The Blind Giant (31 page)

I knew that, given time and information, I could come to understand the culture and the people Francis Haskell was describing by following the traces of this one remarkable woman, Giustiniana Wynne, through their lives. I was also interested, excited and moved by the small fragments of her life I encountered. I took sides in fights and wished her well in her later, more tranquil years. She, in turn, showed me who was important and what they cared about. Haskell passes on her account of Angelo Querini’s house at Alticchiero, now destroyed:

Giustiniana Wynne was a telescope through which I could see another world.

This sense of engagement is key: I found something that I could relate to and process. I have always needed context to remember and understand things. At school, I found the lists and tables of mathematics impossibly hard because I was required to learn them by rote without understanding why they worked or why I needed them. I could not engage with pure figures and operations: they slid off the surface of my mind and left me groping for them in the dark. Tell me, on the other hand, about Pythagoras, and explain the importance of his work, and I can retain and understand his geometry. As Wolf observes, in my uptake of Giustiniana’s world, what was already in my head was as important as what was on the page: it is the encounter between the two that is the relevant experience. It is not important, in this context, whether the engagement is taking place between two flesh and blood human beings, two or more human beings mediated by the Internet, or one human being and the text of a book written by another. There is an interaction taking place, not a straight dump of information from source to brain.

That should hearten anyone who fears that the increasing reliance in digital society on Dr Johnson’s secondary sort of
knowledge – the knowledge of where to find something – is destroying the idea of scholarship and excellence. Johnson’s secondary knowledge actually comes in two parts, the tacit part being ‘knowing where to put information in your own mental
map when you’ve found it, and knowing what to do with it’. Expertise is not merely knowledge, and it is not supplanted by access: it is the ability to incorporate information at a high level, to work with it and manipulate it – to engage with it fully.

More than that, though, engagement is the key to authenticity. With it, something meaningful is happening, whether you’re watching an animated cartoon or discussing ontology with a famous metaphysician. Without it, you could be standing in the midst of wonder and see nothing. The classic image from American movies of recent decades is the dad on his mobile phone when he should be paying attention to his children, but you can equally easily find the phenomenon in people who can’t stop discussing their favourite topic when they’re walking through a rainforest, or those to whom one aspect of life is so utterly all-important that everything must be seen in its light, be that taxation, Marxism, God or sex.

But what was happening in my head was not the straightforward ‘deep reading’ experience Nicholas Carr is concerned we are losing. That encounter – while it is also a powerful engagement – is supposedly more narrow. In deep reading, there is a single stream of information from text to brain that excites what I would call engagement. It is not a question of binding together disparate narratives and creating a fresh perspective, but of connecting one’s own thoughts to those of an author. It is, as it were, monogamous, although Carr also mentions that the act of reading paper differs from reading on screen because there are measurable sense data that differ starkly, which seems to undermine his point. If the business of reading is partly supplemented by subsidiary information like that, then it isn’t entirely devoid of additional streams after all – though, granted, there is a difference between sense information and cognition.

Rather than being like deep reading, the business of understanding the story of Giustiniana Wynne was – subjectively, at least – more akin to the process of writing, or to reading a string of
different documents to try to appreciate a news story from a variety of angles. It was inherently an act of synthesis, of editing, of judgement and creation. I was putting together a narrative. Rather than relying on a linear history with a single viewpoint, I was assembling a new understanding from a selection of incidents. You could argue – in the context of news stories, particularly – that this is a much better way of getting to an accurate perception of events than accepting the account of a single narrator. It’s the skill at the heart of digital reading in my experience: assemblage reading, a kind of internal storytelling in which a series of perspectives including one’s own is merged to produce a new understanding that embraces a string of other narratives and accepts them as primary but single-perspective and tries to assemble an over-arching, inter-subjective picture. It’s what we did (‘we’ being everyone on Twitter and other social media sites) as we tried to fathom what was happening in Egypt in spring 2011, following the stories of people we had never met and weaving them together.

The position of the reader in these two different ways of engaging is key to understanding how digital and plain text differ: in Carr’s deep reading, the reader is active, but still essentially a docile audience. In the read/write creation of a narrative from fragments, the reader is a participant – and that is at the heart of the digital age. The nature of our digital technologies as they presently exist fosters this way of being: a creative, synthetic approach to information and the world rather than an obedient, consuming one. As the growth of literacy allowed human beings to examine themselves as if from without and ushered in a new human mind – and brain – which hinged on that ability, so perhaps the digital technologies bring a more critical, creative, and engaged self to the fore.

Engagement is not a substitute for deep reading – at least, I’m not proposing that it fills the gap Carr feels is left in our brain’s plastic
architecture and function by a diminished amount of time spent reading in the conventional sense, although it may, in fact, be what is replacing it in many situations – but it is a measure of whether or not an interaction is authentic. If you are engaged, either with a person or an object, you are paying attention to them, learning from them and about them, incorporating your encounter into your understanding of the world. If you’re not doing that, your interaction is cursory at best. In a social context you may offend them, and you’re unlikely to remember much about them. If what you’re not engaging with is the nail you’re banging into a piece of wood, it’s entirely likely you’ll hit your thumb with a hammer.

