Humour

From sloths to kangaroos

T A Balasubramanian on how the time one spends online is affecting the attention power of individuals

Boldly venturing into the inner world of Bobo Jitter—the ever-challenged and always-hopeful CIO of Bazooka Corporation—Dr Don Jong holds another session, peppered, as usual, with his tangential tales and incomparable wisdom gleaned from a potpourri of sources. Named ‘The Oddfather’ because of the wacky insights that he cheerfully dispenses, Dr Jong has a special knack for delving into the arcane mysteries of technology and it’s many permutations.

“Ah, Bobo, the long face tells me that you are—how shall we say—wrestling with an inner demon? So what is it that we have now?”

“Well Doc, I cannot read the way I could.”

“And what, if I may ask, stops you from reading? Is your vision failing?”

“No, nothing’s wrong with my vision. What I mean is that I seem to have almost completely lost my ability to read and comprehend, say, a long story in print, or on the computer screen.”

“Ah, so you cannot be bothered to read anything for long with close attention, eh?”

“That’s it. I am only able to read short lines, and my thinking seems to come and go in little flashes, rather like a flickering bulb. I am not thinking the way I used to. I can sense it most strongly when I am reading. I used to be able to digest 1,000-page books like ‘Gone with the Wind’ from cover to cover, but lately even a blog post of more than three or four lines is too much to absorb. I skim through it—almost as if I am in a race against time.”

“Hmm. This is serious, I admit. I too, have immersed myself in those lengthy novels in my youth, but I have not had the occasion to locate such tomes in the book-shops lately. Reading was enchantment. My imagination would get tangled with that of the writer, and I would be lost in the turns of the pages, spending endless hours swimming in the sea of prose. In my earlier days, I could curl up with a paperback and take in a story in a leisurely and contemplative way, like a lazy sloth. Maybe spend days ruminating over a sentence or two. I could even write my own thoughts down in a diary. But that is rarely the case now.”

“It is a relief to know that I am not the only affected one. But what worries me, Doc, is that, my mind seems to be changing.”

“Well, that is to be expected. The great French novelist Marcel Proust observed that ‘The heart of the expert reading brain is to think beyond the decoded words to construct thoughts and insights never before held by that person. In so doing, we are forever changed by what we read.’ Then again, Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher observed, of a typewriter that he learned to use after much exertion: ‘Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.’ Nietzsche’s prose reportedly changed from ‘arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.’ ”

“They were right, Doc, both Proust and Nietzsche. Like most constant users of the Internet, I have turned into an impatient kangaroo—indulging in this compulsive hopping activity, going from one site to another and rarely returning to any source that I have already visited, but with no lasting impression of what I have just seen. I typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before I lose interest and hop off to another place.”

“Ah, this is interesting. From sloth to kangaroo, eh? Your mind has a tendency to jump up and leave while you are reading a book or an article as if it is impatient to go ... somewhere else?”

“Exactly. I have this funny feeling that the amount of time I spend online is affecting the way I read, write, gather knowledge and maybe, even think. I have to make a lot of mental effort to force myself to think deeper and not accept at face value, an article I have just read online, when this process used to be easy and natural.”

“Ah, but it has never been natural, my boy—we human beings were not designed by nature to read long passages of text—we invented reading. The skill has to be passed on to every new generation. Each new human mind comes to reading with a ‘fresh’ slate. Our brains are programmed to speak, see, and think—but not to read. Reading requires the brain to rearrange its original parts to learn something new. According to Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist, the ‘reading’ brain, formed over the past 5,000 years since the acquisition of reading, is ‘being changed in unforeseen ways behind screens that provide all manner of information instantly and seemingly comprehensively’ without the same need for great effort or deep analysis. She says that we are becoming mere ‘decoders of information’ rather than true comprehenders. So, ‘we are not only what we read; we are how we read.’ Or, to put it more colourfully, in your idiom—we are becoming mere jumpy kangaroos rather than plodding sloths.”

“So what do I do, Doc?”

“The British biologist J B S Haldane observed, and I quote—‘Evolution will take its course, and that course has generally been downward. The majority of species have degenerated and become extinct, or, what is perhaps worse, gradually lost many of their functions. The ancestors of oysters and barnacles had heads. Snakes have lost their limbs and ostriches and penguins their power of flight. Man may just as easily lose his intelligence.’ Now, if you think about your inability to read long articles, what does that tell you?”

“That I am bound to become extinct?”

“Well, let’s not take the venerable biologist too literally. Oysters and barnacles, though headless, are still around. Snakes, ostriches and penguins, too, are thriving. They adapted and learned to make themselves cosy in the new world order. Then, of course, one might argue that losing one form of acquired intelligence—the ability to read and reflect across long passages—might not be too bad a fate for mankind if it becomes adept at starting a new order of civilization. In this age of cloud computing, who is to say what forms of new intelligence will be demanded of us by the universal computer? Maybe our hopping kangaroo-mind will become the dominant species and the sloth will become a memory of the past, like the dodo.”

“Which means that even if I have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond the few paragraphs of a blog, I would still survive?”

“Voila, you comprehend! We will become so used to immediate access to instant information that we will have no need to probe under the surface we see. We will abandon the quest for deeper layers of insight, imagination, and reflective musing. Who needs these, anyway, since all knowledge is there, etched in silicon memory? After all, nobody would have believed you if you had predicted, even 50 years ago, that there would be millions of human hands clicking on mice in front of lighted up screens.”