Comments on: Is books making us stupid? behind the curtain of #rhizo14

By: Anthony

Anthony — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 01:36:04 +0000

Don’t you mean “are” books?

By: Mike Caulfield

Mike Caulfield — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 02:57:06 +0000

So I’ll push back a bit. Greenblatt in The Swerve talks about this quite a bit, the way books profoundly changed the way we thought. Part of that, according to Greenblatt, is the way books can transcend context. But a big part to was the intimate solitude of the book. The ancient world had a deep suspicion of reading — anti-social, it allowed people to develop ideas outside a social framework.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, as I look at why wikis have not had the impact in education that they might. And I think to some extent the closest thing we have to the ancient world is Wikipedia. And if you’ve been in Wikipedia, you realize how much communal ownership of ideas sucks. I wrote about this a bit today:

http://hapgood.us/2014/02/09/why-i-dont-edit-wikis-and-why-you-dont-either/

Wikis tend to supress dissent, sure, but they also force dissent into factionalism. It’s probably no coincidence that in the ancient world you had to pick a school of philosophy and adhere to it religiously or break off into your own heretical faction. There really was no middle ground. There still isn’t in Wikipedia, which is why people (and especially the less privileged) flee from its gang violence in droves. If you want a culture that preserves a status quo hierachy, pick an oral culture. Your dissidents won’t stand a chance.

Thinking about about writing broadly, it’s worth going back to some of the earliest uses of it, in accounting and lawmaking. In both cases the record of what a debt was or what the law was protected the weak. I think books also protect weak ideas, allowing them to grow without being smothered. I think oral/web culture tends to make ideas better, but it needs the countervailing force of personal tracts and spaces, or it just becomes a mob. I know you’re just being provocative with the anti-books idea, but far from reinforcing the power structure, it was the book which allowed us continually critique and dismantle it.

By: dave

dave — Sun, 09 Feb 2014 19:50:44 +0000

In reply to Kamran.

Hey there Kamran. That’s true, but lots of people who were very successful are also tall… but that doesn’t necessarily mean that tallness leads to success 🙂

By: Kamran

Kamran — Sun, 09 Feb 2014 06:56:03 +0000

Interesting article. What should I say to this? But keep one thing in mind that many people which achieved high places in the world were readers of books.

By: Jesse Martin

Jesse Martin — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 11:00:57 +0000

Your post reminds me of something Harold Jarche wrote:

Books gave us the illusion that knowledge was stable. It never was.

Books, and by extension linear text, are not organised like we think. We need tools that allow us to interact online like we think. I love blogs for teaching, the to and fro through comments is great. However, it doesn’t quite catch the “conversation that develops BETWEEN people”. A blog like tool that allowed comments, or comment boxes within the post would get closer to allowing people to converse. Blog posts still present ideas in a linear fashion, to which we respond through comments, but I often want to comment on a part of a post, not on the whole thing. That’s closer to a conversation than commenting at the end.

By: Jonathan Hughes

Jonathan Hughes — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 17:15:46 +0000

It’s a good question but I resist anything that claims to make me do things. It’s me that makes me do things. I might not know why or what’s shaped the things I do (like leaving this reply) but that doesn’t absolve me of responsibility. So if I allow a book to make me stupid that’s really me being stupid. And I can be made just as stupid through conversations or by things people say in spoken media.

By: Frances Bell

Frances Bell — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 20:44:48 +0000

I suppose my interpretation is that a focus on the print book is not the most relevant. It seems to me to be a bit of a distraction since the print book itself is in such a state of flux. It’s more easily found (even if out of print) via sites like Amazon (and their extended market place), it could be distributed mainly through pdf copies with less frequents prints (eg lulu.com) enabling self-publishing, some people even make books from their blogs. If indeed it was a tool for dominance in the power games of knowledge, then new arenas for text and conversation do not diminish this, any more than the old ones did. I’ll shut up now and go and think about a blog post on dualities and dualisms in this context.

By: Scott Johnson

Scott Johnson — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 19:50:55 +0000

Curious and Curiouser this tale becomes. Believe it or not, we are trained by good manners not to have opinions on things we don’t quite understand but none of us have good manners here so…

I find the questions difficult to irritating until something in my brain and its extension in my book case starts getting obscure messages about things to apply to the problem (question). The notion that I can assemble resources in the form of sometimes whacky, often inconsistent but always further to resolution than politeness would normally allow is a useful tool.

This self-reliance I think is an outcome we expect from school but it seems to have become a side-effect or even directly in opposition to the orderly purpose if teaching people to replicate answers cleverly disguised as questions. We need more clumsiness in education.

By: Jaap

Jaap — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 19:31:50 +0000

“ … I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. … ”
This tradition might be typical for Anlo-saxon (aristocratic) world with its overload of literature in education, Shakespeare, Milton, and essays in education. Might be a cultural difference.
Nicholas Carr was/is selling a book, that is reason to be very critical or even suspicious about motives. Selling a book is an economic project and has no connection to academic discourse. (It is not at all a crime to sell books, but it is not an academic business )
Could books be obstacles for learning? Books do have a certain authority, printed matter is more trustworthy, in the eyes of many. These books need more critical reflection.
Books are valuable commodities, that may influence the content of books. Lots of books do not exist because no publisher wanted to publish them.
Mistakes, lies, false statements never will be erased when the book is sold. Only sometimes a 2nd edition is edited.
Once a month me and some friends have an evening to discuss one book. Most of time everyone has a different story about the one book we read. Reading a book is very subjective, and discussing a book is never a dull evening.

By: dave

dave — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 18:50:09 +0000

In reply to Frances Bell.

Thanks for the kind words about the course!

I think of Humpty Dumpty as mostly talking about power and certainly mean it in that sense.

I’m not referring to any particular collection of books or one version of them. I’m trying to force the questioning of the issue to free up the community conversation a little. I struggled with this blog post mostly because I’m not trying to make a specific claim but rather trying to encourage a broad number of claims from participants.

Clumsily, I suppose, i am trying NOT to be master.