Being at the Bottom of Things
Home : Writing : by Trevis Rothwell, February 2011
Computer scientist Donald Knuth stopped using email in 1990 in order to devote his efforts to researching and writing books, and explained that email "is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration."
I don't think that what I do needs to be as uninterruptible as what Professor Knuth does, but I've increasingly been feeling inundated with digital tidbits of information, and decreasingly feeling productive with my time.
Aggregates of Informational Tidbits
It all starts out harmless enough. Maybe there's some online community website that has lots of interesting content, updated frequently. On the surface, this is a good thing. I've read many web pages and blog posts and user comments that have been insightful, helpful, and educational. But I've also spent countless hours clicking links like a hen pecking at seeds, consuming content on the web that is superficially related to my interests, but somehow lacking real substance.
Today's technology makes it trivial to find more and more sources of digital tidbits to consume: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, news aggregates... the list goes on, and new websites are being created all the time that offer yet more things to look at and hyperlinks to poke. I used to think that Slashdot was being overly authoritarian by moderating which article submissions were published. Now, in retrospect, the rate at which new information flowed from Slashdot was much more manageable, and since they only published the articles that they thought were truly interesting, odds are good that readers got a good helping of interesting content and minimal fluff.
I seriously doubt that these flows of digital tidbits are going to diminish any time soon. Perhaps particular websites will fade into obscurity—I wouldn't be surprised to see Facebook supplanted in a few years just as MySpace was before them. But I suspect that the nonstop availability of constantly updated information is here to stay.
Digital Candy
Sometimes I feel like just shutting it all off, Knuth-style. Deleting my accounts on such websites, vowing to not return. That feels like a promising idea initially, but then I consider all of the truly valuable things I have learned from these constant flows of information. Sure, most of it wasn't very valuable, but those few things! I don't want to miss out on what's good by throwing out what's trivial.
At least, I purport that this is the reason for not shutting it all off. Maybe the real reason is that I've developed some sort of mental addiction to this digital candy. Even if there's no real nourishment, some part of my mind finds enjoyment out of being constantly updated with information that is easy to discard. And in so doing, it seems harder than it used to be to concentrate on things that I believe to be of value. My mind feels like hopping from one topic to another.
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
I shared my thoughts along these lines with a colleague, who pointed me toward an article that asks Is Google Making Us Stupid? The article does not blame Google directly, but looks at how the world wide web and hypertext have drastically changed the way that we read. The author notes that people in times past were concerned that other advances in how we handle information would be detrimental: the printing press, and even the advancement of writing things down at all (instead of keeping everything known in one's memory).
It is difficult for me to perceive the threat of the printing press, having grown up surrounded by books. It is even more difficult for me to perceive the written word itself as a threat. (I have, however, noticed that once I write something down, it seems as if my mind then feels free to move that information out of active memory, suggesting to me (anecdotally, of course) that our minds put forth extra effort to retain knowledge that they know is not recorded elsewhere.) But it is not difficult at all for me to perceive the threat that is the current state of the popular world wide web.
There are plenty of long written materials on the web: articles, essays, even whole books. But the primary culprit, if there is indeed anything wrong with the web, may be the recent trend toward authoring ever-shorter pieces of information. The blog format makes it easy to publish three-paragraph ideas, or even one-paragraph ideas. Services like Twitter make it easy to publish one-sentence ideas. Neither of these are necessarily bad in and of themselves, but as we increasingly substitute one-sentence ideas for book-length ideas, I am concerned that not only will be severely limit the depths of what we learn, but we may even form bad mental habits that make it difficult to use our minds for anything beyond one-sentence ideas.
IANAP
I am not a psychologist, and my musings here should be taken with a grain or two of salt. But in my own life I feel that exchanging a moderate flow of articles and books for a constant flow of sentences leads down a path that I don't really want to follow. I've not yet deleted any of my accounts on any information aggregate websites, but I am trying to monitor myself and cut back. If my own willpower doesn't prove to be enough, then deleting and blocking things until my mental habits reform is certainly an option.
In addition to not being a psychologist, I am also still not as uninterruptible as Donald Knuth. My role may not be to be on the bottom of things, but I also don't need to be on top of things. I need to be somewhere in the middle, taking in the latest information that is meaningful to me, but spending enough time in the depths of my real work and studies so as to not have my mental capacities turn to mush.
See also: From Thinkers to Clickers by M. O. Thirunarayanan.
tjr@acm.org