Digital Natives Or Strangers In Paradise?

Digital Natives or Strangers in Paradise?

(How To Cope with New Media)

by William

Does a world flooded with information sound like paradise or hell? Do text messages ruin children s spelling? Do you know your best friend s phone number? If computers are changing the way we think, are you ready to evolve?

TALE OF TWO POETS

Imagine two poets, back at the dawn of literacy, travelling bards with thousands of lines of wonderful verse etched in their memories, ready to perform their epics for kings, sultans and pharaohs. Some boffin at the emperor s court shows them the latest gadget: papyrus.

Looks like dried reeds to me, says the first poet.

Yes, says the boffin, but if we inscribe it with symbols using squid ink from a quill, we can record your poetry for future generations.

New-fangled nonsense, the poet laughs. How can you record my sonorous voice, the inimitable performance of my epic, the Nostoi?

The second poet is more curious, and recites his poem for the boffin. It s called the Iliad, he begins humbly.

Laboriously they transcribe the great poem and the Odyssey to follow it, and Homer s great epics are enshrined, by the new technology, as the cornerstone of western literature, while the other poet s forgotten epics are consigned to oblivion.

It s obvious now that paper and ink were destined to change the world. But then?

KNEE-JERK DISDAIN

I was astonished to hear Simon Schama, professor of ., speak at the Edinburgh Book Festival about cyberspace with the same disdain as the first poet in our story. Professor Schama is a remarkable historian, his TV History of Britain a triumph of accessible scholarship. But this master of two media (books and television) has drawn the line at cyberspace. You can buy his books online, but you won t find a dedicated website written by him or about him.

Yes, it s bewildering to follow technological developments, and difficult to distinguish consumer hype from true potential. But the knee-jerk reaction of disdain will only make us out of touch with our children and students, and consign us to oblivion along with the Nostoi.

Looking back through history, all too often we find disdain, indeed moral indignation, over new technologies. But many of our complaints are misguided, prejudicial or nonsensical. We ll run through abreactions to past technologies, look at arguments against simplistic dismissal, taking SMS as an special case, and glance open-eyed into the world of futurology.

FROM PRINTING PRESS TO POPULAR NOVELS

Literacy itself was viewed ambivalently right from the start. The tale of Bellerophon, in Homer s Iliad, harks back to the time when symbols on a page seemed to be a dangerous kind of witchcraft, transferring secret information across vast distances.

But it was with the printing press that moral panic set in. There was such resistance to making the Bible accessible that William Tyndale was burned at the stake in 1536 for printing a translation, and anyone in possession of these forbidden Bibles, smuggled into England in sacks of flour, could be killed.

French romances were considered to weaken people s minds. Don Quixote s madness was inspired by reading too many novels. Victorians were uneasy about the lurid influence on young minds of poetry and novels, just as we worry about the effects of screen violence. What becomes clear, as a medium matures, is that moral indignation should be directed at the content, not the medium. Wholesale disdain of cyberspace is simply nonsensical.

GENERATION TEXT

One medium inspiring particular anger is text messaging or SMS. Typical objections are:

1. Texting is a waste of time, popular among isolated people with nothing better to do.

2. Text speak is nonsensical, shallow and exclusive: penmanship for illiterates, hieroglyphs, abbreviations, codes and face symbols comprehensible only to initiates.

3. Texting erodes linguistic ability. Indeed, it is eroding our language.

Do you agree with these complaints? Or are you a dedicated texter yourself?

Crispin Thurley s controversial study of texts suggests that all three of these stereotypes are not only wrong but ill-informed and patronising.

1. Thurley notes varied social functions carried out in texts, from friendship through humour to flirting and sex. By allowing people to maintain intimacy and banter over distance and extended time, text is small-talk par excellence, a crucial tool in social bonding and a creative outlet for self-expression not for isolated losers at all.

