What's Wrong with Carl Sagan's Glasses?

Fifteen years ago I read Carl Sagan’s beautiful book Pale Blue Dot which describes how unique and interesting we are in our own solar system, but at the same time presents the idea of how fragile our isolated little world really is. We’re not the center of the solar system, let alone the entire universe (or--to put it with more of a religious bent-- all of creation), and therefore need to advance space exploration in hopes of increasing our survivability as a species. Sagan has a now famous monologue from that book where he explains just how miniscule we all are when looking back at our planet from four billion miles, as the spacecraft Voyager 2 did when she snapped a now iconic image that became the title of Sagan’s book. The picture of earth, “suspended in a sunbeam,” is certainly a humbling one, and provides an interesting perspective on all of our daily activities and ambitions.

The problem is that that picture, taken billions of miles out, is not our perspective.

Our world is quickly buying into the idea that massive data sets of information can surely solve our problems if analyzed correctly. Big data is trying desperately to equate our lives to statistical analysis and our behavioral patterns to mathematical formula. It seems there’s an omnipresent push to ensure that every aspect of our lives is empirical and reduced to measurable observation. However, this perspective on life is exactly the shortsightedness that Sagan brought to the table with his book. Please don’t misunderstand me—the macroscopic perspective certainly has value; there is value to remembering once in awhile that our lives are actually a microcosm on a speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam. However, that’s not the perspective of our day-to-day lives.

We live on the human scale. The human scale includes in its fringes our understanding of the cosmos; however, like our place in the solar system, this cosmic perspective is not at the center. It can’t be. Our world is a world of personal relationships which exist very much within the human perspective, so much so that it in fact defines the human perspective as exactly that which sees and understands existence through the relationships that we work so hard at building, maintaining, or sometimes ending.

The world of big data and a cosmological view of our lives are both incredibly extreme perspectives of our reality. When we wake up everyday, it’s not with thoughts of the asteroid that recently came between the earth and the moon, nor is it with thoughts of crunching numbers to determine an algorithm for dressing ourselves, but rather with thoughts of navigating through the web of human relationships that we’ve created, and with the hope that our navigational senses will make those webs stronger. Questions of family, friends, and work are almost always questions firmly in the fields of the humanities. If there’s an issue with a presentation you have to make at work, it’s more than likely because you’re trying to impress or persuade someone. If there’s an issue with a family member, you’re trying to figure out the best course of action to repair that relationship. If there’s an issue with a friend, you may find yourself thinking on the best advice to give. The close approach of that asteroid—though startling—fades from our constructed reality pretty quickly. For us, the human concerns are those concerns that make up what is real—our constructed reality.

This is the reality that we live in, and the human perspective is therefore the view that we need to keep in mind most often.

Die Novel, Die: The impossible intersection between digital culture and reading a novel

Facilitate learning rather than educate. Interactive and dynamic rather than force fed. Doer and transmitter rather than receiver. I understand and believe in most of the new reevaluation of teaching and pedagogy that has occurred in the past twenty years. Students need to be actively learning rather than passively taught, and darn near every educational study has proven this relatively new ideology. However, in the world of English, there’s a problem.

Students still need to spend time, of their own accord, reading.

This problem isn’t something that’s relatively new, and I think we all have to recognize that now. As anecdotal evidence, I like to point to Frank McCourt’s memoir Teacher Man which chronicles McCourt’s time as a high school English teacher in the public schools of New York City. McCourt’s account of unmotivated students took place over thirty years ago, and in the memoir he reports widely on the lack of reading. Fast forward a few decades and the National Endowment for the Arts reported in 2007 that on average Americans between the ages of 15 to 24 spend two hours of their leisure time watching tv, and only seven minutes of that time reading. Seven. If Neil Postman’s futuristic prognostication regarding the detrimental effects of increased technological distractions isn’t vindicated by this little nugget then I don’t know what can.

Students need to be a central part of the learning process. I buy into that wholeheartedly. But how does an English class proceed to the facilitation of learning when the majority of the class hasn’t read?

Only in the last few years have I started to really understand the relationship between English as a subject that’s part of a school system (and the focus regarding a school “system” is to stress that systems are designed around ideologies) and English as a representation of the literary arts. Literature is art. This is really the crux of the issue that English teachers face in the classroom. As an art, English teachers not only facilitate interpreting that art, but also facilitate how to appreciate it, and how to apply it. The crux of the matter then revolves around the issue of technological distractions and experiencing literary art.

Music is easy, and arguably, visual arts even easier. Although one could spend a whole lifetime studying and appreciating these art forms (as many people do), to experience the totality of these genres of art can often be done in twenty minutes. Understand that I’m talking about the experience of the art, mind you, not the thinking about and interpretation of the art. A pop song is often experienced in under four minutes; many classical pieces can be experienced in under twenty. A novel, however, can take many hours to experience. How, in this way, is the novel to survive a cultural push to crowd out, condense, and clip knowledge into digestible and scan-able scraps?

