with reading a page of uninteresting but important text.

I think the kind of Great Books that were produced in the past simply can’t be produced today. The problem is that in the past, very little was known. So a single very smart person could take his or her ideas and develop them and keep developing them and develop them to the point of a great treatise. These great treatises could then serve as a starting point, a foundation, for future thinkers to debate, question and build upon. For instance, Euclid wrote a great treatise on geometry (I’ve heard that he didn’t come up with many of the theorems himself, and they were the work of others, but it was still the first single compilation of much of the knowledge).

Today, too much is known. There is a lot of knowledge and information. A lot of the things that scientists and philosophers thought to be true earlier are now known to be false (for instance, Aristotle’s belief that matter was infinitely divisible). Knowledge is also fragmented into many more disciplines, which means that, to an extent, a generalistic Great Book of the kind produced in the past isn’t possible.

The change in the structure of knowledge has resulted in a change in the way scholars work and operate. There are a large number of books written today, both academic and popular, that are far from simplistic. There are large numbers of highly specialized academic texts, and a large number of more popular-style texts that simplify some of the issues to present them to a larger audience, and yet convey fairly complex messages. Many of these are based on the latest scientific knowledge and understanding.

Is there value in reading the Great Books of the past? Certainly, there is value. But that value doesn’t undermine the value in reading a lot of the good books of the present.

Coming to the Internet.

Does the Internet reduce attention span? I think this is a hard question, and I certainly don’t think it can be answered by mere reflection. Individuals are very unlikely to come up with an appropriate conclusion because the age and circumstances of an individual change. I’ve certainly grown in my ability to concentrate in the last ten years, but that may partly be explained by the fact that I’ve grown from the age of 12 to the age of 22.

There’s also the question of selective memory. We aren’t good at remembering and reliving the past as we experienced it at that time; certain kinds of memories stand out and others don’t. Specifically, the more distinctive and vivid memories stand out more. The memory of reading a good and challenging book and understanding it deeply would be one such memory.

So, I don’t know. I haven’t noticed any reduction in the ability of people around me to read books, or their ability to carry out complex arguments. I have noticed a reduction in certain arguments that arose due to lack of minor information — the kind that you can now quickly Google and find out. I don’t think that’s germane to anything, though.

Finally, how the Internet empowers us and what we can do about it.

The Internet allows for a hyperlinked structuring of knowledge, which is, in my view, a good thing. This doesn’t mean that everything should be hyperlinked. Not all forms of complex thought may be suitable to a linked structure — but many are. And we should examine everything to see whether it benefits from the advantages of small slices and hyperlinking that the Internet offers. We should remember that the great writers of this past didn’t choose against the Internet. They just didn’t have the option. So it might well be the case that some of those thoughts are better expressed using the linked structure of the Internet.

Linked structure doesn’t necessarily mean Twitter-length statements. Conciseness is an art, and it is also very hard. It’s easy to be brief, but it’s much harder to be brief and yet to convey complexity. In fact, it’s easier to be long and convey complexity than to convey a message of the same complexity in a short message. So, I think we should admire the art of writing short and powerful core messages but we shouldn’t equate mere brevity with greatness.

I think one of the deeper problems here is that nobody’s really trying to figure out how the Internet can be used to slice and repsent knowledge better. Current usage of the Internet is largely superficial, and most of the money that goes into the Internet is to make it better for advertisers and corporations, rather than to make knowledge more beautiful. If people start looking at the Internet seriously, I’m sure we can come up with a large number of solutions to encourage curiosity, creativity, and thoughtfulness.

When I teach a college class, I tend to assign some readings which I expect students to do independently, without my help, to supplement the material I am teaching. No matter how much I exhort them to do these readings and impress on them that the final exam will contain questions, a portion of students (perhaps a third) will not read them, and will thus miss those exam questions. And, these are students in a demanding field (computer science) at an ivy league college. It is, simply put, their loss; they get a lower grade.

But the good news is, that the majority do read, at least when pressed to do so, and the really brilliant students read gladly and thoughtfully and come back to me with questions as a result of their reading.

So, I am simply not worried. There have always been dolts.

