Fortsätter Bokprat-rapporterna. Vi läser Nicholas Carrs ”The shallows” (Amazon, Bokus, Adlibris). Läs andras kommentarer på Bokprat-sajten.
Sammanfattningsvis såhär långt, drygt den första tredjedelen, så har Nicholas Carr först grundlagt vår hjärnas eviga föränderlighet – vad vi än gör så förändras våra hjärnor. De blir bättre på det vi gör mer av och det vi gör mindre av blir den sämre på. Delar av hjärnan växer och krymper i förhållande till varann.
Därpå pratar Carr om hur de medier vi använder eller utsätts för påverkar dels våra hjärnor (här räknas verktyg som medier, à la Marshall McLuhan) – och dels hur vi ser på världen. Klockan t ex – den gjorde oss både medveten om tid på ett helt nytt sätt och fick agera metafor för våra försök att förstå t ex vår egen kropp eller universum (båda tickande maskiner).
Sedan dyker han på djupet i vårt kanske mest betydelsefulla medium, det skrivna ordet; hur läsning fick oss att koncentrera oss på ett sätt vi aldrig gjort tidigare och hur vårt språk exploderade i omfång.
Och till sist datorn och nätet – mediet som slukar alla andra medier. Vi läser förvisso mer text än någonsin sedan nätets intåg, skriver Carr, men det är inte en fysisk upplevelse som med boken och vi engageras inte lika djupt. Nätets själva arkitektur, dess centrala element – hyperlänken – distraherar alltid och pekar vidare till nästa grej.
Där är jag nu – och jag tyckte han väldigt snabbt blev väldigt kritisk. För mig har snarare hela hans hisnande början gång på gång fått mig att tänka på hur nätet känns som en naturlig fortsättning på utvecklingen från böcker som kopierades för hand för en exklusiv skara via tryckpressen och demokratiseringen av det skrivna ordet.
Carr radar upp medium på medium och beskriver hur det fått våra hjärnor att utvecklas – förvisso på bekostnad av förlusten av förmågor vi haft tidigare. Han citerar en brittisk censor på 1600-talet som undrar om inte boken fört mer ont än gott med sig och jag misstänker att kritik av den typen hörts i varje skede längs vägen.
Visst, vi kanske inte i samma utsträckning förlorar oss i enskilda texter på det sätt som vi gjort tidigare, men nu kanske vi börjar pussla ihop mängder av disparata fragment och kokar samman dem till nya saker?
Om klockan och kartan och andra medier så dramatiskt förändrade vårt sätt att uppfatta tillvaron, kommer naturligtvis nätet göra det också. Men vad är det som säger att det kommer vara på ett sätt som är underlägset den lins som boken utgjorde när vi tittade på omvärlden?
Hur som helst, det ska bli intressant att se om Carr plockar fram något positivt om nätet eller om resten av boken går åt till att dissa.
Här kommer det jag har highlightat i Kindle sedan sist. (Första gången jag läser något i Kindle och jag gillar det skarpt.)
Om hur våra hjärnor förändras av de medier vi använder
”Monkeys, for instance, were taught how to use rakes and pliers to take hold of pieces of food that would otherwise have been out of reach. When researchers monitored the animals’ neural activity throughout the course of the training, they found significant growth in the visual and motor areas involved in controlling the hands that held the tools. But they discovered something even more striking as well: the rakes and pliers actually came to be incorporated into the brain maps of the animals’ hands. The tools, so far as the animals’ brains were concerned, had become part of their bodies.”
”When they compared the scans with those of a control group, they found that the taxi drivers’ posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in storing and manipulating spatial representations of a person’s surroundings, was much larger than normal.”
”The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into ’rigid behaviors.’ The chemically triggered synapses that link our neurons program us, in effect, to want to keep exercising the circuits they’ve formed.”
”’If we stop exercising our mental skills,’ writes Doidge, ’we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead.’”
”That doesn’t mean that we can’t, with concerted effort, once again redirect our neural signals and rebuild the skills we’ve lost. What it does mean is that the vital paths in our brains become, as Monsieur Dumont understood, the paths of least resistance. They are the paths that most of us will take most of the time, and the farther we proceed down them, the more difficult it becomes to turn back.”
Om hur medier påverkar vår uppfattning av världen
”The more frequently and intensively people used maps, the more their minds came to understand reality in the maps’ terms.”
”The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought.”
”Our technologies can be divided, roughly, into four categories, according to the way they supplement or amplify our native capacities. One set, which encompasses the plow, the darning needle, and the fighter jet, extends our physical strength, dexterity, or resilience. A second set, which includes the microscope, the amplifier, and the Geiger counter, extends the range or sensitivity of our senses. A third group, spanning such technologies as the reservoir, the birth control pill, and the genetically modified corn plant, enables us to reshape nature to better serve our needs or desires. The map and the clock belong to the fourth category, which might best be called, to borrow a term used in slightly different senses by the social anthropologist Jack Goody and the sociologist Daniel Bell, ’intellectual technologies.’”
