fishers, surfers and casters

Remember when you were 16 years old? Now, imagine you are 16 and living in a suburb where your or your friends’ parents think earning between 60 and 90 grand a year is, politely, "living simply". Your high school no longer has funds to teach you anything beyond maths, science and the traditional humanities, so if you want to explore art, design or music then you ask your parents to pay for you to go to a summer camp. The local council doesn’t allow teenagers to hang out in public spaces, for some reason, so you meet friends at home, or get your parents to pay for you to join a tennis club.

Life seems to suck a little, but you have one thing up your sleeve, or, well, in your home. You have access to good technology. your parents know a lot about the latest computer hardware and software, even though you know more, and they can get it cheaper than most people. If your parents have a bit of money, then each family members has the tech they need, and there’s a room in your house with some top play gear. If your parents have a bit more money, then your house will be designed for great play gear to happen.

This is, according to Heather Horst, a researcher at the University of California, pretty much what it’s like for a teenager in Silicon Valley today. In a seminar presented at RMIT on 21 June, she offered us her findings on an in-depth study of families and their homes in the Californian region, where she sought out how both parents and children work out effective family life immersed in new technology. She discovered:

• large tech placed in family spaces, in order to allow parents to monitor children’s use
• new spaces created in new homes for tech: e.g. Rumpus rooms, tech rooms, etc
• others would renovate old family rooms into "media" rooms
• unlike their parents, children don’t consider bedrooms are private spaces, as parents listen in, or they share with siblings. Private spaces for kids more likely in social media sites than in physical spaces

What generated much interest at the seminar was the amount of professional work-life that parents bring back into the home. As work makes its way into family life in Silicon Valley, the boundaries between “homespace” and “workspace” are blurred. Given the amount of time that both parents and children spend on computers and devices, the opportunity to turn the desktop into a family space, like the dining table and lounge room, is optimised.

Horst makes the exciting claim that this reflects images of family life in pre-industrial Europe and its colonies, where trades, crafts and professions were conducted as much at home as in the town centre, where children were involved, and where work and parenting were done more or less simultaneously.

Of course, this pattern is just confined to the Silicon Valley. At home I have a desktop in the study, as well as a laptop. I cannot keep from bringing work home with me, and used to have the laptop in the lounge where I could work, check emails, etc. while hanging out with the kids who are playing on the PS3 and watching TV. Now my daughter is a little older, she needs my laptop to connect with friends, develop her craft on deviantart.com, do research and homework tasks. Our dining table has become a workspace for her, since I’d rather she were online when I’m around than in her bedroom. It means I prefer now not to work in my study on the desktop, but somehow get a few things done at the same table as her. I find that when I do, even though we are paying attention to our own devices, we get to talk a little more and connect than we would if I were in another room. My child’s tech use is influencing my own in the home.

In response to my post on Nichols Carr’s visit to Melbourne, The Wheeler Centre has kindly sent me the link to a video taken of the presentation. Would love to hear what you think of it.

Once again, the generation that proclaimed in song, "the times they are a-changing", is decrying that they are a-changing without them.*

Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows, is important. That was evidenced by the turn-out at his free lecture at The Wheeler Centre last night. The room was at capacity, and there were people outside waiting in hope a no-show by someone who reserved a ticket, could mean they might enter. The room was about four or five times as long as it was wide, and all chairs faced the far end where the author and his conversant, Gideon Haigh, would sit. Before beginning, Haigh asked the audience to turn off their mobile phones, their iPhones, iPods and iPads (shame on me, I had brought mine with me in the hope I could make notes and fulfil my paperless aspirations. Alas I had to bring out the ol’ biro and ring-binder). We had to do these things because, Haigh told us, "It’s good to do this once in a while."

So the room compelled us to give Carr and his presenter our deep attention, unable to be distracted by each other or our little devices.

Haigh, an author like Carr, listed his companion’s contributions to all conversations about what his wrong with the new Twitter and Facebook generation. He let Carr talk about the new insights into himself and own capacity for reason once he learned to "back away" from his computer every once in a while. He asked Carr to talk about his theory of intellectual ethic – how each technology is created with assumptions about how humans use their minds – and that while print media are built on the ethic of deep attentiveness, online media encourage the rapid intake of small pieces of information, and value "distractedness, with no room for contemplation."

Carr obliged, of course, as it is what his book is all about. He told us that we humans are naturally wired for distraction, and that we are curious creatures who are built to take in whatever we can through our senses. For Carr, however, the natural state is not the optimal one. "To be attentive is to open up our consciousness and make our culture richer." Haigh wanted to present for consideration that digital natives, like online gamers, perhaps used more parts of their brain while being attentive, but couldn’t do it without telling us he thought them to be "inarticulate social misfits" (this coming from someone who writes books about Cricket). Carr in turn told us that while more parts of the brain are active when engaged with a screen, apparently when reading a book our brain is quieter, and suggested that a broad pattern of cerebral activity is not necessarily an optimal one. That word again.

