Cactus Juice

Stuff I didn't get to do because I didn't have the internet

I didn't go to church on my weekend without the internet.  St. Mary's, a wonderful Anglo-catholic church just down the hill from Grove Park Inn, has been having some construction and air conditioner problems and has been altering their meeting schedule. We didn't see anyone about when we drove by.  I could have paid to use one of the Inn computers, or I could have asked the concierge to look it up.

That was always the potential solution.  We could have asked the concierge what time the art shop opens on Monday and not sat in the street for half an hour.  We could have asked the concierge where the restaurants were.

We could have asked the concierge if he had a dictionary.  A couple of times I wanted to look up words in the books I was reading.  Instead I wrote them down and we looked them up after we drove home.  One dictionary, especially for an academic word, isn't very helpful.  (Words exist in a web of meaning, always look in at least two dictionaries kids.  Or, better yet, use the internet.)

For the most part we were able to find the shops we wanted to find because my sweetheart had thought ahead, searched up every kind of shop he thought I would want to find (including the local knitting shops!) and printed directions.  It is true that not having the internet means relying on other people and talking to other people.  I'm just not sure how big a benefit that is if I need to stand in line to ask someone to look up a word for me.

By the way, for whatever reason (!!!) my sweetheart didn't think I would make it a weekend without the internet.  He imagined me throwing a toddler-fit at 3AM and so he had an "in case of emergency" computer hidden in the back of the car.

Turning off the internet: it ain't all that

This weekend an experiment in turning off the noise.  No computer, no blackberry, no radio and (normal for me but to be complete) no television.  I did not reach any grand conclusions about research or life.  I did not find myself suddenly thinking more clearly under a more blue sky and greener trees.  I did read several books, but I should point out they were mass-market nonfiction I had saved up for my great break from work and graduate school, not for a great break from the internet.

In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr points out that brain plasticity means your brain becomes good at what you practice.  In my case, access to the internet doesn't mean I don't read.  I read at length on a daily basis.  Carr quotes college professors complaining that it is nearly impossible to get today's undergraduates to read entire books.  I am going to guess that is more about the entitlement of today's undergraduates than it is about their brain plasticity.

Entitlement is obnoxious, especially in the young, but it is another effect of the internet.  The internet breaks down what used to be intellectual expertise.  In The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University Louis Menard points out that a professor used to have authority simply based on the fact that long reading had provided access to information not available to the average person.  With nearly any fact available on Google, specialists no longer have this advantage.  Reading an entire book requires a justification (a justification that today's muddled educational system fails to make either intellectually or by authority).

In Cognative Surplus Clay Shirky writes of a child who refused to interact with a television in the mode required by television- passive observation.  "Where's the mouse?"  This is the entitlement I missed this weekend.  I now expect to be able to talk back.  Or at least talk about.  In our intellectually fragmented world, if I had brought together the whole population of the resort it is not likely that any of us had read the same books (although with the 101 Kindles and iPads present, it isn't as easy as it once was to tell just by looking at someone carrying their reading material!).  Formulating what I might say about a book or an experience and saying it- this is the buzzing in the brain that I missed this weekend, and I am more than happy to have it back.