too many Daves

Since five words — “the medium is the message” — are literally the entire extent of my exposure to Marshall McLuhan’s ideas, this passage from a Wednesday piece by Douglas Coupland had its intended effect on me:

Here’s what he wrote in 1962, and see if it doesn’t give you a chill: “The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.” Brrrrr.

Coupland’s piece is called “Why McLuhan’s chilling vision still matters today.” It’s here. If it’s remembered a month from now, it will likely be for this one-liner: “Google isn’t making us stupider, it’s simply making us realise that omniscience is actually slightly boring.”

Omnipresence, meanwhile, remains slightly awesome.

My mom’s dad was named Maurice Kelley. He died in 1996. This was before any of us had heard of Google. So there’s something almost magical for me about what happened when we tried using Google Books to search for the words my grandfather left behind during his scholarly career.

The thrill is that we found more than scholarship. We found, for example, a 1921 book called University anthology, with several poems by a University of Oklahoma sophomore named Maurice W. Kelley. And that’s him, younger than any of us ever knew him, doing something that I, at least, never knew he did.

I don’t claim to be able to judge the poems on their merits, and that’s not really what this post is about. But here’s one:

AT EVENING

Her silhouet was black against the pane.

Made dully golden by the candle light.

She let her fingers wander, falling as they might

And sang a song that I would hear again.

Each modulation was unconscious art

So soft and pleasing like the mellow rays.

Fled from my brain were thoughts of bitter days

And a calm and peaceful quiet filled my heart.

And another:

“CITY”

The tawdriness of all that cheap array

Brought back a longing for his home once more.

The carts on pavement at the break of day

Made a rattle like a dead man’s throat before

The fleeing soul is gone. The distant roar

Of engines coming in, the newsboy’s call,

The drab cold room with splintery unclothed floor

Contrasted to a peaceful farm in fall

Made him rise from a cold hard bed and curse it all.

A couple of minutes ago, I reached this passage in Tao Lin’s Richard Yates:

Dakota Fanning asked if Haley Joel Osment wanted music. He said he did and she put on music. He lay on the bed and covered his face with a blanket. They listened to “Tripped” by Neva Dinova which Haley Joel Osment had emailed to Dakota Fanning a few weeks ago saying it was one of his favorite songs. He moved his arm in the air and Dakota Fanning touched his hand. He held her body and they listened to another song.

We’ve reached a point where we could choose to take it for granted, but I’m grateful to have the means to type “neva denova tripped” into Google and have Google ask me “Did you mean: neva dinova tripped” and then click on a video of “Jake and Roger from Neva Dinova playing Tripped at a record store in Austin.” I can only guess that people like Nicholas Carr who think I’m ruining myself with detours like this one are blessedly immune to the nag of not knowing whether Tao Lin’s characters are listening to a polka or a ballad or some drywall-wrecking beat. Good for them.

I e-mailed my favorite blogger last night. Today he excerpted my e-mail on his blog. I’m grateful.

As it stands, my words are attributed to “a reader.” It’s an accurate description, but I can’t stay true to my own standards unless I sign my name to my e-mailed critique of “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains,” Nicholas Carr’s piece in the current Wired. If I keep my name off the critique, I will need to stop griping about the sucker punches people throw from the shadows of online anonymity. I like that high horse and I’m unwilling to dismount.

So I’ll post my full e-mail here. As you’ll see, the e-mail refers to “Filling A Bathtub With a Thimble,” the title of the post that brought Carr’s article to my attention and prompted last night’s e-mail. The post’s title came from an image Carr used in Wired: “Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory.”

Here, without any further throat-clearing, is last night’s e-mail …

Dear Andrew:

I’m writing because I found “Filling A Bathtub With a Thimble” to be almost entirely unpersuasive. It just struck me, though, that there’s something I should do before I dissect Nicholas Carr’s claims: retrace my steps, tell you how I got here. I’ll do this because my accidental, unpremeditated path feels meaningfully different from the “watching the landscape from a train” experience you described.

