Clay Shirky gave a speech at a Web 2.0 conference a few weeks ago that made an entertaining connection between societal transformations in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 19th century, there was a sudden shift from rural to urban life that was so wrenching that scores of people needed to drink heavily to cope - gin as the critical technology for the industrial revolution. Only after the “collective bender” did people wake up and build the “institutional structures” we associate with the industrial revolution today - he lists libraries, museums, democracy, broad education.
As you could probably guess from the title of this post, Shirky then claims that the sitcom is the 20th century equivilent of gin. Underlying this argument is that shortly after WW II a whole whack of people suddenly found themselves with a lot of free time - something they’d never had to manage before. In turn, they panicked and watched sitcoms for 50 years or so. He then goes on to effectively argue that, as a society, we are coming out of the collective “bender” - of 200 Billion hours a year watching TV in the U.S. alone - to use that “free time” for something more productive. The age of participation.
I don’t want to go too much further into his details then that, but rather stay at this level and focus on what is becoming one of the more interesting questions of the day. From the Shirky perspective the age of participation is pulling people away from TV and into more productive activities. At least we are doing something, and even it some of it’s silly right now it’s better than just passively watching a box. For the most optimistic, more and more participatory time will be going towards more and more productive activities.
From the perspective of folks like Bauerlein (The dumbest generation Ian wrote about recently) all of this digital stuff is making us stupider. The age of participation is pulling us away from things like books, and we’re actually losing the critical thinking skills associated with reading (see: does the digital world endanger the reading brain, where I talked about the great article on the Twilight of the Books). There are many other people lining up on this side of the argument, and for the most pessimistic it’s a nothing less than than a downward slide that ends with the collapse of civilization as we know it.
Now I’m assuming that wikinomics readers skew heavily towards the Shirky side of the fence - but most would also acknowledge that the other camp has at least some good points. Does anyone want to offer up some thoughts for either side?
Analogies can be enlightening, but also can oversimplify the situation. For me the great difference is the adaptive behaviours expressed by the populations in both cases.
The generalist agrarian workers were essential de-skilled to become factory worker specialising in an aspect of the production process. Confronted by the current changes brought about by technology people are having to re-skill themselves. The greatest area to re-skill is not the software, but in the concepts that lay behind the creation of text (in the very broadest sense of the world).
The written word is not dead, in fact many studies suggest that the ‘net gen’ actually read and write more than Gen X did at the same age. Some would argue that texting isn’t Tolstoy, but the scores are still on the board.
I totally reject that there is a specific ‘critical thinking’ skill associated with reading ‘books’. Critical thinking skills are critical thinking skills! The reading of texts (novels, poetry, TV ads, websites, a concept album, billboards) revolves around judgements of purpose and effectiveness, based on critical analysis of form, content and audience.
Being ‘pulled away from books’ by more participatory activities is natural thing – It is much more human ‘to do’ than just consume – Once the industrial revolution got going they didn’t need gin to sedate their feelings of dislocation because ‘consumption’ became the new Hunting and Gathering.
Books as with all ‘served’ media only give us the chance to deconstruct now we can construct. At the moment that construction is inconsistent, partly through technical competence, but largely because prosumers vary in understandings of the concepts behind deconstruction and construction.
As a media teacher this is precisely the process I teach. In the process of construction we value best professional practice (e.g. Tops selling ‘Manga’ if the student is proposing a graphic novel or Michel Moore’s work if students are producing a subjective/personality driven documentary) in so much as it guides our own construction.
This is the new paradigm: I will value ‘books’ only in so much as they inform and assists the construction of my own texts.
Those that continue to promote reading and writing as content you should consume, ‘because it is good for you’ will fail to convince contemporary students and possible be more sedating than Gin! Those that promote ‘books’ as essential parts of the process of constructing new personalised texts will attract an enthusiastic following of young people ready to leave off texting for a while to sit down with Tolstoy.
Gilbert,
Thank you for the incredibly thoughtful response. In fact, it is exactly the type of comment that greatly increases the value of a post, and that I hope other sites find a way to promote /leverage (when they get overrun with numerous silly ones - see my most recent post). You’ve given some great food for thought.
I like the picture posted yesterday by the way.