The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
Practically speaking, it’s possible to build a strong habit of choice. It’s like learning to fasten your seat belt when you get in the car. You just do it, over and over, until it becomes part of the business of starting the engine. (In fact, of course, what you’re doing is strengthening the relevant neural pathways in your brain – turning neuroplasticity to your own advantage.) In the real world, it might be hard to find evenly balanced decisions with trees of branching possibility to practise on, but, coming right back to the beginning of this book, we know that decision-making skills are among those emphasized by frequent interaction with digital technology. Both computer games and web use require anticipation, problem-solving and decision. So if you’re already working and playing digitally, you’re solving part of the problem. (Games, obviously, want to present you with hard choices to keep you interested, and deciding whether to click through a link in an article to the deeper information beyond is, as Nicholas Carr describes it, a split-second change in cognition during which you weigh what you’re presently reading against an assessment of the interest and value of what you are likely to find beyond the link.)
US writer and thinker Howard Rheingold, who chronicled the rise of the WELL in the early days of the Internet, also wrote a checklist for lucid dreaming. Lucid dreams are dreams in which the sleeper is aware that they are dreaming and can control their actions and environment. The trick is to reach that point without also waking yourself up. Rheingold gives three easy ways of spotting a dream: physical laws don’t work; text changes when you read it twice or is illegible; switches and mechanisms that ought to function do nothing. He advises would-be lucid dreamers to check these things frequently throughout the day so that they do it naturally, and hence while dreaming.
The concept lends itself well to training oneself to good habits of decision-making. Each time you’re confronted with a situation that seems to call for choice, check your assumptions. Look at the options in front of you, and remove the ones that seem out of place, like the Economist’s print-only option. Now ask yourself whether the options available accord with what you actually want and what you feel able to pay in terms of time or effort or money – or personal data. At each stage, demand more of yourself. Don’t simply wait for time, the system or circumstance to make the choice for you. (This last is particularly important as businesses in all areas confront the digital challenge; there’s a natural caution that urges us to watch and wait and see what it all looks like ‘when it’s calmed down’. The problem with that is that it cedes the act of creation of the new landscape to others who have different priorities. Once again looking at the publishing trade, the digital giants – Amazon, Apple and Google – have different priorities and business models from those of conventional publishers. A ‘wait and see’ strategy hands control of the book’s new era to entities that need different things from the existing publishing industry. The hard truth is: get involved, or get sidelined. The future is not set. It’s being made right now.)
Broadly, the ‘choice habit’ looks a bit like this:
1 What are the overt costs and benefits?
2 What are the hidden costs? Under what circumstances if any will this become a disaster?
3 What will the effects of this choice be on the wider world?
4 What assumptions have I made in framing this choice in this way? Are there other ways of dealing with the same situation that might be better?
It’s quite interesting to run different decisions through the list. For example: Should I accept an interest-only, negative-amortizing, adjustable-rate sub-prime mortgage?
Rendered in English, that’s a loan secured on your house on which you have the option of adding your interest payments to the capital sum as you go along. If it sounds barking mad, that is because it is, as far as I can tell, the worst type of loan created during the sub-prime lending boom, designed in essence for people who could not afford to borrow what they were being offered. It is a loan whose purpose is not to serve the borrower but to form part of a package of loans that can then be securitized and sold on: a loan-as-commodity. It stumbles a bit on question 1, looks utterly alarming on question 2, and brain-shatteringly scary if you can actually answer question 3. (In which case, you can join the five or six people who dared to ask hard questions in the run-up to the collapse and make a lot of money.) The answer to question 4 would probably be: Yes, you need to consider a different property or a rental.
I’m not proposing that this is magic, just that a real decision process, robustly applied, will at least reveal the nature of the choice in front of you. It works equally well on the Economist’s pricing scheme, by the way: question 4 has you re-examining the different price bands and asking, if you’re really being serious about it, why the print-only option is included at all.
It’s a longish list, and it requires some brainpower to apply it, but habit makes this kind of thing very rapid – as with the example of starting your car. In that case, the sequence goes something like: seat belt, got everything, know destination, start car, mirrors and road, signal, move – and takes a few seconds. Obviously, a choice-under-pressure list looks different, as we’ve already seen. But in context, part of the point of choice is that you have to construct your own priority list; that very action is an important aspect of deciding where you assign value. And once you begin to use a list like this, you shape your life around the idea that you make your own decisions and it becomes self-reinforcing; feedback once again.
Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we’re not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what’s going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn’t like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it’s like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world.
Perhaps more, though, you are mutable, and that is good. Your habits and opinions are not written in your brain or your DNA like carvings on stone tablet, although some of your predispositions probably are. Steven Pinker again: ‘When identical twins who were separated at birth are tested in adulthood, their political attitudes turn out to be similar.’ Our brains are to a certain extent set, but within limits they are changeable, trainable. So we need to learn to treat our identities as something we make, at least in part, and be sensitive to the possibility that others are using that mutability as a tool to manipulate our actions – while at the same time taking advantage of it to become more who we wish to be. What we can’t change will take care of itself. What we can is up to us.
blindgiant.co.uk/chapter7
PART III
8
Engagement
A FEW YEARS ago, a friend of mine was studying for an art history qualification (I forget which kind). She had among other things to absorb the entirety of a wonderful book about Italian art in the Baroque period called Patrons and Painters. I had almost no knowledge of the topic, and yet somehow I had to help, at least to glean enough so that I could test her knowledge. I started at the index, looking for a way in that would allow me to find a meaningful path through a foreign land, and noticed that one name occurred a great deal: that of Consul Joseph Smith.
Smith was a collector and a patron; actually, you could say that he was the patron. He knew everyone. He occurs a great deal in Francis Haskell’s book because he’s a pivotal figure, which makes him ubiquitous and therefore useless as a first stepping stone. There’s simply too much of him to absorb without a background. However, in skimming the main entry on Joseph Smith I found someone who was, to me, more interesting: Giustiniana Wynne.
Giustinia
When I began to trace the story of Giustiniana Wynne through Venice, I became deeply and delightedly engaged. Maryanne Wolf, in Proust and the Squid, describes it perfectly in relation to reading a passage from (of course) Proust:
As your brain’s systems integrated all the visual, auditory, semantic, syntactic and inferential information … you, the reader, automatically began to connect [it] with your own thinking and insights … Reading is a neuronally and intellectually circuitous act, enriched as much by the unpredictable indirections of a reader’s inferences and thoughts, as by the direct message to the eye from the text.
I knew that, given time and information, I could come to understand the culture and the people Francis Haskell was describing by following the traces of this one remarkable woman, Giustiniana Wynne, through their lives. I was also interested, excited and moved by the small fragments of her life I encountered. I took sides in fights and wished her well in her later, more tranquil years. She, in turn, showed me who was important and what they cared about. Haskell passes on her account of Angelo Querini’s house at Alticchiero, now destroyed:
the building is not sumptuous, nor is the furniture lavish of choice; but – far better – the arrangement is as simple and convenient as possible.’ On the tables are busts of ancient and modern philosophers, among them Voltaire and Rousseau by Houdon, and the influence of both men is felt throughout the villa and gardens. No precautions are taken against theft. Only at Tahiti and Alticchiero, exclaims Mme Rosenberg, can such trust in human nature be found.
Giustiniana Wynne was a telescope through which I could see another world.
This sense of engagement is key: I found something that I could relate to and process. I have always needed context to remember and understand things. At school, I found the lists and tables of mathematics impossibly hard because I was required to learn them by rote without understanding why they worked or why I needed them. I could not engage with pure figures and operations: they slid off the surface of my mind and left me groping for them in the dark. Tell me, on the other hand, about Pythagoras, and explain the importance of his work, and I can retain and understand his geometry. As Wolf observes, in my uptake of Giustiniana’s world, what was already in my head was as important as what was on the page: it is the encounter between the two that is the relevant experience. It is not important, in this context, whether the engagement is taking place between two flesh and blood human beings, two or more human beings mediated by the Internet, or one human being and the text of a book written by another. There is an interaction taking place, not a straight dump of information from source to brain.
That should hearten anyone who fears that the increasing reliance in digital society on Dr Johnson’s secondary sort of knowledge – the knowledge of where to find something – is destroying the idea of scholarship and excellence. Johnson’s secondary knowledge actually comes in two parts, the tacit part being ‘knowing where to put information in your own mental map when you’ve found it, and knowing what to do with it’. Expertise is not merely knowledge, and it is not supplanted by access: it is the ability to incorporate information at a high level, to work with it and manipulate it – to engage with it fully.