This started with my wife sending me an e-mail with an uncapitalized “sullivan” in the subject line. In the body of the e-mail, she pasted your Ralph-the-pig-themed “Emails of the Day.” Reading those, I saw the words “pig nipples” in hypertext. Now, I’m not a prude, but I haven’t ever clicked the words “pig nipples” before. Tonight I did. Why? My best guess is that many of those futile, little thimbles that I’ve splashed into the bathtub of my mind have been infused with this basic idea: “Dear Bathtub: We got these ideas from Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan posts worthwhile stuff. He uses links sparingly and intelligently. We can’t click all links. But Sullivan’s links tend to be worthwhile. Remember this. Yours sincerely, Thimble.”

And so I clicked “pig nipples.” This launched my browser, pulled up “The Sexually Ambiguous, Swimming Pig, Ctd” post, and gave me the pleasure of learning the expression “worthless as teats on a boar hog.” In fairness to Nicholas Carr, I can’t be sure that I will remember that expression two months from now. But I’m OK with that. Truly.

Having finished reading the “teats on a boar hog” post, my eyes drifted toward the right of the screen. I saw your picture. My gaze drifted further right to Megan McArdle’s picture. I thought of my friend Aaron, a doctor with keen ideas on healthcare reform who has been unimpressed by some of McArdle’s work. Right or wrong, the thought of Aaron pulled my eyes away from McArdle and back to you. Under your photo, I saw the cryptically truncated words “Filling A Bathtub With A…” With the interrupting ellipses, those five words were even less promising than “pig nipples.” But I clicked anyway, read through your “Filling A Bathtub With A Thimble” post, and emerged feeling skeptical. Remembering Thimble’s note, Bathtub reminded me that you use links sparingly and intelligently and that I could delve deeper into Carr’s ideas by clicking the link in your post. So I clicked.

As I clicked, I was distracted — not by pop-up ads or by a surfeit of hypertext but by hearing my spaniel pad past. This reminded me that I’d already broken my promise to take the dogs straight out five minutes earlier. When made to wait, our dogs sometimes pee inside. I eyed the spaniel, confirmed that he was settling in for a nap instead of sniffing around for a peeing spot, and started to read Carr’s piece. By the end of the first paragraph, I was completely distracted — not by Twitter, not by incoming e-mail, not by the peril of canine piss but by a flaw in the evidence Carr cites.

Carr opens with a UCLA study in which volunteers “used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics — the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car — (while an) MRI scanned their brains …”

Well, Bathtub was roiling at this point. Bathtub wanted me to stop reading, to forget about Carr. Why? Because long experience has taught Bathtub that Google is useful for learning precisely because it allows users to sprint after information at the moment when curiosity strikes, at the exact moment when our minds are most primed to receive, value, and retain information. And Bathtub somehow doubted that these UCLA volunteers, gamely going along with the experiment, were ablaze with curiosity about the nutritional benefits of chocolate or vacationing in the Galapagos Islands or buying a new car or whatever the other “preselected topics” may have been. So Bathtub didn’t think this experiment had anything to tell Carr or you or me about real-life Internet use.

But Bathtub is nothing if not fair. So Bathtub then reminded me that I’ve always learned better by hearing than by reading and that it would be a simple matter to put Carr’s piece on my Kindle, plug in some headphones, leash up the dogs, go outside, stop worrying about pee-puddled carpeting, and command the Kindle’s little text-to-speech robot man to read Carr’s words to me while the dogs sniffed around the front yard. So that’s what I did.

I ended up believing that Carr gets things right and wrong: right when he acknowledges our agency by writing that “we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture”;  wrong, among other places, when he implicitly denies our agency with the “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” subtitle of his forthcoming book.