”Although the use of any kind of tool can influence our thoughts and perspectives – the plow changed the outlook of the farmer, the microscope opened new worlds of mental exploration for the scientist – it is our intellectual technologies that have the greatest and most lasting power over what and how we think.”
”What Nietzsche sensed as he typed his words onto the paper clamped in his writing ball – that the tools we use to write, read, and otherwise manipulate information work on our minds even as our minds work with them – is a central theme of intellectual and cultural history.”
”Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work. The map and the clock shared a similar ethic. Both placed a new stress on measurement and abstraction, on perceiving and defining forms and processes beyond those apparent to the senses.”
”The intellectual ethic of a technology is rarely recognized by its inventors.”
”The users of the technology are also usually oblivious to its ethic.”
”Ultimately, it’s an invention’s intellectual ethic that has the most profound effect on us. The intellectual ethic is the message that a medium or other tool transmits into the minds and culture of its users.”
”What’s been harder to discern is the influence of technologies, particularly intellectual technologies, on the functioning of people’s brains. We can see the products of thought – works of art, scientific discoveries, symbols preserved on documents – but not the thought itself.”
”Neuroplasticity provides the missing link to our understanding of how informational media and other intellectual technologies have exerted their influence over the development of civilization and helped to guide, at a biological level, the history of human consciousness.”
”We also now know that the changes in the brain spurred by map use could be deployed for other purposes, which helps explain how abstract thinking in general could be promoted by the spread of the cartographer’s craft.”
”As the classical scholar Walter J. Ong put it, ’Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.’”
Om effekten av skrivande och läsande
”Silent reading was largely unknown in the ancient world. The new codices, like the tablets and scrolls that preceded them, were almost always read aloud, whether the reader was in a group or alone.”
”To read a long book silently required an ability to concentrate intently over a long period of time, to ’lose oneself’ in the pages of a book, as we now say. Developing such mental discipline was not easy. The natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness.”
”’The ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted,’ writes Vaughan Bell, a research psychologist at King’s College London, represents a ’strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development.’”
”Many people had, of course, cultivated a capacity for sustained attention long before the book or even the alphabet came along. The hunter, the craftsman, the ascetic – all had to train their brains to control and concentrate their attention.”
”Library architecture evolved too. Private cloisters and carrels, tailored to accommodate vocal reading, were torn out and replaced by large public rooms where students, professors, and other patrons sat together at long tables reading silently to themselves.”
”Priests and politicians began to wonder whether, as England’s first official book censor put it in 1660, ’more mischief than advantage were not occasion’d to the Christian world by the Invention of Typography.’”
”’For the medieval type of brain,’ writes J. Z. Young, ’making true statements depended on fitting sensory experience with the symbols of religion.’ The letterpress changed that. ’As books became common, men could look more directly at each other’s observations, with a great increase in the accuracy and content of the information conveyed.’”
”The brain regions that are activated often ’mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.’ Deep reading, says the study’s lead researcher, Nicole Speer, ’is by no means a passive exercise.’ The reader becomes the book.”
”The vocabulary of the English language, once limited to just a few thousand words, expanded to upwards of a million words as books proliferated. Many of the new words encapsulated abstract concepts that simply hadn’t existed before.”
Om nätets effekter
”Today, with the Internet, we’re seeing firsthand the extraordinary implications of Turing’s discovery. Constructed of millions of interconnected computers and data banks, the Net is a Turing machine of immeasurable power, and it is, true to form, subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our typewriter and our printing press, our map and our clock, our calculator and our telephone, our post office and our library, our radio and our TV.”
”It’s often assumed that the time we devote to the Net comes out of the time we would otherwise spend watching TV. But statistics suggest otherwise. Most studies of media activity indicate that as Net use has gone up, television viewing has either held steady or increased.”
”Because of the ubiquity of text on the Net and our phones, we’re almost certainly reading more words today than we did twenty years ago, but we’re devoting much less time to reading words printed on paper.”
”There’s ’a crucial link’ between ’the sensory-motor experience of the materiality’ of a written work and ’the cognitive processing of the text content.’”
”Hyperlinks are designed to grab our attention. Their value as navigational tools is inextricable from the distraction they cause.”
”Our attachment to any one text becomes more tenuous, more provisional.”
”We don’t see the forest when we search the Web. We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.”
Och den här var jag bara tvungen att ha med; kanske den allra mest förödande effekten av nätets intrång: ”Unit sales of greeting cards and postcards are dropping.”
Foto av Jean-François Gornet under Creative Commons-licens.
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