Simply put? It can’t. The cultural forces that are going to cause the downfall of the novel may have unintended consequences. I’m willing to bet there’s going to be a renaissance in the interest of poetry due to these same forces. Epic, no, but short-verse freeform and the lyric? Absolutely. Shakespeare understood the requirement of readership when it came to the life of a work. In sonnet 18, the speaker depicts his lover’s immortalization in the poem itself:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,  Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, / Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,  When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;  /  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

What Shakespeare is assuming as he penned these lines, however, is that someone will always be reading it. The poem gives the lover immortal life as long as it’s always read. Will that happen any longer if our culture only values and courts the information that’s easily accessed or instantly searched? Is the lover of the poem still given life if that famous couplet is the only part of the sonnet ever pulled out and read from the Internet’s constantly indexing search engines?

My fear is essentially this. Perennially I tell my students not to read a novel, but to experience it. Experience it as art and allow the novel to work into the inner most recesses of your brain, or, better yet, let it chip away or tug at the core of your emotions where a light of recognition and understanding connects your mind with a thought of one of your own personal experiences. My fear, then, is saying these things to a class of students who have become information spectators rather than artist actors. My fear is standing in front of the classroom and eventually realizing that my generation’s experience with a novel may be the last to experience it as such. But more importantly, my fear isn’t that the students who aren’t reading novels don’t read them because they choose the easy way out by instantly going to Spark Notes or to Google, but rather that they can’t experience it the way that I do because culture has hardwired them to see that experience as superfluous, old-fashioned, and irrelevant.

Once culture has succeeded in that, the novel will be truly dead.

Unglamorous Glorifying of Big Data

The recent article in Popular Science magazine by Juan Enriquez titled “The Glory of Big Data” boasts a tagline that should scream at us to wake up instead of making us drool over the possibilities of data crunching that the article highlights. The tagline reads, “Suddenly, we can know the world completely. Next, we reprogram it.” It’s become very apparent to me that we’re losing perspective on the difference between knowledge and experience.


I attended a conference at Rutgers University in June of 2010 where a speaker on the use of technology in the classroom told us that the future student will have more knowledge at their fingertips due to technology than the specialized knowledge in which a professor will have personally acquired. At first blush this seems absolutely incredible and progressive. The skills the student then needs is not retaining information but learning how to access it.

So where’s the problem? This seems like a giant leap forward in the ever quickening race to acquire information. That’s a good thing right?

What we’re failing to separate is the distinction between what we gain in the human condition through experience and what’s classifiable as attainable knowledge. To make an analogy, I can tell someone that heroin use is harmful to one’s body and that it can damage one’s relationships, like any other substance abuse, because of the intensity of addiction. I know that; that’s knowledge. However, I’m lucky enough to have never experienced it, either first or second hand. Someone who has experienced the awful issues revolving around heroin abuse will access that pool of wisdom they’ve accumulated about its devastating impact. This is a resource that I can’t replicate or duplicate, not with Google or any other powerful information search engine.

Moreover, the human condition is defined as the sum total possibilities of human experience. Notice it doesn’t concern itself with knowledge, because knowledge is not as useful to us without the accompanying experience to turn that knowledge into wisdom. It’s our experiences that define us, not necessarily just what we know.

As a case in point, the perennial stumbling block of all English teachers is Spark Notes or a plethora of the other sites that summarize and analyze literature. This, in and of itself, is harmless, and not the issue. The issue is how this knowledge is used to supplant the experience of reading the art, for art it is. This is the equivalent of someone telling you that Raphael’s “The School of Athens” is a painting that depicts some of the greatest philosophical minds of antiquity, including Aristotle, Plato, and, interestingly and anachronistically, even Raphael himself. Ok, so now I know who’s in the painting. I’ve gained some knowledge. However, in the summer of 2008 I had the pleasure of seeing this famous painting in person at the Vatican Museum. It’s an incredible experience to behold this colossal work. In the few moments I had with the painting I experienced a kinship of understanding with the artist; a connection with Raphael. Although the Vatican commissioned the work, Raphael had the freedom to depict these philosophers as he wished, and one can experience the reverence and awe that Raphael imbibes in the painting by being present with it. It was in the moment of experiencing the art that I began to fully understand how important these Greek philosophers were to our modern world. These thinkers set the stage for others to build upon their thoughts. I didn’t read this sensation; I didn’t have it described to me; it wasn’t analyzed by some third party. I experienced it.

