Medieval Multitasking?

You're probably at least aware of the latest "the Internet is making us stupid" debate. On one side, you have people like Nicholas Carr who (roughly speaking) think that the Internet is reshaping our brains so that we have a hard time concentrating and that we're constantly distracted by the trivial. On the other there's Clay Shirky and others who think the changes wrought by the Internet are positive and that we're not losing something in as much as we're gaining something even better in abundance. And there are those who don't think we're losing any brain power.





Both sides look to the changes that the printing press brought about, but scholar Elizabeth Drescher goes back even further. In "Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus?" she looks at the role of medieval manuscripts in how people thought.

The medieval books we admire so much today are distinguished by the remarkable visual images, in the body of a text and in the margins, that scholars have frequently compared to hypertexted images on internet “pages.”

The function of these images in illuminated manuscripts has no small bearing on the hypertext analogy. These “miniatures” (so named not because they were small—often they were not—but because they used red ink, or vermillion, the Latin word for which is minium) did not generally function as illustrations of something in the written text, but in reference to something beyond it.

Books of commentary, known as “glosses,” included conversations among different commentators across time that surrounded a central text, such as a Bible passage…Over time, the original contexts for these comments were forgotten and their relevance to the central text became obscure, so they became part of the interpretive project of reading a book.

Add to these distractions the fact that medieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. A binding might include a bit of Chaucer—something from the life of St. Bridget, perhaps—and part of an almanac, or a treatise on herbal remedies. They were mash-ups, that is.

Medieval reading as a practice was deeply social. Indeed, long after the invention of the printing press, until rather late in the 18th century, reading was a communal affair, with a group of hearers gathering around a reader to engage a book, letter, or other textual production.

…as scholars have been reminding us for a very long time by now, private reading and the linear thinking that Carr so values as essential for deep, contemplative thought did not feature much in the lives of the people who pretty much brought us the contemplative tradition. Rather, sorting though the mix of images and ideas, arguing with friends over meanings and interpretations, and mullying it up again with a new bit of this or that seem to have been very much at the center of the thought world of ancient philosophers and medieval mystics.

I've read Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" but not his book on the subject The Shallows. Contra Carr, I have read a couple of Shirky's articles and a few others including Steven Pinker's "Mind Over Mass Media". As of now I remain ambivalent.

It would surely help if I were to read Carr's book as well as more about "brain plasticity", i.e. – that the more we browse and distract ourselves on the Internet, the more our brains wire themselves to think in that manner and not in a deep, linear way. And I think it's helpful to understand that there are (at least) two different issues here, one quantitative and the other qualitative. First there's the issue of whether or not using the Internet changes our brains rendering us unable to think deep, sustained thought patterns. The other is, given that our mode of thinking is changing as Carr argues, is this a bad thing? At the end of the day, I don't know the answers to either of these questions.

When I contemplate on my own brain, one that grew up with a computer (but not the Internet) & MTV but has since gone on to work in IT, I don't think that Google has made me stupid. There are, to be sure, times when I'll be reading something on the Web and quickly check my e-mail or distract myself online in some other way, but I eventually get back to whatever it was that I was reading and finish it. I am currently in the middle of my second book in a row that is 400+ pages. Last year I read all 1,500 or so pages in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle – all three books back-to-back. And I don't have a problem sitting through a 2 ½ - 3 hour movie. (Unless it's god-awful, of course.) I listen to 6-hour radio dramas. Not that this is an exhaustive list of things to determine whether you have a short attention span or not, but I just don't think the Internet has killed my concentration.

What about you?