Content without context: Learn to digest your brain food
Our Cut & Paste Culture
It was not too long ago that I coined a term: shallow polymaths. It came from my sense of frustration of living in a cut and paste culture. A quick example: I recently posted an article on Medium where the platform let’s readers know that it will take twenty minutes of their time to read it. Now, I’ve heard of speed-reading, but when a link to my article is posted to Twitter within a minute of my sharing that link, I’d say that reader takes the gold medal in speed-reading or in pure social media ballsiness.
Back to the idea of a world full of shallow polymaths. What do I mean? I think you can work it out. The sharing of content through social media has made us an online nation of skimmers. Here’s another example:
I can’t help it. Every few weeks, my wife mentions the latest book her book club is reading, and no matter what it is, whether I’ve read it or not, I offer an opinion of the work, based entirely on … what, exactly? Often, these are books I’ve not even read a review or essay about, yet I freely hold forth on the grandiosity of Cheryl Strayed or the restrained sentimentality of Edwidge Danticat. These data motes are gleaned, apparently, from the ether — or, more realistically, from various social media feeds.
What was Solange Knowles’s elevator attack on Jay-Z about? I didn’t watch the security-camera video on TMZ — it would have taken too long — but I scrolled through enough chatter to know that Solange had scrubbed her Instagram feed of photos of her sister, Beyoncé. How about this season of “Game of Thrones” and that nonconsensual intercourse in the crypt? I don’t watch the show, but I’ve scanned the recaps on Vulture.com, and I am prepared to argue that this was deeply offensive. Is Pope Francis a postmodern pontiff? I’ve never listened to one of his homilies nor watched his recent “60 Minutes” appearance, but I’ve seen plenty of his @Pontifex tweets retweeted, so I’m ready to say his position on inequality and social justice is remarkably progressive.
That extract is from an article by Karl Taro Greenfeld entitled Faking Cultural Literacy. Here’s the link to it. Beware, you might find it too long, y’know tl;dr and stuff.
Who can deny that we are all somewhat guilty of skimming? Has it become a habit amongst online users? If it has, then we are losing our human-ness and then, zombies!
Perhaps, this Hegelian notion of habit allows us to account for the cinema-figure of zombies who drag themselves slowly around in a catatonic mood, but persisting forever: are they not figures of pure habit, of habit at its most elementary, prior to the rise of intelligence (of language, consciousness, and thinking). [2] This is why a zombie par excellence is always someone whom we knew before, when he was still normally alive — the shock for a character in a zombie-movie is to recognize the former best neighbor in the creeping figure tracking him persistently. (Zombies, these properly uncanny (un-heimlich) figures are therefore to be opposed to aliens who invade the body of a terrestrial: while aliens look and act like humans, but are really foreign to human race, zombies are humans who no longer look and act like humans; while, in the case of an alien, we suddenly become aware that the one closest to us — wife, son, father — is an alien, was colonized by an alien, in the case of a zombie, the shock is that this foreign creep is someone close to us…) What this means is that what Hegel says about habits has to be applied to zombies: at the most elementary level of our human identity, we are all zombies, and our “higher” and “free” human activities can only take place insofar as they are founded on the reliable functioning of our zombie-habits: being-a-zombie is a zero-level of humanity, the inhuman/mechanical core of humanity. The shock of encountering a zombie is not the shock of encountering a foreign entity, but the shock of being confronted by the disavowed foundation of our own human-ness.
That’s from an article by Slavoj Zizek and, yes, I have read the whole thing. But look out, it’s tl;dr.
Ok, I’m being facetious. Yet where will all this skimming lead?
In the past I have been critical of Maria Popova of Brain Pickings fame, as have others. As Hamish McKenzie writes in the article I linked to above, Popova became a “hero to the intelligentsia.” This is unfortunate. Her short snippets transfer the weight to our shoulders; we have to do the work. The issue is, will we? In his lyrics to one of The Band’s best songs, The Weight, Robbie Robertson wrote:
Take a load off, Fanny
Take a load for free
Take a load off, Fanny
And (and) (and) you put the load right on me
Yeah, feel free to put the load right on me. I would admire Popova if she wrote in depth articles or critiques of the works that she cuts and pastes. And yet the habit that her list-of-links newsletters helped us all to form, skimming, would surely mean that no one would read her articles or critiques; tl;dr.
