Strike a balance

In the interest of bringing you 80s/90s culture at its finest, I offer "Vogue," a Madonna song featuring the iconic line, "Strike a pose," which was the inspiration for my title.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJQSAiODqI

Please, feel free to provide diversions in your blogs (or random connections).  We don't have to be all serious up in here.  But I AM reading a book that is stirring up serious concerns and questions.  My goal continues to be two books every two weeks, and I am back on track since I finished both the books I was reading in the past couple of weeks (OK, three - three weeks. I was slower than usual...so many essays to grade.)  I also continue to read the nonfiction books I purchased with an LEF grant so that I can make sensible, informed recommendations to my students.  I loved Thank You for Your Service, the book investigating issues that soldiers confront after deployments in the Middle East, and reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains at the same time offered nice variety, though both books do deal with war - one literal, one figurative.  In The Shallows, the author argues that our digital habits are waging war against our intellect, and the stakes are high - not the loss of land or status, but the loss of our ability to think deeply, immerse ourselves in what we read, and retain information for the long haul. I'm an English teacher; losing our ability to read and think IS a war to me, one I hope to fight in small, non-violent ways.  (Twenty minutes of IRT - no phones allowed).

A crucial component to Carr's argument revolves around the concept of neuroplasticity, the idea that "just as the brain can build new or stronger circuits through physical or mental practice, those circuits can weaken or dissolve with neglect" (35). He offers numerous studies that involved changing behaviors and brain scans, indicating entirely different parts of the brain activating after brief changes in habits, and he follows his scientific data with statistics about hours modern people spend with digital media as opposed to written texts.  As a nation, "most Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day" looking at some sort of digital media, while "the time the average American over the age of fourteen devoted to reading printed works had fallen to 143 minutes a week" as of 2008 (87).  The numbers alone, of course, prove nothing, but coupled with the idea that every minute in front of a screen potentially short-circuits or even eliminates connections in the brain associated with reading means we are undoubtedly altering the inner workings of our gray matter, and the results of that shift may have alarming consequences.  Note: the author admits that some of the digital skills we gain are useful, and I agree in that the access we have to information, the  quick shifts in thinking we develop, and the global communication we can foster undoubtedly have some benefit, but his fear, and mine, centers around the growing disregard for skills that require deeper, slower thinking. As he puts it, we may be losing "mental functions...that support calm, linear thought - the ones we use in traversing a lengthy narrative or an involved argument," the very skills my students need for the rigors of the AP test, and more importantly, college (142).

I suppose we could argue that the future will not involve deep reading or analysis of complex arguments, that all we will need to be able to do is to toggle between tasks and complete them quickly, instinctively, but what a depressing image that is to me.  We have complex problems to tackle in the world, controversies without easy answers, and if we rely on quick fixes, we may be taking one step forward followed by two steps back until we no longer see the problems in front of us.  We see sound bytes and video clips that make us feel better, while the problems simply grow.  I do not want to be in a world like that.  Reading forces me to question my beliefs, to reevaluate my opinions, and to feel human in a way that clicking through 140 character snippets never can.  I do not plan to give up my Twitter scanning or my Daily Skim for daily news, but I hope we can all strike a balance between "quick" digital input (but 8 hours...really?) and the slow, steady, satisfying experience of delving into a good old-fashioned type-written page.