Three Tweets for the Web

byTyler Cowen
Welcome the new world with open arms—andbrowsers.
The printed word is not dead. We are not about to seethe demise of the novel or the shuttering of all the bookstores, and wewon’t all end up on Twitter. But we are clearly in the midst of acultural transformation. For today’s younger people, Google is morelikely to provide a formative cultural experience than The Catcher in the Rye or Catch-22 or even the HarryPotter novels. There is no question that books are becoming less central toour cultural life.
The relative decline of the book is part of a broadershift toward short and to the point. Small cultural bits—writtenwords, music, video—have never been easier to record, store,organize, and search, and thus they are a growing part of our enjoyment andeducation. The classic 1960s rock album has given way to the iTunes single.On YouTube, the most popular videos are usually just a few minutes long,and even then viewers may not watch them through to the end. At theextreme, there are Web sites offering five-word movie and song reviews,six-word memoirs (“Not Quite What I Was Planning”), seven-wordwine reviews, and 50-word minisagas.*
The new brevity has many virtues. One appeal offollowing blogs is the expectation of receiving a new reward (and finishingoff that reward) every day. Blogs feature everything from expert commentaryon politics or graphic design to reviews of new Cuban music CDs to casualruminations on feeding one’s cat. Whatever the subject, the contentis replenished on a periodic basis, much as 19th-century novels were oftendelivered in installments, but at a faster pace and with far more authorsand topics to choose from. In the realm of culture, a lot of our enjoymenthas always come from the opening and unwrapping of each gift. Thanks totoday’s hypercurrent online environment, this is a pleasure we canexperience nearly constantly.
It may seem as if we have entered a nightmarishattention-deficit culture, but the situation is not nearly as gloomy as youhave been told. Our culture of the short bit is making human minds morerather than less powerful.
The arrival of virtually every new cultural medium hasbeen greeted with the charge that it truncates attention spans andrepresents the beginning of cultural collapse—the novel (in the 18thcentury), the comic book, rock ‘n’ roll, television, and nowthe Web. In fact, there has never been a golden age of all-wise,all-attentive readers. But that’s not to say that nothing haschanged. The mass migration of intellectual activity from print to the Webhas brought one important development: We have begun paying more attentionto information. Overall, that’s a big plus for the new world order.
It is easy to dismiss this cornucopia as informationoverload. We’ve all seen people scrolling with one hand through aBlackBerry while pecking out instant messages (IMs) on a laptop with theother and eyeing a television (I won’t say “watching”).But even though it is easy to see signs of overload in our busy lives, thereality is that most of us carefully regulate this massive inflow ofinformation to create something uniquely suited to our particular interestsand needs—a rich and highly personalized blend of cultural gleanings.
The word for this process is multitasking, but that makes it soundas if we’re all over the place. There is a deep coherence to how eachof us pulls out a steady stream of information from disparate sources tofeed our long-term interests. No matter how varied your topics of interestmay appear to an outside observer, you’ll tailor an informationstream related to the continuing “stories” you want in your life—say, Sichuancooking, health care reform, Michael Jackson, and the stock market. Withthe help of the Web, you build broader intellectual narratives about theworld. The apparent disorder of the information stream reflects not yourincoherence but rather your depth and originality as an individual.
My own daily cultural harvest usually involveslistening to music and reading—novels, nonfiction, and Webessays—with periodic glances at the NewYork Times Web site and an e-mail check everyfive minutes or so. Often I actively don’t want to pull apart thesedistinct activities and focus on them one at a time for extended periods. Ilike the blendI assemble for myself, and I like what I learn from it. To me (and probablyno one else, but that is the point), the blend offers the ultimate ininterest and suspense. Call me an addict, but if I am torn away from thesestories for even a day, I am very keen to get back for the next“episode.”
Many critics charge that multitasking makes us lessefficient. Researchers say that periodically checking your e-mail lowersyour cognitive performance level to that of a drunk. If such claims werebroadly correct, multitasking would pretty rapidly disappear simply becausepeople would find that it didn’t make sense to do it. Multitasking isflourishing, and so are we. There are plenty of lab experiments that showthat distracting people reduces the capacity of their working memory andthus impairs their decision making. It’s much harder to show thatmultitasking, when it results from the choices and control of anindividual, does anyone cognitive harm. Multitasking is not a distractionfrom our main activity, it is our main activity.