The experience of art is different in a museum than on a computer screen—anyone who has ever visited a museum or has been in an art studio can tell you this. Spark Notes and its ilk mar the ability for a student to experience the art—to allow the student to formulate their own constructions of meaning and experience around the act of experience itself. The Spark Notes method of disseminating knowledge from the art is not referential nor does it allow for the indelible personal connection. Take a look at some of the incredible things that genetic engineers are now close to accomplishing—like bringing back the wooly mammoth—which could potentially go horribly and irreversibly wrong. Tell someone that science is potentially the greatest force the human species has ever wielded, and they’ll know it. Talk to a scientist that has ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or watched Jurassic Park and they’ll have the wisdom of it.

Determining what humans stand to lose if knowledge supersedes experience is a difficult conclusion to pin down. However, the loss of experience must impact the depth of the human condition. Take away experiences and one makes human existence meaningless. In a sense, pure knowledge is embodied by the Internet itself. It’s important to remember that the Internet—data-- is not who we are. However, if education and our daily lives are now defined by how we access our information and not what types of experiences we have, we should expect a great shift in what it means to be human. The degree of that shift, and in what direction, bodes ill.

Tech-ing Ourselves to Death

My students use their cell phones in their purses, in the front pocket of their hooded sweat-shirt, under their arms, or even down under their seats. Some are even good enough to text while they stare me in the eye. Just last evening I opened my cell phone and took a picture of my wife’s grocery list and then sent that picture to her phone—she had forgotten the list at home. Again last evening I uploaded three pictures of my old car onto Craigslist. By this morning seven people were asking about the car. In order to make a sales pitch to some colleagues I slid my 2.0GB thumb drive into my computer, downloaded the pictures of the car and brought them to work.

The phenomenon of Craigslist, the cell phone (which serves so many functions it’s a misnomer), or the thumb drive are just a few of the tech innovations that will change the way we look and think of our relationship with media and the printed/displayed word. Social web sites are quickly becoming a form of communication, and, so much so, that students are resisting writing a five paragraph essay more than I’ve noticed in the past. Their writing is quick, and to the point. (Some are already screaming, “How is that bad!”) Writing is changing, and I’m noticing the change in my own writing as well. Written expression is being redefined by the media itself—my Craigslist post consisted of a single sentence with a bulleted list.

What interests me is to question whether or not writing in this sense will have a negative impact on what we consider literature and, by extension, the significance on our cultural well- being. I notice all too often that students can’t stand writing that isn’t as flashy in description or tone the way a television or movie now is—authors used to expect imagination to complement the language; it’s not working that way anymore.

My college prep. courses are full of students who both read books and those who haven’t read a single book on their own. (These, by the way, students are very willing to confess.) How can these students co-exist in the same class? Easy. Tech. In a world where “copy and paste” has replaced “research and write,” students don’t have to read long passages in a novel to advance; they can simply use tools to get around that.

This isn’t intrinsically a bad thing. Why should students be forced to find a single solution to a problem when their world has presented them with twenty? Knowing there are different ways to solve a problem is a freeing experience, one that allows you to use methods that were never possible before simply because they didn’t exist. For example, on an assignment a student needs to explain how the protagonist in a story acquired a desire for power. They go to Google where they first enter the terms “power” and “literature,” and are instantly presented with the option to buy a term paper on power in literature (the site that pops up is called AcaDemon). Ok, so most students don’t have the bankroll to finance a continuing operation like that, so they skip to Wikipedia. Quickly zipping through this site, a student can peruse a plethora of subjects that deal with power. The point is, the student has so many resources at their fingertips, that they would sooner use these rather than their own noggin. That, therein, lies the problem.

What will happen to our society if the tech that provides us with the information becomes a vehicle for intellectual stagnation? Is it possible to still have innovative thoughts other than innovations in tech? My worries lie in the possibility that all of this tech will assist us so much that we’ll forget what it’s like to have to think through a problem, we’ll struggle to come up with original and meaningful discourse. In his 1980s book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman unearthed the tip of a large boulder when he speculated that technology (tv specifically—it was the 1980s) and our insatiable desire for entertainment are leading to the decline of public discourse and literacy. Unfortunately, I’m noticing that his prophecy is coming all too true.

Flattening the World

One of the greatest things our technology allows us to do is communicate with a world-wide audience. My students are currently expressing their views on a blog that I run. However, due to the unknowns of the Web, the blog is private, which, admittedly, I feel is somewhat counter intuitive. I've been brainstorming a way to allow students to safely speak with the larger Web community. Even though our connectivity allows us to share our experiences and thoughts worldly, safety is a foremost concern. Ironically, safety has become the foremost concern outside of the Web too.

Blogs and other technomedia are the neopolitical forms of the Greek polis. Students, teachers, and world learners all need to embrace this technology but at the same time provide uniform and reliable security measures. Once we accomplish this, my hope is that our newfound technology will allow us to not only bridge the gap between geographic and political differences, but also bridge the gap between ideologic and philosophic differences as well.