Seven Hours of Debate? No, Thank You

Neil Postman “The Typographic Mind”

Nicholas Carr “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Neil Postman informs us that the famous Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858 lasted seven hours and the audience was willing to “cheerfully accommodate themselves” (1) to the long oratory. The asks the obvious question: “What kind of audience was this?”

I’ve been judging high school debate for 1999. Team policy rounds consist of four eight-minute constructive speeches and four five-minute rebuttal speeches. Lincoln-Douglas value debates are shorter, lasting a total of 40 minutes including prep time and cross-examination. Sometimes I have to force myself to stay awake, especially if I’ve judged consecutive rounds.

Speeches by most professional politicians aren’t any better, but I can walk away from the television when I listen to those.

I pay attention to lectures by taking copious notes. If I don’t take notes, I am unlikely to understand what it is being said.

Obviously, I am not like the 1858 audience. Very few of us are. We have changed.

Postman explains that “people of a television culture,” like myself, need “’plain language’ both aurally and visually” (2). He suggests that there is something else going on as well.

He points out the fact that “the written word, and an oratory based upon it, has a content: a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content” (2). It makes claims and asserts ideas. In other words, it has a “meaning which demands to be understood” (2).

Or at least it should have meaning that demands understanding.

Postman argues that “much of our discourse today has only a marginal propositional content,” leading to our increasing inability to listen to seven-hour debates. He illustrates his argument by comparing advertising claims from the eighteenth century, which provided detailed claims and information, to the catchy advertising slogans of the present that basically say nothing. He describes American television which requires “minimal skills” (3) for comprehension, but which is “pleasing to the eye and accompanied by exciting music” with “the best photography in the world” (3).

He extends his argument and states that the “problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining” (3).

He cites the example of WINS, an old New York City radio station, that used to tell listeners, “Give us twenty-two minutes and we’ll give you the world” (5). Postman points out that this is said without irony, as if the audience believes it can really be gone.

There is a reason why we used to call television the “idiot box.” But has it really transformed us into a culture without meaning, or is there something else going on?

In his article “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” Steven Johnson argues that new media, including television, is causing us to develop new cognitive abilities and that the “growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple treading, flashing arrows and social networks” (216).

I’m not sure.

Nicholas Carr suggests a different causation for our lack of focus in his Atlantic Online article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” from 2008. He celebrates internet research, the “advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information” (2), but says that the “Net seems to . . . [be] chipping away at [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation” (2). He says he is not alone. He quotes Bruce Friedman, who stated, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print” (2). He claims that his thoughts have taken on a “staccato” quality, and he has lost the ability to read books like War and Peace.

Carr asserts that the “human brain is almost infinitely malleable” (3), that it adapts to the technologies we use. Did Nietzsche’s writing really change when he began using a typewriter? (3). And does use of the Internet affect our cognition? Does Google’s ability to understand “exactly what you mean” and “give you back exactly what you want” shut down some cognitive process in our minds? (5).

Carr sends us back to Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates worried about the development of writing, concerned that it would erode our memories and eliminate the need for dialectic.

The proliferation of writing as a technology has indeed changed us, but we depend on it too much to ever give it up. The way we learn, the way we process information, is constantly changing. We don’t want to listen to seven-hour speeches. We have better things to do.We may not read War and Peace voluntarily.

Whether we like it or not, the adoption of technology transforms us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Johnson, Steven. “Watching TV Makes You Smarter.” They Say/I Say. Ed. Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel Durst. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc, 2009. Print.