Digital Brains and Wisdom

I found the Ong and Wolf articles assigned for this week fascinating reading, although I have to admit I also found them pretty heavy slogging to get through. I had always thought of imperious as meaning arrogant, but I was surprised to learn that it also means “assuming power without justification”. What could it mean to say that literacy is imperious? The idea that literacy should not necessarily be regarded as normative and natural and essential to human intellectual life was one that had not occurred to me before.

Upon further reflection I realized that, of course, Ong is correct. There was plenty of human intellectual discourse prior to the development of writing, and writing is not an innate characteristic of being human in the way the speech is. What writing did, was to change the nature and content of intellectual discourse. As Ong puts it, writing is “utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior human potentials.” Writing brought about an “interior transformation of consciousness” that made possible a whole new type of intellectual process. Where oral thought had been essentially conservative, written thought allowed for more abstract and exploratory thinking. Writing allowed for ideas to be preserved across time and across space.

What does this have to do with digital literacy? I can’t help but wondering what changes in the nature of the intellectual thought of our species may be slowly being wrought by evolving digital technologies. I was struck by the description of how Plato condemned writing as alien, artificial and foreign to human life—quite similar to the criticisms often leveled in modern times at computers and digital modes of communication. Could it be that we are in the midst of a transformation that we are not fully aware of, just as Plato was not truly aware of how thoroughly writing had changed the nature of thought during his times? As Ong points out, Plato could not even have formed his argument against writing had the emergence of writing not already changed his thought processes. Perhaps the existence of digital media has already changed the structure of our thoughts in ways we have not yet fully realized.

This idea is supported by the Wolf articles, which describe how the human brain changed as reading and writing developed. Where Ong talks about a transformation of consciousness, Wolf describes a transformation of the physiology of the brain. If these changes occurred as the technologies of reading and writing emerged, it is equally possible that changes of similar magnitude are occurring as digital technologies emerge. A simple Google search with the term “internet changes brains” yields 37, 600 results, including many articles that I suspect many of us have read over the past few years. Some of these articles appear to be of the hand-wringing variety—“Is the Internet Melting Our Brains?", while others are more positive—“Using Internet Boosts Older Brains”.

In a sense, I don’t think it matters much whether we agree with the hand-wringers or the cheerleaders. Change, whether it’s for the better or the worse, is here, and, in my opinion, is unstoppable. Perhaps it is more important to be aware of it and to try to understand it than to form a judgment about its goodness or badness.

So why is the word “wisdom” in the title of my post, you may be wondering at this point? It’s there just to highlight a passing and somewhat unformed thought I had while reading the Ong article. Ong points out that great advances in intellectual thought were made possible by the development of writing. As he puts it, “Pressed by the need to manage an always fugitive noetic universe, the oral world is basically conservative. Exploratory thinking is not unknown, but it is relatively rare, a luxury orality can little afford, for energies must be husbanded to keep on constant call the evanescent knowledge that the ages have so laboriously accumulated. Everybody, or almost everybody, must repeat and repeat and repeat the truths that have come down from the ancestors." Writing made exploratory thought possible, it created a separation between knowledge and the possesor of that knowledge. Knowledge and ideas could be transferred without personal contact. Although it is indisputable that a vast amount of great thought and intellectual progress was enabled by the emergence of writing, it may also be just possible that a bit of wisdom was lost in the process.

There may have been some value in the conservatism necessitated by a world without writing. I have long been enchanted by storytelling. I firmly believe that there can sometimes be more “truth” and more wisdom in a short, well-told tale than in volumes of written text. When a person, or a community, or a culture, can only keep as much information as can be committed to memory, by necessity only the most valuable ideas will be preserved. In a society where access to information is virtually unlimited, and the ability to preserve every little scrap of information—from financial records, to test results, to endless photos of the minutest events, to recordings of what we eat for breakfast—is also virtually unlimited, many people find it increasingly difficult to sift through all of that information to find what is of value; they find it difficult determine what their values are and to decide what constitutes moral “right behavior.” I don’t at all mean to suggest that we ought to try and go back to some idealized “good old days” when everything was better and everyone knew right from wrong; I simply wonder what was lost along with all that was gained when we humans learned to write.