Consider the fact that IQ scores have been rising fordecades, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. I won’t argue thatmultitasking is driving this improvement, but the Flynn effect does beliethe common impression that people are getting dumber or less attentive. Aharried multitasking society seems perfectly compatible with lots ofinnovation, lots of high achievers, and lots of high IQ scores.
With the help of technology, we are honing our abilityto do many more things at once and do them faster. We access and absorbinformation more quickly than before, and, as a result, we often seem moreimpatient. If you use Google to look something up in 10 seconds rather thanspend five minutes searching through an encyclopedia, that doesn’tmean you are less patient. It means you are creating more time to focus onother matters. In fact, we’re devoting more effort than ever beforeto big-picture questions, from the nature of God to the best age formarrying and the future of the U.S. economy.
Our focus on cultural bits doesn’t mean we areneglecting the larger picture. Rather, those bits are building-blocks forseeing and understanding larger trends and narratives. The typical Web userdoesn’t visit a gardening blog one day and a Manolo Blahnik shoesblog the next day, and never return to either. Most activity online, or atleast the kind that persists, involves continuing investments in particularlong-running narratives—about gardening, art, shoes, or whatever elseengages us. There’s an alluring suspense to it. What’s next? That is whythe Internet captures so much of our attention.
Indeed, far from shortening our attention spans, theWeb lengthens themby allowing us to follow the same story over many years’ time. If Iwant to know what’s new with the NBA free-agent market, the debatesurrounding global warming, or the publication plans of Thomas Pynchon,Google quickly gets me to the most current information. Formerly I neededpersonal contacts—people who were directly involved in theaction—to follow a story for years, but now I can do it quite easily.
Sometimes it does appear I am impatient. I’lldiscard a half-read book that 20 years ago I might have finished. But onceI put down the book, I will likely turn my attention to one of thelong-running stories I follow online. I’ve been listening to themusic of Paul McCartney for more than 30 years, for example, and if thereis some new piece of music or development in his career, I see it first onthe Internet. If our Web surfing is sometimes frantic or pulled in manydirections, that is because we care so much about so many long-runningstories. It could be said, a bit paradoxically, that we are impatient toreturn to our chosen programs of patience.
Another way the Web has affected the human attentionspan is by allowing greater specialization of knowledge. It has never beeneasier to wrap yourself up in a long-term intellectual project without atthe same time losing touch with the world around you. Some criticsdon’t see this possibility, charging that the Web is destroying ashared cultural experience by enabling us to follow only the specializedstories that pique our individual interests. But there are also those whoargue that the Web is doing just the opposite—that we dabble in anendless variety of topics but never commit to a deeper pursuit of aspecific interest. These two criticisms contradict each other. The realityis that the Internet both aids in knowledge specialization and helpsspecialists keep in touch with general trends.
The key to developing your personal blend of all the“stuff” that’s out there is to use the right tools. Thequantity of information coming our way has exploded, but so has the qualityof our filters, including Google, blogs, and Twitter. As Internet analystClay Shirky points out, there is no information overload, only filterfailure. If you wish, you can keep all the information almost entirely atbay and use Google or text a friend only when you need to know something.That’s not usually how it works. Many of us are cramming ourselveswith Web experiences—videos, online chats, magazines—and alsofielding a steady stream of incoming e-mails, text messages, and IMs. Theresulting sense of time pressure is not a pathology; it is a reflection ofthe appeal and intensity of what we are doing. The Web allows you toenhance the meaning and importance of the cultural bits at your disposal;thus you want to grab more of them, and organize more of them, and you arewilling to work hard at that task, even if it means you sometimes feelharried.
It’s true that many people on the Web are notlooking for a cerebral experience, and younger people especially may lackthe intellectual framework needed to integrate all the incoming bits into ameaningful whole. A lot of people are on the Web just to have fun or toachieve some pretty straightforward personal goals—they may want toknow what happened to their former high school classmates or the history ofthe dachshund. “It’s still better than watching TV” iscertainly a sufficient defense of these practices, but there is a deeperpoint: The Internet is supplementing and intensifying real life. TheWeb’s heralded interactivity not only furthers that process but opensup new possibilities for more discussion and debate. Anyone can find spaceon the Internet to rate a product, criticize an idea, or review a new movieor book.
