Random Digital Thoughts

I recently read Michael Harris’ book, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. The chapters on attention and memory interested me most. Also, there was the Glossary. But you may check that out on your own. Below are some highpoints I gleaned when my attention didn’t drift to the squirrel outside the window or checking my email.

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In 1937, psychological researcher B.F. Skinner posited that humans will repeat any behavior which produces positive rewards. This theory likely explains why we check our email ten times a day, hoping for good jokes or cute kitten pictures. What won’t we do to avoid the struggle of writing!

Our loss of attentiveness (and retentiveness) began long ago, as oral tradition gave way to print. Hearing and retelling edge-of-the-campfire tales evolved into reading the stories, sometimes aloud, sometimes silently. In time, most of us stopped moving our lips. Our author—Michael Harris, if you can not recall his name from paragraph one—included an interesting footnote in which he mentioned that “Around 380A.D., the future St. Augustine was astonished, upon meeting the future St. Ambrose, to find him reading without moving his lips.”

Today, moving one’s lips while reading is associated with certain backwardness, somewhat like sending snail mail or using a flip-phone. No allowance is made for aural appreciation of an author’s writing. Even today, best-selling authors don’t endorse lip movement. For example—and this is my reference to commercial fiction, not Michael Harris’—please consider a bit of dialogue from mystery writer John Sanford’s novel, Deadline, his thirty-eighth novel and a quick read with many humorous, off-color one-liners that will keep your attention. One of his characters says of her lover, “…Johnson, you been reading again, without your Chapstick,” and the character further explains, “His lips get chapped when he reads too much.” Lip readers get no respect.

Today, few of us spend any uninterrupted time reading, with or without lip movement. We are digitally-driven multitaskers, or as Harris says, we are actually engaged in “rapid-shifting-minitasking.” At best, we are “multiswitching.”

After honest consideration, we have to admit there is no such thing as multitasking. We suffer attention deficit and knowledge deficit. As a species, we know less than we did centuries ago. When a cosmic catastrophe one day destroys the nation’s electronic grid (and the internet!), most of us will starve, unable to grow a potato or make bread rise. We now know only where to find answers as we access the internet via our tablets and digital phones. Some digiphiles argue the Internet is simply an improvement upon already existing organizational tools: the alphabet, a book’s index, or a phone book. I’m not sold on that excuse.

Isn’t knowing important? And what about remembering? Harris described his undergrad English professor, who for thirty years required students to memorize the first twenty-six lines of John Milton’s poem, Paradise Lost. How they complained! But they complied, and the prof’s end-of-year evals invariably cited that memorization as the “most empowering” aspect of the course.

To laud the benefits of attentiveness and memorization, I close with two selections cited by the author (whatshisname, Michael Harris):

Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sow a thought, reap an action;

Sow an action, reap a habit;

Sow a habit, reap a character;

Sow a character, reap a destiny.

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From Paradise Lost by John Milton, those first twenty-six lines of Book 1

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,

In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth

Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow'd

Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence

Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,

That with no middle flight intends to soar

Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues

Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.

And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer

Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,

Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first

Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread

Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss

And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark

Illumine, what is low raise and support;

That to the highth of this great Argument

I may assert th' Eternal Providence,

And justifie the wayes of God to men.

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Finally, if Harris’ suggestions are too academic and evoke dark memories from your high school years, I offer a salute to memory quoted to me by a friend from my long ago military days: Airman Second Class Wayne Goodman, Det. 5, 9^th Weather Squadron, Mountain Home AFB, Idaho in 1962.

Twenty-five ponderous pachyderms pillaged a pigmy village, piling pins and pips in pretty and posthumous piles, period.

Is it too much for me to expect you to recite all three of these items from memory when we next encounter one another? We can at least discuss the benefit derived from trying.

The End

© Richard J. Schram