A new book by Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois–Champaign, attempts to debunk the abundant concern among some commentators (as often reported here) who think that the Internet and other digital means of communication are turning us into a dumber species. The book is "A Better Pencil," and it takes the long view of such controversies, pointing out that all advances in communications since the days of Plato have been met with unjustifiable fear and suspicion. The grim predictions are never true, the author says. In fact, each advance in technology since the smoke signal has improved communication for the betterment of society.
Faculty members who voice concern about the reading and writing habits of the most recent generation of students may be particularly interested in what Dr. Baron has to say. Caveat: His students matriculate at a highly selective university.
Salon, an online magazine, recently conducted a cogent interview with the author. The interview is by Vincent Rossmeir. The title of the article: "Is the Internet Melting Our Brains?"
A couple of choice extracts from Dr. Baron's responses to the interviewer's questions:
I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony. We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."
And:
Opening up writing to new voices can’t be a bad thing. We’re seeing this spiral. The more people use technology, the more people communicate, the more people in power become concerned with how to control that use. There are two forces pushing against each other. Whether it’s government or religious organizations or schools controlling what children do online or parents controlling what their kids are doing with communication technologies or groups online self-organizing and deciding how to control what does and does not get expressed -- it’s similar to what happened when printing presses became a major means of communication or when radio and TV became major communication players. How do you license, how do you control what gets said on the air? There’s a lot of bad stuff online and there’s a lot of good stuff online, and it’s going to take a long time to figure out what standards and regulations are going to be acceptable that aren’t going to stifle creativity but that are going to give people some security as well.
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