2. In a study of over 500 messages, there were only three abbreviations per message, 73 letter-number homophones (gr8 for great, RU for are you ), and 39 emoticons (face symbols, eg :) meaning smiles). These innovations, seized upon by the media in criticising text speak, are not truly central to the medium.

3. There are misspellings and typographic errors, but this in no way proves that the Text Generation is illiterate. Text communication has its own etiquette and rules, but this does not mean texters lose the ability to use standard language. One Scottish schoolgirl caused consternation by writing a holiday essay in text speak: My smmr hols. B4, we usd 2 go 2 NY 2C my bro. ILNY, its gr8 ... But this shows linguistic versatility, rather than ignorance: we can imagine the girl s delight in her teacher s shock.

Thurley claims that texting is a direct, authentic style of communication, bringing the immediacy and humour of speech into written text. Yes, texters cut off the end of words and omit double letters, but they know when they are doing this. They are effectively bi-lingual, they still know how to use apostrophes, and if they want to read Bible in text speak (as available from Bible Society of Australia), they will do so for fun: In da Bginnin God cre8d da heavNs + da earth

Nor are such abbreviations new. So-called text speak appears on Prince s albums (Nothing Compares 2U), in Burt Bacharach songs (Wishin And Hopin ), and in Mark Twain s writing. Consider this quotation:

Our clt Mr Jarndyce being abt to rece into his house, under an Order of the Ct of Chy in this cause, for whom he wishes to secure an elgble compn.

A legal text message? No: this appears in Charles Dickens Bleak House, published 18??.

Nearly a billion people worldwide own mobile phones. Nearly a billion SMS messages are sent every month in the UK alone. Can we really decry such a phenomenon as shallow and exclusive?

WIDER DUALITIES

Let s dissect more popular worries about young people, computers and technology. Young people, we are told, can t concentrate on anything. They find reading boring and they can t write. They re glued to their computers, disconnected from the real world, indulging in moronic chat, dumbed-down junk culture, violent games and dangerous websites.

Are these things true? If so, are they new?

I heard an eight year old pupil explaining to his twelve year old brother how to search a web encyclopaedia more effectively, suggesting that his reading skills are enhanced by computers, not diminished. Children s book sales are currently at their highest ever level in the UK. People who once hated writing are now email addicts.

As for moronic chat and dumbed down culture, these were around long before computers. Didn t our parents complain about how we spent our time? Can any of us honestly say that we don t enjoy mindless magazine articles, television programmes and foolish chatter with friends (though perhaps in a caf or on the phone rather than internet chatrooms)?

Fears about disconnection from the real world, violence in games and internet pornography surely have some validity. But are they so different from Victorian worries about the immoral effects of lazing around reading novels gothic, romantic or erotic? Only later did we start to value such novels as art, for the insight they provide into life. Nobody these days complains that reading is bad for you.

Digital evangelists claim equal value for modern media. Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You, observes that good computer games are deep complex experiences, that computer chat rooms require complex etiquette and challenge old prejudices, and that the best of today s television is hugely complex to satisfy today s media-savvy audience. (Compare the multi-layered plots of The Sopranos and Lost with the simple stories in Happy Days or I Love Lucy.)

Furthermore, there is evidence that our children s brains are developing to cope with the demands of the digital age. Oxford s Anders Sandberg has discovered that computer games can enhance aspects of attention, such as peripheral vision. Pam Briggs, a professor of applied cognitive psychology, has shown that people can accurately judge the usefulness of websites in less than two seconds. When I was buying a croquet set for my father on E-bay, he wanted to take notes on all 135 options I persuaded him with some difficulty that I could judge trustworthy sellers from their posting and E-bay ratings.

Helen Petrie, professor of human-computer interaction, explains: Young people sift more and filter more. Umberto Eco notes how this generation prizes the diminutive, the brief and the simple in communication. But this needn t be a criticism. When I was a child, looking for entertainment, I could choose from three television stations, books on my bookshelf and games in my cupboard. Now the whole of human knowledge is available all the time. Yet when they find something engaging, young people can still concentrate: on a new computer game, the latest Harry Potter, writing own blog, or watching the World Cup final. And if their need to be entertained presents challenges for teachers, is that necessarily a bad thing?