One way to understand the emotional and intellectualsatisfactions of the new world is by way of contrast. ConsiderMozart’s opera Don Giovanni. The music and libretto express a gamut of human emotions,from terror to humor to love to the sublime. With its ability to combine somuch in a single work of art, the opera represents a great achievement ofthe Western canon. But, for all Don Giovanni’s virtues, it takes well over three hours to hear itin its entirety, perhaps four with an intermission. Plus, the libretto isin Italian. And if you want to see the performance live, a good seat cancost hundreds of dollars.
Instead of experiencing the emotional range of Don Giovanni in one long,expensive sitting, on the Web we pick the moods we want from disparatesources and assemble them ourselves. We take a joke from YouTube, aterrifying scene from a Japanese slasher movie, a melody from iTunes, andsome images—perhaps our own digital photos—capturing thesublime beauty of the Grand Canyon. Even if no single bit looks veryimpressive to an outsider, to the creator of this assemblage it is a richand varied inner experience. The new wonders we create are simply harderfor outsiders to see than, say, the fantastic cathedrals of Old Europe.
The measure of cultural literacy today is not whetheryou can “read” all the symbols in a Rubens painting but whetheryou can operate an iPhone and other Web-related technologies. One thing youcan do with such devices is visit any number of Web sites where you can seeRubens’s pictures and learn plenty about them. It’s not so muchabout having information as it is about knowing how to get it. Viewed inthis light, today’s young people are very culturally literateindeed—in fact, they are very often cultural leaders and creators.
To better understand contemporary culture, consider ananalogy to romance. Although many long-distance relationships survive, theyare difficult to sustain. When you have to travel far to meet your beloved,you want to make every trip a grand and glorious occasion. Usually youdon’t fly from one coast to another just to hang out and sharedowntime and small talk. You go out to eat and to the theater, you makepassionate love, and you have intense conversations. You have a lot ofthrills, but it’s hard to make it work because in the long runit’s casually spending time together and the routines of daily lifethat bind two people to each other. And of course, in a long-distancerelationship, a lot of the time you’re not together at all. If youreally love the other person you’re not consistently happy, eventhough your peak experiences may be amazing.
A long-distance relationship is, in emotional terms, abit like culture in the time of Cervantes or Mozart. The costs of traveland access were high, at least compared to modern times. When you didarrive, the performance was often very exciting and indeed monumental.Sadly, the rest of the time you didn’t have that much culture at all.Even books were expensive and hard to get. Compared to what is possible inmodern life, you couldn’t be as happy overall but your peakexperiences could be extremely memorable, just as in the long-distancerelationship.
Now let’s consider how living together andmarriage differ from a long-distance relationship. When you share a home,the costs of seeing each other are very low. Your partner is usually rightthere. Most days include no grand events, but you have lots of regular andpredictable interactions, along with a kind of grittiness or even uglinessrarely seen in a long-distance relationship. There are dirty dishes in thesink, hedges to be trimmed, maybe diapers to be changed.
If you are happily married, or even somewhat happilymarried, your internal life will be very rich. You will take all thosesmall events and, in your mind and in the mind of your spouse, weave themtogether in the form of a deeply satisfying narrative, dirty diapers andall. It won’t always look glorious on the outside, but the internalexperience of such a marriage is better than what’s normally possiblein a long-distance relationship.
The same logic applies to culture. The Internet andother technologies mean that our favorite creators, or at least theircreations, are literally part of our daily lives. It is no longer along-distance relationship. It is no longer hard to get books and otherwritten material. Pictures, music, and video appear on command. Culture isthere all the time, and you can receive more of it, pretty much wheneveryou want.
In short, our relationship to culture has become morelike marriage in the sense that it now enters our lives in an establishedflow, creating a better and more regular daily state of mind. True, culturehas in some ways become uglier, or at least it would appear so to theoutside observer. But when it comes to how we actually live and feel,contemporary culture is more satisfying and contributes to the happiness offar more people. That is why the public devours new technologies that offerextreme and immediate access to information.
Many critics of contemporary life want our culture toremain like a long-distance relationship at a time when most of us aregrowing into something more mature. We assemble culture for ourselves,creating and committing ourselves to a fascinating brocade. Very often thepaper-and-ink book is less central to this new endeavor; it’s justanother cultural bit we consume along with many others. But we are betteroff for this change, a change that is filling our daily lives with beauty,suspense, and learning.
Or if you’d like the shorter version to post toyour Twitter account (140 characters or less): “Smart people aredoing wonderful things.”