The Shallows

This is the first week of classes, and I'm registered in a course called 'Digital Games and Learning'.

I have some trepidation about this course.  One of the books on my summer reading list was Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows - What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains'.  Strangely, it's a book about why people don't read books anymore.

Marshall McLuhan famously said "The medium is the message", a cryptic way of saying that communication technology doesn't just deliver content but also directly influences how we  think about that content.  Each new technology modifies our brains.

Carr's message is this:  if we had intentionally set out to build the most effective brain-modifying technology possible, it would probably look a lot like the Internet.   The more we use it, the more it changes us.  We're using it a lot.  And it may not be changing us for the better.

Specifically, Carr is talking about 'deep reading'.  Reading has been at the center of mankind's rapid intellectual progress for the last three millennia.   The printed book focused our attention, the written word organized our thinking, the library captured our collective progress.

But books and periodicals are quickly losing ground to newer media.  We now average 8 1/2 hours a day looking at our televisions, computers, and cell phones (often simultaneously), but only 20 minutes reading print publications.

Worse, those 20 average minutes includes seniors who tend to be the heaviest readers.  Young adults between 25 and 34 are only reading print media for 7 minutes a day.  (!)

Maybe that's not a problem.  Reading web pages is still reading.  But it's a jerky, distracted, multi-tasking,  shallow-browsing kind of reading, punctuated with hyperlinks, graphics, and videos.  The average time spent on a web page is only33 seconds - including banners and ads.

Reading an e-book on an iPad sounds similar to reading an old-fashioned book, but the reader is continually interrupted by emails  from friends, advertisers, and spammers, IM pop-ups, news updates, stock market reports, and RSS feeds.  Plus the endless temptations of viral distractions.    It's hard to achieve focus in all that noise.

Carr worries that we may have squandered mankind's greatest treasure, traded it for, well, we're not quite sure what yet.




When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, "Because that's where the money is".

So yes, let's explore games as a teaching medium.  Books aren't working anymore, and the Internet isn't going away.  Carr was wrong about the internet being the most effective possible tool - games tap into the most basic wiring of our brains and invoke our deepest primal fears and instincts.

If that isn't enough, we also have the toolbox of operant conditioning - game controllers that serve up electric shocks, and others that read our very thoughts.  We would have to justify to the ethics committee before we could use this stuff on rats.

Maybe we can turn this technology to our use, mindful of McLuhan's warning.  But I have this trepidation...