Unlike some children I met at the zoo this week, I am quite sure I could recognise a kangaroo from a very early age. Not being a native of Australia, I can only assume that this is because K was for kangaroo in my ABC book, or because I was an avid viewer of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Either way, the message got through, and I just can't remember a time when I didn't know this.
While I did not ask these children how many hours a week they spend watching television or playing computer games, or what books they might be reading, I feel sure that technology, in one of its many guises, is responsible for the kangaroo never having featured in their young lives. Literacy in its broadest sense is suffering at the hands of technology. I do not mean the basic manipulation of letters to form words and sentences, but the interpretation and analysis of text that is necessary for an appreciative understanding of the arts and sciences.
In my childhood, television and books served as complementary tools. While on one level they provided large doses of "candy for the mind", on another, more astute level, television often provided an informal introduction to a subject that you could further pursue by consulting books or magazines. This way you got the visual, entertaining, "soundbite" versions as well as the more detailed and informed versions. You had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Can the same be true for Web-based information? Does it serve as a complementary tool to books, or do its users accept only the edited versions they receive online? Author and professor of Media Culture at New York University, Douglas Rushkoff, says that the viewing style of today's children is more adult than it has ever been. Apparently myself and my childhood peers, being victims of a gap-evasive viewing style that ignored the basic reality of a discontinuous mediaspace, were easily convinced that our lives could run smoothly and easily if we simply followed instructions.
In contrast to today's children, we were passive and unquestioning, never changed channels, and learned what to think rather than how to think. Today's remote control-wielding, channel-hopping children, while perhaps having a shorter attention span, are immune to persuasion, he says, having attained the much more important skills of multi-tasking and the ability to process visual information very quickly. The multi-tiered scanning abilities that Rushkoff sees as essential for surviving in the electronic age have always been with us. A chaotic landscape encompassing multi-channel TV and the World Wide Web with all its appendages has, he says, catapulted us into a post-linear mode of thinking and communicating. But we are all in this together with one subtle difference: many of us over the age of 25 have ably married the linear and the chaotic. We have mastered the interpretation of the written word and the visual on-screen images. We can write letters and send e-mail. We can channel hop and read books. We can surf the Web and surf the shelves of libraries and bookstores. Television or the Web cannot threaten our long attention spans, because when they fail to reach our high standards or fulfil our intellectual needs, we simply turn to the book. If the online library catalogue crashes in the morning, we can confidently stride over to the cabinets of index cards and continue where we left off.
While Rushkoff is excited and enthused by the chaotic and non-linear aspect of the electronic age, seeing it as a natural step in the evolutionary process, Sven Birkets, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, sees the printed word as part of a vestigial order that we are moving away from by choice, as well as by societal compulsion. This is not the first shift in our long history. The shift from oral to literate culture took centuries. It also took several centuries for affordable printed matter to filter down to all levels of society, but the impact of electronic developments have been more immediate.
If you love that musty, warm bread smell of crispy yellowing pages and are brave enough to overcome the fear of encountering the odd dead moth housed therein, you may be devastated to learn the thoughts of one Robert Zich, "special projects czar" of the Library of Congress. Frankly accepting that people will be able to get any information they need directly from their computers, Zich accepts that the function of libraries will change, becoming more like museums than purveyors and providers of knowledge and information. The big research libraries and the great national libraries "will go the way of the railroad station and the movie palaces of an earlier era, which were really vital institutions in their time".
If your heart is sinking at the very prospect, brace yourself for his comments on the future of the book. Suffice it to say that he is very enthusiastic about Sony's hand-held electronic book and Franklin Electronic Publisher's miniature encyclopaedia. I do not know how he feels about the thesaurus feature that ships with Microsoft Word, but I can tell you now that if the current generation of students typing up their essays are depending upon it, a large number of words in the English language (e.g. atavistic, campanology, sacerdotal) that are missing from this ignoble tool will be defunct within 10 years.
As a guardian and champion of the written word and printed text, Birkets is gravely concerned about language erosion in our all-electronic future. There is no going back, developments are afoot, and gurus such as MIT's Nicolas Negroponte are propelling well-funded research that will network our very souls. This development, while not all bad, does need to be critically examined for flaws as well as benefits. It is doubtless invigorating, stimulating and challenging, but will profit from opposing commentators like Rushkoff and Birkets, who, while embracing their first loves, do not totally dismiss the fundamentals of each other's love affairs with technology and the book respectively.
Birkets appropriately quotes Heraclitus: "The mixture that is not shaken soon stagnates." We don't need Luddites and we don't want robots, but we do want non-fundamentalists from both camps to help society meet the challenges. Some, like J.K. Rowling have done so inadvertently. I do not know if her plan was to defeat the miasmic forces of the PlayStation, and put a book in the hand that feels more at home manipulating a joy-stick than turning a page, but this was certainly the welcome, if surprising result of her literary endeavours. It is a well-known fact that our young people are finding it more and more difficult to read 18th and 19th-century literature with ease. The exquisite prose and beautiful play with words is being abandoned for the more easily absorbed and digestible text that some educators would try to convince us is literature.
As Birkets observes, the transition from the culture of the book to the culture of electronic communication will radically alter the ways in which we use language, the complexity and distinctiveness of spoken and written expression being replaced by a more telegraphic sort of "plainspeak". Ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety and wit are fast disappearing, he says, while the "greater part of any articulate person's energy will be deployed in dumbing-down her discourse." The multi-media and entertainment industries have given themselves a brief to educate all of us in their own inimitable style. But is this really education or just a glossy familiarisation with a given topic? Will the hypertext version of a Shakespeare play give us more insight into King Lear or Macbeth, than the well-versed teacher with the worn text?
To those of us with a longer attention span, more used to reading a book from beginning to end, the endless multimedia supplements in the electronic version would be irritating distractions from the main text. The necessity of accessing all the links would seem superfluous to the main task in hand, that of reading the work, more than likely a simpler version of the original. Perhaps the links and hyperlinks in the classroom of hyperspace are more suited to today's youth. Perhaps the familiar linearity of the book is now defunct for the children of the post-linear generation, whose attention spans have the ability to maintain themselves over long stretches of discontinuity, a feature of multimedia learning. As Rushkoff says: "The child with the ability to pull himself out of a linear argument while it is in progress, re-evaluate its content and relevance, and then either recommit or move on, is a child with the ability to surf the modern mediaspace."
It would seem that the challenge of the modern mediaspace is purely navigational, a low-level fact finding tour, whereas the challenge of literature is in interpreting the language. Any literate person can move forward and learn to navigate, but can the navigators go back in time and learn to interpret the language of any era? I will leave the final word with Sven Birkets: "Language is the soul's ozone layer and we thin it at our peril."
Berni Dwan is a freelance technology writer