My estrangement from Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" continues, well sort of. Think of this estrangement as a lovers spat. In any friendship or marriage you often come to realize that you love the other person dearly, but there are some things you just have to put up with and tolerate - you just don't see eye to eye with them on that. So it is with Postman - in terms of intellect he is to me as Mt. Everest is to an anthill and in terms of influence he is to me as the Pacific Ocean is to a raindrop. But, as I mentioned here, I find myself more and more skeptical about his views on the superiority of print culture to graphical culture.
I am intrigued with the work of Steven Berlin Johnson who says that "Everything Bad is Good for You." He makes the audacious and heretical claim that things like TV and video games are actually good for you - claims which are doubly heretical coming from a preacher like me who seems to be endorsing them. After all, we all know that TV and video games are ruining our society and it is the job of clergy like myself to protect society, and impressionable young minds in particular, from these things.
I am still a bit agnostic on whether or not Johnson is right. You can get a quick summary of his thesis in this review of his book by Malcolm Gladwell. His thoughts are intriguing to say the least. It would be helpful if you can read Gladwell's review before you read what I am writing next because it is an important piece of background. On his blog Johnson imagines a world where video games preceded books. Now, a new thing has come out which is replacing the old - in this imaginary world, books have been invented and people are shifting en masse to reading them, and this alarms those who have been a part of a video-game driven culture.
Again, this is imaginary and Johnson prefaces what I am about to quote by saying he doesn't believe this. He just wants to show the possible objections that those who have spent centuries in a video-game based world might offer to the intrusion of books. And I offer this as an alternative to Postman - Postman is concerned about what we will lose in the transition from a print based to a graphic based culture. Johnson imagines things the other way around. And, at the end, I want to suggest that a transition similar to what Johnson envisions has already happened in our past.
"Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries –– and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they're all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:
Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying –– which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements –– books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new 'libraries' that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.
Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia –– a condition didn't even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion –– you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today's generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they're powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it's a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to 'follow the plot' instead of learning to lead."
Now again, all of you who have turned purple, please relax. Johnson is giving a fictitious scenario and doesn't hate books - after all, he promulgates his ideas through books. But I would suggest that something similar to what he describes here happened in the shift from an oral culture to a print based culture.
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