More than that, though, engagement is the key to authenticity. With it, something meaningful is happening, whether you’re watching an animated cartoon or discussing ontology with a famous metaphysician. Without it, you could be standing in the midst of wonder and see nothing. The classic image from American movies of recent decades is the dad on his mobile phone when he should be paying attention to his children, but you can equally easily find the phenomenon in people who can’t stop discussing their favourite topic when they’re walking through a rainforest, or those to whom one aspect of life is so utterly all-important that everything must be seen in its light, be that taxation, Marxism, God or sex.
But what was happening in my head was not the straightforward ‘deep reading’ experience Nicholas Carr is concerned we are losing. That encounter – while it is also a powerful engagement – is supposedly more narrow. In deep reading, there is a single stream of information from text to brain that excites what I would call engagement. It is not a question of binding together disparate narratives and creating a fresh perspective, but of connecting one’s own thoughts to those of an author. It is, as it were, monogamous, although Carr also mentions that the act of reading paper differs from reading on screen because there are measurable sense data that differ starkly, which seems to undermine his point. If the business of reading is partly supplemented by subsidiary information like that, then it isn’t entirely devoid of additional streams after all – though, granted, there is a difference between sense information and cognition.
Rather than being like deep reading, the business of understanding the story of Giustiniana Wynne was – subjectively, at least – more akin to the process of writing, or to reading a string of different documents to try to appreciate a news story from a variety of angles. It was inherently an act of synthesis, of editing, of judgement and creation. I was putting together a narrative. Rather than relying on a linear history with a single viewpoint, I was assembling a new understanding from a selection of incidents. You could argue – in the context of news stories, particularly – that this is a much better way of getting to an accurate perception of events than accepting the account of a single narrator. It’s the skill at the heart of digital reading in my experience: assemblage reading, a kind of internal storytelling in which a series of perspectives including one’s own is merged to produce a new understanding that embraces a string of other narratives and accepts them as primary but single-perspective and tries to assemble an over-arching, inter-subjective picture. It’s what we did (‘we’ being everyone on Twitter and other social media sites) as we tried to fathom what was happening in Egypt in spring 2011, following the stories of people we had never met and weaving them together.
The position of the reader in these two different ways of engaging is key to understanding how digital and plain text differ: in Carr’s deep reading, the reader is active, but still essentially a docile audience. In the read/write creation of a narrative from fragments, the reader is a participant – and that is at the heart of the digital age. The nature of our digital technologies as they presently exist fosters this way of being: a creative, synthetic approach to information and the world rather than an obedient, consuming one. As the growth of literacy allowed human beings to examine themselves as if from without and ushered in a new human mind – and brain – which hinged on that ability, so perhaps the digital technologies bring a more critical, creative, and engaged self to the fore.
Engagement is not a substitute for deep reading – at least, I’m not proposing that it fills the gap Carr feels is left in our brain’s plastic architecture and function by a diminished amount of time spent reading i
Obviously, when you’re dealing with a person, it isn’t simply a question of learning about them to gain access to information about the world. When we try to find out about someone socially – What movies do you like? Can you dance? What kind of work do you do? – we’re looking for places where we can bring our own experience and identity into contact with that of someone else. We’re in a species of dance, probing the edges of our agreements, looking to learn, to discover commonality or points of enjoyable difference. This kind of engagement is the interaction and meeting of two identities effectively communicated.
The key factor is that what separates real from counterfeit is not physical presence, but the actual interaction of mental and emotional patterns. Granted, you can’t have a real fight or real sex with someone without a physical component – yet – but if you have an hour-long conversation in the flesh and come away with no memory of the detail, no sense of who the other person was, and no real change to yourself as a consequence of the interaction, it’s hard to see how you can feel that you’ve had a real encounter. On the other hand, if you have an hour-long conversation online that moves and challenges you, and that experience becomes a part of who you are, the engagement clearly is important and the interaction is real. More challenging is what would have happened if you’d had that same conversation in the flesh. Would it have been more intense, more engaged? It’s impossible to say. Yes, our non-verbal communication is hugely important, so you would receive additional cues and information. On the other hand, would it have taken a different course? Would a sexual dynamic have occluded intellectual honesty and resulted in a lousy cognitive engagement, an encounter filled with partial deception ending in a physical encounter? Does that qualify as more genuine?