EXTENDED MIND

As yesterday s science fiction becomes today s technology, the very way we think may be changing.

What s your best friend s phone number? You don t know? Before mobile phones relieved us of the duty of writing numbers down, that would have been unthinkable. Ross Anderson, in the Guardian, warns that young people use Satellite Navigation so much they don t even know where they are driving. But is that necessarily bad?

Andy Clark, professor of cognitive science, believes we are already cyborgs, or cyber-organisms. Notebooks, tape recorders and computers are all a type of extended memory. If we use software to trawl the net for personalized news, music or goods, can we really tell where brainwork stops and processing begins?

Such changes have long been afoot. In 400 BC, soldiers invading Syracuse proved they were Athenian by reciting long passages of Euripides plays they could only have heard once. Could any of us do that now? With the advent of literacy, books relieved us of much rote learning. But that doesn t mean we are letting our brains atrophy.

Technology reduces the burden on memory, says memory expert, Professor Martin Conway, and increases our ability to make use of our minds. We can use the neural pathways for other, more important information.

But we can still develop our memory when required: London taxi drivers enlarge their hippocampus by memorising every street in the city imprisoned East Timorese leader Xanana Gusm o recounted his memoirs to fellow prisoners who memorised passages to transfer to manuscri pt later.

BIONIC BRAINS

The dreams of science fiction are moving ever more quickly into reality. Men visited the moon less than a century after HG Wells imagined it. The dreams of Star Trek and Star Wars are already all around us: video conferencing, laser surgery, interactive democracy. What is a mobile phone but a futuristic tele-communicator?

Our understanding of the brain and nervous system is leading to revolutionary advances. Former US Marine, Claudia Mitchell, has just been fitted with a bionic arm connected to the nerves that once went to her real arm. She can now fold clothes, eat a banana and do the washing up simply by thinking that s what I want to do.

Ken Wood, of Cambridge s Microsoft Research Laboratory, is developing SenseCam software to stimulate episodic memory in Alzheimer s patients, mimicking the processes of hippocampal brain structures to stave off memory loss.

Ian Pearson of British Telecoms s futurology unit believes we will soon be downloading our brains, as envisioned in cyber-fiction like William Gibson s seminal Neuromancer. By 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it s not a major career problem. Sony s PlayStation 3 is 1% as powerful as a human brain. Will we be able to simulate a brain, complete with emotions and consciousness? Futurologists warn that once we create ultraintelligence computers more intelligent than ourselves that may be the last invention man need ever make, as subsequent machines will invent everything else for us, at an unimaginable rate.

The ethical dilemmas presented by cybernetics, virtual reality, cloning and genetics are complex. Yet we have had previews: Hollywood has asked these questions with films like 2001: a Space Odyssey, Bladerunner, Minority Report and The Island.

THE FUTURE NOW

All this is just the beginning. All the media we know and love may change unrecognisably. Radio stations can already be tailored to our tastes. Televisions can learn to show us only programmes we like. Books and newspapers can be read on slim electronic paper. If we can t get used to DVDs, the internet and MP3 players, we re going to be in trouble, like the epic poet bamboozled by papyrus.

Consider the wider possibilities. Some aspects of language teaching can already be done better by computers. Teaching may give way to distance learning and computerised learning. As voice recognition improves, will we need to write at all, or even type? As computers understanding of language improves, so will automatic translation and interpreting: brain implants may one day render language skills redundant. Computers already run our finances. Why can t they control our cars, our houses, our cooking? Why can t they become our friends?

Some commentators argue that our indignation about new technologies is pure nostalgia. Because things are different, we like to complain that they re worse. But in this world flooded with endless information, bits, bytes, soundbites and stimuli, we need to set aside moral indignation, judge media by their content (not how new-fangled they are), and value the new skills this brave new world will require.

William