The Internet is not doing anything to our brains. We may be doing bad things to our brains. But the things that we are doing have been possible as long as there have been libraries. Any library patron has always been free to read a paragraph, re-shelve the book, grab a new one, skim its preface, re-shelve it, wander to the periodicals section, grab the New York Times magazine, flip to the fancy real estate ads in the back, think of West Egg and East Egg and Jay Gatsby, put down the magazine, head to the fiction section, reach out for Fitzgerald’s classic, realize that he’s never read anything by Fitzgerald’s wife, wonder if this makes him a sexist, decide that it just might, scan the fiction Fitzgeralds until he finds Zelda, grab a copy of Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz, start to read the first paragraph, question his own memory, flip to the author bio to confirm that Zelda was truly married to the Gatsby author, see that Zelda was born in Montgomery, think of the Montgomery bus boycott, remember that he’s been meaning to buckle down and read Taylor Branch’s MLK biographies, head off for the biography section.

Etc.

Etc.

Etc.

Most of us don’t do that in libraries. But we could.

If Carr’s piece causes people to rethink the choices they make online, I’m all for that. But I’ll be upset if Carr’s piece causes people to flee the Internet or to resign themselves to an online reading experience that, to use those words of yours, is “more like watching the landscape from a train.” It’s not just that we can drive our own train. It’s that we’re free to jump the track, to go where we want at the speed we want with as many or as few distractions, digressions, and deep-thinking dives as we choose.

If you’ve read this far, Andrew, you may still be a more patient reader than you imagine yourself to be.

With best wishes,

David

I piled cringe upon cringe Friday — first because I read Steven Pinker’s vivisection of Malcolm Gladwell’s new essay collection, second because of what I found when I Googled a flub Pinker wielded against Gladwell.

Reviewing What The Dog Saw for the NY Times, Pinker slapped Gladwell like this:

He … quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

Because Gladwell once took time to chat with me at a journalism conference, because my daughter loves Gladwell’s Blink, because Gladwell replied to my daughter’s fan e-mail once, I wanted Pinker to be wrong. I wanted “igon value” to be some legitimate alternate spelling. So I Googled “igon value.”

The Google results, as I said, made me cringe.

First, a timeline. As I write this, it’s 2009. Gladwell’s original “igon value” essay appeared in The New Yorker in 2002. So that gave Gladwell — or his source for the story, or a reader — seven years to notice the “igon value” error. Had someone noticed, “igon value” could have been switched to ”eigenvalue” in time to deny Pinker the mocking bludgeon of the “Igon Value Problem.”

Someone did notice. On the first page of Google results for “igon value,” you find this blog post. But the blogger doesn’t mention “igon value,” doesn’t even mention Gladwell. No, that would be too easy. Rather, a reader of the blog posted this comment: “One of my favorite journalistic gaffes is ‘igon value’ from one of Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker pieces. I guess he and his editors never took a single linear algebra course. (I actually really dig Gladwell’s pieces in general).”

This amounts to a ghastly parable for the conscientious writer, for any of you with a semi-obsessive impulse toward using the Internet as a tool to track your reputation, your triumphs, your “igon value” screwups. It’s one thing to Google yourself. It’s another thing to read every comment on every blog post that mentions your name.

Or maybe it’s not a parable at all. Maybe it’s just another way of saying that you can’t be perfect and that you can’t spend your whole life trying to track down every mistake you might have made. Realistically, Pinker would have bludgeoned Gladwell with something else if he’d corrected the spelling of “eigenvalue” in time for the book. Indeed, Pinker praised Gladwell’s writing but tarred him for being a “minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures.”

Am I the only person who’d rather be called an “idiot” than a “minor genius”?

Back to the point, here’s what feels most broken about all this. We have a blog commenter who says “I actually really dig Gladwell’s pieces” and somehow the error he detected did not get fixed. Why? Well, we can’t know at this point. I e-mailed the commenter yesterday and asked this: “I’m just curious as to whether you wrote to Gladwell or The New Yorker about the error you found. If so, did you get a response? If not, why do you think you chose to write a comment on a blog instead of alerting Gladwell? Oh, and what did you have for lunch on that day in 2003? Surely, you remember all of this perfectly.”

If I get a response and the commenter is cool with being quoted, I will write a follow-up post.

In the meantime, try to resist the can-of-worms impulse to Google yourself.

For more of my posts about books, writers, and writing, please click here. The most recent, “Jonathan Lethem and the Bartender,” got a mention on The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog. Thank you for reading.