When I was teaching and colleagues lamented the internet degrading student attention spans and reading abilities I used to respond sententiously that the problem was not in the students it was in us -- we had not been trained to teach people in the digital age; the next generation would have that background and the problem would go away.
Colleagues would typically look impressed so I kept repeating this wisdom till I retired, about the time smartphones became common. Good thing I disappeared before my wisdom was put to the test! Your report is pretty shocking (though most shocking of all is your confession that you didn't read every page of every assignment).
Marvelous and thoroughly depressing Stack. I was also going to say “prescient” but the post-print/literate age is already here, at least as “coming attractions.” (Pardon the post-literate question, but you mean “dead trees mashed into words” and not vice versa?)
Ditto. I used to be told that the difference was the self-selection of those who went on to university.
My first encounter with the rejection of subtext was related to studying the Bible. My father, Jewish and born in 1931, used to argue that if God existed and wanted us to understand His rules, He should have written them out explicitly. It sounded very Protestant to me which may simply indicate my own level of ignorance.
Interesting aside, there has long been a debate in theatre about whether there is subtext in Shakespeare.
And since you bring up issue and volume numbers, what's your perspective on page numbers? It drove me bonkers that students didn't use them in citations, yet many digital sources no longer use them either.
I scandalized a reviewer once by using Kindle locations instead of page numbers. But I was reading on a Kindle! It was what I had! I also think it is perplexing if you don’t view a PDF as a representation of a printed artifact that there can be a PDF page number and a page number on the PDF’d page that are so different.
Plenty to push back on here. As you say "But if everything is born digital, then the distinctions that mattered so much in a world of physical knowledge no longer have much purchase." But this is (mostly) a good thing. As you say, we don't need to worry about volume and issue numbers any more - ISDN (the D is for "digital" does the job comprehensively). Same for indexes - who needs them when documents are searchable?
"Something is clearly lost when audiences can no longer be expected to serve as audiences." A special case of "you rarely get something for nothing". I don't get a one-time chance the full experience of Lawrence of Arabia in widescreen, but I could watch it right now (in a small town in Queensland at 5am) if I chose, or pretty much any other movie ever made. And if I kept writing this comment while I watched it, that reflects the fact that nothing like Substack existed when Lawrence of Arabla came out. Even watching the less bad of the two available TV channels, there was nothing to distract me.
More generally, any time diverted from broadcast TV is a plus. It wasn't called the "idiot box" for nothing. Neil Postman had this down. As I predicted back in 1995, the arrival of the Internet produced a golden age of text, far better than anything that could be provided by print
The arrival of short-form video like TikTok has led to a fair bit of this being lost. But you can't analyse it if you are starting from a position of nostalgia for the constraints imposed by print.
Very interesting comment, Mr. Quiggin. Let me push back in turn on a few of your good points, major and minor.
First, I took the most important of Professor Musgrave's themes not to concern the decline of physical print pages so much as the decline of certain skills that the print medium tended to encourage. These included sustaining focused attention, following complex strings of reasoning interwoven with various types of data, and engagement through active responses, from more arduous ones (notes for information summary, retention, and cross reference) to undemanding ones (underscoring / highlighting). All of these skills *can* be sustained in pixel-reading, but the evidence of the past decade is that it is a very poor vehicle for developing them. You and I may not experience these negatives directly because we have come to the digital age with attitudes and habits that can overcome these issues with minimal discipline, but Professor Musgrave's current students did not. (I used to teach but retired before smartphones took hold and used to respond to complaints about eroding skills with trade-off arguments. But conversations I've had with mid-career college teachers in recent years have convinced me that this has gone well beyond trade-off territory.) So it's not the constraints imposed by print that are of value and at issue; it's the type of cognitive skills that those constraints demonstrably produced over the period from the broad (European) popularization of printed materials in the 18th century until the rapid rise of the internet and smartphone technology. (During my own teaching career I did not find the internet alone producing the types of dramatic shifts former colleagues still teaching now report, so I think phone culture may have been a more marked turning point.)
Less important: (1) As a former professional book indexer my thought on reading your comment is that you were thinking only of non-analytical indexes. Well-published academic books used to include detailed analytic indexes that guided readers through topic/name mentions through tiered conceptual categories. Control+F won't get you there. (2) Having seen "Lawrence of Arabia" on release in a wide screen theater, complete with intermission and a stunned audience mingling midway and after, I think it's important to recognize that while the trade-off argument has legitimacy the nature of what has been traded away is hard to appreciate if it has not been experienced. (3) I think the incremental value of diverting time from broadcast TV to the internet depends entirely on which broadcast shows and which internet sites are involved. Newton Minnow's "vast wasteland" comment was on target, but there were nevertheless a certain proportion of oases. There are many, many oases on the internet, but I think the vastness of the wasteland has reduced rather than increased their impact, especially when thinking of an average college student's background experience.
So before pushing back I think it's worth pausing to take in the implications of Professor Musgrave's report of the cognitive products, rather than the intellectual potential, of digital technology.
When I was teaching and colleagues lamented the internet degrading student attention spans and reading abilities I used to respond sententiously that the problem was not in the students it was in us -- we had not been trained to teach people in the digital age; the next generation would have that background and the problem would go away.
