You Ought to Print this Out
By Francisco Fernandez
The Internet is a bit like Plato’s cave. All across the world millions stare at flickering images on a screen, tied down to their seats and slack-jawed instead of living reality. The Internet, I am told, is a wonderful thing. I am constantly reminded, reassured: We are all connected now. There is a world of information at the tip of our fingers—quite literally. This and more I cannot deny, but I still have my suspicions buried deep inside.
For a mere seven or eight dollars a month I could access hours of relentless television streaming into my laptop via the magic of Netflix. For some, this might have been a harmless diversion. In my case it was pernicious. The hours of readily accessible commercial-free television were a source of infinite distraction and refugee from real world problems. As a graduate student, this was nothing short of disastrous. Hours of mind-stultifying images drifted past my consciousness. My thoughts were slower,more confused and the seemingly vast amount of time I had available to devote to my studies disappeared.
So, I got rid of Netflix but filled my time with other distractions: reading what passes for news, or even pseudo-intellectual blogs about my pet interests. But even delving into the supposedly more edifying aspects of the online world left me with the same screen-staring induced mental fogginess. The constant and easy availability of distractions ensured that my on screen reading remained superficial at best. Something about the light behind the screen hurt my eyes and slowed my thoughts.
During my web-surfing, I couldn’t escape the nagging suspicion that I was wasting my time. As a student I could be studying harder, getting better grades and— here’s a quaint notion—searching after truth. In the search for truth the medium matters. The online medium changes thought patterns precisely because information is easily available. Barriers to information access liberate readers from distraction. If I am reading Evelyn Waugh and suddenly I am reminded of Flannery O’Connor, the prospect of physically fetching a new book forces me to focus. From this focus something like contemplation emerges, a contemplation which thrives on high barriers to access.
Low barriers to access, in contrast, are inimical to real learning and thinking. Carrie Fried’s 2006 study “In-class laptop use and its effect on student learning” documents the strong connection between in-class computer use, multi-tasking and student learning. Using laptops in class correlated negatively with several measures of student learning including grades and students’ self –assessments. More interesting still students reported that other students’ computer use interfered more with their learning than their own computer use, other students’ talking, the length of the class, other students’ fidgeting and moving, the time of day, or the classroom environment. Here social science once again confirms the totally obvious: anyone who has ever been in a classroom knows that the Internet makes learning more difficult. Facebook tempts. Your neighbour’s online gaming seduces. More corrosive still is the general atmosphere of distraction and the tacit belief that what the professor is saying is not as important as Groupon.
This led me to make a choice that many around me found radical. When I went home to see my family at the end of last quarter I left my laptop behind. Now my access to on screen distractions is buffered by a trip to campus computer labs. From my apartment this takes about half an hour by foot. I suppose my liberation is one of laziness (how is this lazy? Just curious), but it is a sweet liberation nonetheless. I am more productive, I sleep better, I now do my best work at my apartment where I cannot access blogs, youtube videos or email. I spend more time to talking to actual people. Occasionally, a day or two goes by when I do not access the web and I experience relief from the near constant assault of images and information that characterize the online world.
What really scares me more than anything about my relationship to the series of flickering images we call being online is that the very things I decry about it are what draw me closer to my digital Plato’s cave. A cave Christopher Hedges describes in an interview with Media Roots News, “We are awash in electronic hallucinations, and the worse it gets the more we retreat into those hallucinations—which is what dying cultures always do. They sever themselves from reality because reality becomes so difficult to face. And we’re no exception from that. ” I want inside the cave of electronic hallucinations when I see an economic order that exists to serve the entrenched interests of elites. I want inside the cave, when I see the prospect of an endless “war on terror.” Most of all I want inside the cave when I think about the day to day, humdrum problems of my ordinary life. Ordinary life can be scary enough.