Haigh prompted Carr to talk about what he thinks the Internet does to reading, writing and thinking. Carr responded with worries that reading is replaced by skimming, that writing is replaced by flashing bits of text, and that the "golden age of expressionism" is lost.

I couldn’t help but I think of another book I had read a few years ago (me, think about books. I know, right?), called A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel. In it is a story about what older adults thought about youth who started to enjoy reading books and scrolls silently and alone, rather than aloud and with one another. Manguel wrote that adults worried that their young were being lost in books, detaching themselves from the world and the richness of culture, disassociating themselves from other humans and drowning in words and mental images. The books are gone, but the moral panic remains.

But then Carr mentioned something that made me go, "Oh, wow. I can’t believe he just said that." When talking about the capacities of information storage he lamented that the Web’s potential to enhance memory is a good thing, but when the Web replaces memory, it’s bad. Umm, when we want to remember things, umm, don’t we write notes? Don’t we access encyclopedias when we want to find out more about something, but keep the volumes so we can go back to them? Isn’t the printed word meant to do that? The capacity of the printed word to store memory increased our capacity for building knowledge and educating each other on specialised topics, fostering the growth of the sciences, humanities, business, communications, and all the other disciplines.

Maybe it’s just me, but when I look at my Facebook page I see a reflection of a rich culture. When friends post photographs, design images, tell me about what’s happening in that specific moment, and I read what their friends think, how they appreciate the comment, I am viewing a lot of social capital, a whole stack of cultural currency being passed around. Sure, not with the same values as we find in published works in libraries, framed works in galleries, or intellectual parlances as heard in The Wheeler Centre, but it is culture.

And maybe it’s just me, but when I can’t remember what the capital of Burkina Faso is, and go to Google or Wikipedia to find out, I don’t think that makes me stupid. I’m not hopping on my bike and going to the local library and picking up a book that’s written by some guy I don’t know and published by some company I don’t know. I’m accessing sites that are written by people I don’t know and organized on the Web by a technology I’m not aware of. But I’m not stupid. I’m just relying on different authorities to give me information.

While I disagreed I took notes and listened and engaged in "deep attentiveness" toward the speaker and his presenter, who moderated discussion. So I thought it quite ironic that when one member of the audience took longer than 40 seconds to complete her comment Haigh started a little "I’m so bored" dance and asked her to hurry up and get to the question.

I think Carr’s book is important. Like Lily Allen’s The Fear, in the face of unbridled consumerism, we need words like Carr’s to remind us that our consumption of technology need not, and should not, determine who we are as humans in bodies and people in cultures. The debate into which Carr has invited us will help us temper technology’s impact on our future. Yet I think people like Haigh and Carr need to realise that when they talk about "losing the richness of culture" they are in fact talking about the failure of their own generation’s culture to stay relevant, and insulting the rich culture of generations of people who are not them. Moreover, when they talk about the ethic of "deep attentiveness", I wonder if they are actually lamenting that such attentiveness is being diverted from authors like them.

Why is it only authors who cry over the death of the author?

* Okay, so Carr and Haigh may not be more than ten years older than me, and it’s really possible that they, like me, are not children of the Dylan years. But I’m a Gen-Xer, and what they talked about was, like, so Boomer.

According the NY Times, undergraduate students are more likely than ever before to copy text from outside sources and pass it off as their own work. The article refers to the comments of lecturers and other university workers and cites a survey, where 40% of about 40 thousand students admitted to small breaches (“copying a few sentences”).

I am not convinced that this article is yet another contribution to moral panic about the Internet’s effect on young people’s education. Sure, everyone uses Wikipedia, and some may think they can get away with it clicking CTRL+C and CTRL+V a few times. Still, I reckon the same could be said 25 years ago when we were doing it with Encyclopaedia Britannica and World Book. One of the article’s interviewees suggests that, because students do not hold a book in their hand, but read it on screen, the text feels somewhat less like it’s the work of another, and requires reference. But I think because it’s on screen, quickly searchable, and not found in a book at the back of the library’s third storey, it’s a lot easier for use to identify plagiarism, especially with respect to Wikipedia.

I would also hazard a guess that about 40% of students in any university in 1990 would admit to doing their own outdated version of copy + paste, at least once during their enrolment, if they knew it was safe to do so.

The article does, however, throw into the ring an idea worthy of further contemplation and conversation. For this new generation of readers and consumers of text, the concept of individual authorship has begun its demise. For Susan D Blum, who is interviewed for the article and is from Notre Dame University, rising plagiarism is an indication of a future where originality and individual authorship are no longer valued. For new generations, once a text is made, it no longer belongs to the author. Creative work, or worthy scholarship, may be found in the mash-up.

Yet the article’s final word is given by she who coins the term “Generation Plagiarism” referring to a cohort of lazy students have been ill-prepared for tertiary life by their high schools. So the moral panic rolls downward.

Hat tip to Gerry McKiernan, whose blog has a wealth of information for those interested in the future of online education and creativity.