Furthermore, when much younger, I was unable to read certain novels. It wasn’t lack of interest so much as the desperation of my circumstances, working multiple jobs to get through college in a world where no loans were available for low-income students. So when it came time to read, which was rare enough given my many jobs, I was tired and invariably fell asleep. Thus, I didn’t discover Jane Austen, really, until I was 40, and by then, I had enough life experience to appreciate her completely, so it’s just as well, I think.

If you want a real problem to worry about, worry about the death of liberal education. That IS happening, and I don’t think it’s because people can’t or don’t read long things, I think it’s because our education system is so poor; we aren’t taught history by anyone who actually knows history. We aren’t taught science (at high school level, anyway) by people who actually know science. Instead, we are taught by people who have gotten degrees in “education”. Hello? Since when has knowing about education guaranteed that a person knows science?

Then there is the constant press of time on us. I remember my college years as a period when I rushed through countless books; only after I graduated from college, having no deadlines on my reading, did I try to tackle some of the longer books that I have since read, such as Livy’s History; Tolstoy’s War & Peace; the 3 volumes of Braudel’s Civilization & Capitalism; & the pulp fiction of Yoshikawa’s historical fiction.

It always seems that we are being forced to make a conclusion before we are ready. Had I the time, I could say more — but I have chores to do, so I must leave you with only these fragments.

Geoff

I believe Larry is right to point out that the ‘Googling’ of society probably does not have such a great effect on such luminaries as Anthony, Gareth and Russell [Aleta waves to Russell] and that that is largely because they were fully-formed individuals *before* these phenomena. It’s not just Google; it’s the Internet: a vast repository for the ravings of every genius and every kook; but it started waaaay before then, before I was bornm even: in Madison Avenue ‘Winston tastes good like a cigarette’ should ; in television ‘To boldly go where no man has gone before’ in music (I’d give examples but they’re foul) oh okay I just thought of a clean one: ‘Fly Robin Fly, up up to the sky’ which, some of you will remember, is the sum total of a particular song: my God, is that the extent of creative genius for a whole generation?

It continued in the fact that I learned and had separate classes in English Composition, Reading Comprehension, and Grammar, and that was before I left primary school, but my younger sisters learned ‘language arts’, and if you have a child today it is being suggested that they will not even be taught writing. I don’t mean essay writing–I mean how to use a pen to write.

These things dumb down a society, but it’s not only Google’s fault. I could go on, but you get the point.

But don’t you see that the fact that so much of life is increasingly available online, always accessible, is possibly putting pressure on the ability of younger people, at least, to focus, and indeed to develop the ability to read at length?

I notice that Tom and Troy see it as a problem and they have suggestions about how to deal with it. I do too. (I did recently finish re-reading Pride and Prejudice, for what it’s worth. Yep, I can still read books! Of course, this is silly; I never stopped reading them. )

I agree with Russell when he says there’s no need to panic, but according to a National Endowment for the Arts study, book-reading went into decline just as the Internet rose to prominence. And then you’ve got what Carr says and the nerve he has touched in a lot of us. Is this only a collective delusion, then, that we (some of us) seem to be losing the taste for and ability of difficult book-reading? I have to doubt it. And don’t forget the people nodding their heads at what Clay Shirky says, that the world of the future will have dismissed the importance of what he complacently calls the “cathedral-like” model of the mind. That is, the next generation will regard as quaint and old-fashioned the notion that some great individual minds — thinkers and artists — might be especially worth coming to grips with by painstaking effort. Instead, everything of cultural importance will happen in a giant online conversation, vaguely analogous to the Blogosphere, in relatively small chunks. If Shirky’s values come to hold sway, that really would be a radical realignment of intellectual values, and not a happy one.

But the question I really wanted to raise is not whether the effect is real. I think the effect is real, however significant it is and however it affects us personally, and my question is, what can we do about it?

The conversation I want to have is similar to one we might have had in the 1950s or 1960s, after television came into prominence and people started worrying a lot about its effects. Civilization itself is being changed by the Internet; the Internet is changing how we think and how we read. It won’t all be for the better. Television extended our experience tremendously and brought us together in ways we never before imagined. But it also famously pushed us apart and depressed book-reading. The Internet seems to be having similarly disruptive effects. One of the effects is on our attention, which is required for our ability to read, appreciate, and understand long and difficult books. If like me you think it is important that we continue to read, study, and appreciate books (especially the great books of the world’s great civilizations), then you naturally have reason to be concerned. And then the question again is: what can we do about it?