Obviously, when you’re dealing with a person, it isn’t simply a question of learning about them to gain access to information about the world. When we try to find out about someone socially – What movies do you like? Can you dance? What kind of work do you do? – we’re looking for places where we can bring our own experience and identity into contact with that of someone else. We’re in a species of dance, probing the edges of our agreements, looking to learn, to discover commonality or points of enjoyable difference. This kind of engagement is the interaction and meeting of two identities effectively communicated.

The key factor is that what separates real from counterfeit is not physical presence, but the actual interaction of mental and emotional patterns. Granted, you can’t have a real fight or real sex with someone without a physical component – yet – but if you have an hour-long conversation in the flesh and come away with no memory of the detail, no sense of who the other person was, and no real change to yourself as a consequence of the interaction, it’s hard to see how you can feel that you’ve had a real encounter. On the other hand, if you have an hour-long conversation online that moves and challenges you, and that experience becomes a part of who you are, the engagement clearly is important and the interaction is real. More challenging is what would
have happened if you’d had that same conversation in the flesh. Would it have been more intense, more engaged? It’s impossible to say. Yes, our non-verbal communication is hugely important, so you would receive additional cues and information. On the other hand, would it have taken a different course? Would a sexual dynamic have occluded intellectual honesty and resulted in a lousy cognitive engagement, an encounter filled with partial deception ending in a physical encounter? Does that qualify as more genuine?

I’m far from being the first person to identify and emphasize the value of the engaged state. Robert Pirsig’s novel
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
discusses something very similar. Pirsig identifies moments of disengagement as ‘quality traps’. When you make a poor decision, force a screw and strip the thread because you were in a hurry and not really concentrating, that’s a quality trap. The smooth focus that Pirsig proposes we should all try to inhabit all the time has been lost, and the consequence of a heedless, careless interaction with the world is frustration.

Psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi also wrote extensively about what I would identify as the deep engagement of creative work in
Flow
: ‘When all a person’s relevant skills are needed to cope with the challenges of a situation, that person’s attention is completely absorbed … All the attention is concentrated on the relevant stimuli … one of the most universal and distinctive features of optimal experience takes place: people become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic …’ But importantly, ‘Although the flow experience appears to be effortless … it requires … highly disciplined mental activity. It does not happen without the application of skilled performance.’

Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow’ is almost certainly the most concentrated sort of engagement; I don’t propose that we all constantly push ourselves to the level of focus required to drive a Formula
One car or write a novel. In any case, judging by my own experience, that state is not something that can be maintained at all times and nor is it entirely desirable to do so; the absoluteness of it makes it a perilous friend if you’re walking through a crowded marketplace or driving a car (unless that activity is what you’re concentrating on). I find that when I’m working at that level I lack what fighter pilots call ‘situational awareness’; more colloquially, I could keep working through a small earthquake so long as the power to my computer remained uninterrupted, and if the power did fail I might well just go and find a pen.

But the basic tenet of focus, of the application of the attention of the mind to a task, an activity, is the same. It’s what differentiates interactions that are real and worthwhile from those that are essentially a waste of time, or, at least, the kind of thing with which our days are filled and which we generally forget: tying shoelaces, brushing teeth and so on. We don’t engage with those activities in general because we don’t see that they have value; they’re mechanical actions rather than ones we need to get to grips with and understand. (As a matter of interest, engaging properly with either one of those examples yields fascinating information: shoelaces lead backwards into history and sideways into fashion and the mathematics of knots, and tooth-brushing touches biology, chemistry, advertising, body mechanics … Pirsig would probably say that was the point: an open appreciation of the world around yields understanding and wonder.)

Engagement is also important because it is in part a determinator of whether we grant someone the privileges of the hearth. That’s more than simply a question of whether you allow them into your house; it’s a question about whether you’d give them a key to your house. Granting someone access to the hearth – to the place where we play and where our families live – is a gesture of trust and an acceptance of them into a different order of our personal understanding of the world. Inside the hearth circle, there is a code of behaviour, a reciprocal relationship of guest and
host, of co-equals, and of mutual obligation. It goes beyond ‘
Netiquette’, the much debated code of online politesse. Hearth rules are exacting yet soft, more understandings than codified laws, requiring attention and even empathy.

In
Predictably
Irrational
, Dan Ariely describes an example that intrigues me. At a day care centre in Israel, there was apparently a problem with tardy parents. The centre, in an attempt to ameliorate this, imposed a fine for lateness. Not only did this not solve the problem, it actually exacerbated it: the change from social obligation – hearth rules – to commercial transaction made parents much more willing to show up late, because now there was a straightforward cost that could be met by paying the fine rather than a sense of anti-social behaviour. The host–guest relationship was annulled and replaced with a simple transactional one, in which transformation, people in cooperation became representatives of two separate financial interests bound in a contractual relationship. In the new situation, the only obligation upon the parents was to pay their bills, after which it was up to them to extract the most good from the service. What had been cooperation between individuals on an informal, hearth basis in which everyone knew what was and was not acceptable, but it was not codified, became tension between (fractionally deindividuated) representatives of two teams. Reversing the process seems to be very difficult; when the fine was discontinued, behaviour got even worse: now there was neither a social penalty nor a financial one, so parents just turned up when they wanted to.