Colleagues would typically look impressed so I kept repeating this wisdom till I retired, about the time smartphones became common. Good thing I disappeared before my wisdom was put to the test! Your report is pretty shocking (though most shocking of all is your confession that you didn't read every page of every assignment).
Marvelous and thoroughly depressing Stack. I was also going to say “prescient” but the post-print/literate age is already here, at least as “coming attractions.” (Pardon the post-literate question, but you mean “dead trees mashed into words” and not vice versa?)
I was trying to evoke lettertype hitting pulp (I think you remember both!) :)
That too! Spent many years smashing Smith Corona keys into pulp.
Ditto. I used to be told that the difference was the self-selection of those who went on to university.
My first encounter with the rejection of subtext was related to studying the Bible. My father, Jewish and born in 1931, used to argue that if God existed and wanted us to understand His rules, He should have written them out explicitly. It sounded very Protestant to me which may simply indicate my own level of ignorance.
Interesting aside, there has long been a debate in theatre about whether there is subtext in Shakespeare.
And since you bring up issue and volume numbers, what's your perspective on page numbers? It drove me bonkers that students didn't use them in citations, yet many digital sources no longer use them either.
I scandalized a reviewer once by using Kindle locations instead of page numbers. But I was reading on a Kindle! It was what I had! I also think it is perplexing if you don’t view a PDF as a representation of a printed artifact that there can be a PDF page number and a page number on the PDF’d page that are so different.
Plenty to push back on here. As you say "But if everything is born digital, then the distinctions that mattered so much in a world of physical knowledge no longer have much purchase." But this is (mostly) a good thing. As you say, we don't need to worry about volume and issue numbers any more - ISDN (the D is for "digital" does the job comprehensively). Same for indexes - who needs them when documents are searchable?
"Something is clearly lost when audiences can no longer be expected to serve as audiences." A special case of "you rarely get something for nothing". I don't get a one-time chance the full experience of Lawrence of Arabia in widescreen, but I could watch it right now (in a small town in Queensland at 5am) if I chose, or pretty much any other movie ever made. And if I kept writing this comment while I watched it, that reflects the fact that nothing like Substack existed when Lawrence of Arabla came out. Even watching the less bad of the two available TV channels, there was nothing to distract me.
More generally, any time diverted from broadcast TV is a plus. It wasn't called the "idiot box" for nothing. Neil Postman had this down. As I predicted back in 1995, the arrival of the Internet produced a golden age of text, far better than anything that could be provided by print
https://johnquiggin.com/2020/08/19/so-last-millennium-repost-from-2004-linking-article-from-1995/
The arrival of short-form video like TikTok has led to a fair bit of this being lost. But you can't analyse it if you are starting from a position of nostalgia for the constraints imposed by print.
Very interesting comment, Mr. Quiggin. Let me push back in turn on a few of your good points, major and minor.
First, I took the most important of Professor Musgrave's themes not to concern the decline of physical print pages so much as the decline of certain skills that the print medium tended to encourage. These included sustaining focused attention, following complex strings of reasoning interwoven with various types of data, and engagement through active responses, from more arduous ones (notes for information summary, retention, and cross reference) to undemanding ones (underscoring / highlighting). All of these skills *can* be sustained in pixel-reading, but the evidence of the past decade is that it is a very poor vehicle for developing them. You and I may not experience these negatives directly because we have come to the digital age with attitudes and habits that can overcome these issues with minimal discipline, but Professor Musgrave's current students did not. (I used to teach but retired before smartphones took hold and used to respond to complaints about eroding skills with trade-off arguments. But conversations I've had with mid-career college teachers in recent years have convinced me that this has gone well beyond trade-off territory.) So it's not the constraints imposed by print that are of value and at issue; it's the type of cognitive skills that those constraints demonstrably produced over the period from the broad (European) popularization of printed materials in the 18th century until the rapid rise of the internet and smartphone technology. (During my own teaching career I did not find the internet alone producing the types of dramatic shifts former colleagues still teaching now report, so I think phone culture may have been a more marked turning point.)
Less important: (1) As a former professional book indexer my thought on reading your comment is that you were thinking only of non-analytical indexes. Well-published academic books used to include detailed analytic indexes that guided readers through topic/name mentions through tiered conceptual categories. Control+F won't get you there. (2) Having seen "Lawrence of Arabia" on release in a wide screen theater, complete with intermission and a stunned audience mingling midway and after, I think it's important to recognize that while the trade-off argument has legitimacy the nature of what has been traded away is hard to appreciate if it has not been experienced. (3) I think the incremental value of diverting time from broadcast TV to the internet depends entirely on which broadcast shows and which internet sites are involved. Newton Minnow's "vast wasteland" comment was on target, but there were nevertheless a certain proportion of oases. There are many, many oases on the internet, but I think the vastness of the wasteland has reduced rather than increased their impact, especially when thinking of an average college student's background experience.
So before pushing back I think it's worth pausing to take in the implications of Professor Musgrave's report of the cognitive products, rather than the intellectual potential, of digital technology.