ENQUIRING?

ENQUIRING? (Revised)

          Years ago, the New Yorker magazine ran a regular full-page ad for a daily newspaper, the Philadelphia Enquirer, which consisted of cartoon variations on one theme: a bewildered little man scratching his head at the sea of people around him – including taxi drivers, mothers with babes-in-arms, tree-climbers, people milling about, sitting on benches etc. as far as the eye could see – each and all avidly reading the open pages of the Philadelphia Enquirer. The caption underneath the cartoon was always the same: “In Philadelphia almost everyone reads the Enquirer!”

          It was an amusing ad for its time and a novel if surreal idea: everyone in the whole city reading their daily paper all at once except one lonely individual. No wonder in its bizarre variations it ran for years.

          It turns out not to be such a fantasy as all that, though the medium is not a newspaper but the mobile/cell phone. Whenever I take my constitutional in the local park I am brought back to memories of that bewildered little man in Philadelphia all those years ago. The other day I passed a foursome: two young couples, each couple holding hands with one hand, and all four each holding a mobile with the other, staring down into it. They were entirely silent, wrapt in the gizmo. Perhaps they were each playing a game, maybe the same game. Who knows, they might have been texting each other! Well, at least they were out in the fresh air and holding hands. And maybe mobile “enquiring”?

          Much has been made recently of a study published in Ofcom’s annual Communications Market Report based on a survey of 2,050 adults and 500 teenagers who spend, on average, 25 hours a week on the internet. “Three quarters of UK internet users said it was important to their daily lives and 59% said they were ‘hooked’ on the device they used.” Many report loss of sleep, neglected housework, loss of real contact with family and friends, with some saying they had been late for work because of internet use; 60% of the teenagers “admitted neglecting school work and a quarter said they were late for school because they were glued to connected devices.”

          But some people are trying to get out from under this habituation. Some 30% of adults have sought a period of time offline; about 25% spent a day internet free; 20% took up to a week off; while around 4-5% went web-free for up to a whole month. Substitute “alcohol” for “internet” and you have what look like similar patterns of addictive behaviour, “detox” efforts and all.

          There are the physical effects as well, such as serious spinal problems developing from prolonged periods when the head is bent down to the chest to work mobiles, and the effect of screen-glare upon eyesight in general.

          One thinks of another cartoon, of older vintage: an etching by Hogarth of the dregs of London in the 18^th century due to the universal ruination of the populace by cheap gin. (Babies falling out of drunken mothers’ laps into the gutter and so on.) At least mobiles, I don’t suppose, have any detrimental effect on the liver but they appear to be able to screw up human intelligence in various ways.

          Now, we don’t need alcohol, but most of us need the internet one way or another short of being addicted to it. We cyber-utilitarians are like “social drinkers”, if you like, to set us apart from those lying across park benches.  This blog seems necessary to its creators for putting things across, though that makes us part of the internet problem if only by way of adding yet more to the web. But if we make the blog as non-habit-forming as possible then to the extent that it puts you off we are salving our conscience.

          As a Marxist I can only remark on one aspect of the whole internet phenomenon: we ourselves are the very commodities that we purchase. I am not being particularly original in saying that what Facebook etc. “sell” are the human beings who join it. Your profile is or becomes a marketable commodity in itself for those determined to sell you goods. Though if you are constantly on the internet you may not have the time to use them. Once people “sold” only their labour-power to the employer: that is, the time they spent on the job doing work of some kind. And of course prostitutes sell or rent their bodies out for particular times, not to speak of the vast market in human body-parts around the world. But these are identifiable commodities drawn from specialised human activities and organs. In the internet and all that goes with it, especially its social-media function, we have human beings freely offering their whole selves up as the wares sold. In some curious way, we “buy back” ourselves.

          Meanwhile, one other item that may have slipped the attention of pupils and students. According to the Daily Mail for 26^th April 2014 (“If you want total recall, use pen and paper (not a laptop)” by Ben Spencer), studies from Princeton University published in Psychological Science show that even when laptops are used in classrooms as intended – and not for buying things on Amazon during class – they may still be harming academic performance. Students do worse when using laptops for “conceptual” questions as opposed to “fact-recall” questions. It’s really very simple. On laptops which are so easy to use students write too many notes. By comparison, writing in longhand is more arduous. It follows that when you make notes (on a lecture, say), in longhand you are forced to follow the lecture yourself, almost instinctively noting down only the salient points because less physical effort is required. This kind of note-taking is a form of thinking. By contrast, if you type out everything being said, you are not only unable – later – to sort out the most important stuff from the detail; you are during the lecture acting like a machine yourself, not mentally taking in what is being said because you are confident you can access it in full later. But you won’t because you won’t have been paying attention in the first place. You might be able with time to wade through the laptop notes to make real sense of them but it would be like attending the original session all over again, and most students are unlikely to relish the prospect of that !