Institute For The Future

"Blackberries, wax tablets, and thinking"

Recently I had the pleasure of spending some time with John Seely Brown, former head of Xerox PARC, author of two books (one of which I very much admire, the other of which I'm now reading). At one point, he was complaining about "Berrybite," a problem he's been seeing with people who try to read even relatively short pieces-- like op-ed pieces-- on their Treos or Blackberries. John Hagel expands on the concept:

 

In our quest to stay connected, we have embraced powerful new technology. Some of the best new products include the increasingly ubiquitous Blackberries and Treos, combining e-mail and telephone functionality.

In recent weeks, however, JSB and I have been exposed to the dark side of this new technology. JSB has even coined a name for it-- he calls it ‘Berrybite”, merging Blackberry with soundbite.

Both JSB and I have had experiences where documents we sent were read by people on a Blackberry or Treo. They weren’t long documents – basically the equivalent of two or three pages of text. The recipients were initially highly critical of the material. But, when we pressed them to read the documents again, they came back after reading them more carefully on a PC or in print form and apologized for their initial reactions. They said the material was excellent and they didn’t really understand why they had such a negative initial reaction.

Well, we think we know why initial reactions were so negative. The Blackberry or Treo is not conducive to a careful read-- it encourages skimming. It also encourages people to find a quick way to capture what is in the document and then move on to the next message. As a result, people tend to try to fit these documents into familiar categories based on some key words rather than thinking deeply about the topic and absorbing new perspectives. It also doesn’t help that documents on these devices are typically accessed in environments with lots of distractions-- meeting rooms, airports, automobiles, etc.-- making it difficult to concentrate on the message at hand.

 

Probably everyone has had an experience like this. Indeed, complaints about the negative impact of computers, e-mail, video games, and other information technologies on our ability to concentrate, or focus for long periods, are legion; it's one reason Steven Johnson's new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, has stirred up such controversy.

That's why it's worth noting that there are times when new media help us handle more complex arguments, and construct more complex texts. Consider, for example, the impact that the great availability of paper and parchment had on writing in the Middle Ages. According to Paul Saenger (in his brilliant, controversial "Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society," Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (1982), 367-414), the growing availability of parchment gave authors greater opportunity to write and revise their work, and hence more room to work out complex arguments and develop difficult lines of thought, than they had previously. (Bear with me. It'll become clear at the end of this post why I reach so far back for this example.)

Saenger notes that 12th-century scholastic authors worked by either dictating to assistants, who took notes on wax tablets, and then copied the final version onto parchment. "Wax tablets, however, limited the scope of written composition," he says, and so "glosses were phrase-by-phrase explications of the text without cross-references or discussions of problems pertaining to the work as a whole." Further, assistants wrote in shorthand, summarizing rather than transcribing. As a consequence, "composition was… clearly a group activity… and a very prolific writer might well publish works which he had never seen or heard in final written or edited form."

The growing availability and lower cost of parchment in the 13th century changed this system dramatically. Authors like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas now worked directly on quires and parchment, without assistants or scribed. Consequently, Saenger says, "authors could revise and rearrange their texts while composing them," allowing "13th-century scholastic writers to prepare texts rich in cross-references." (Indeed, they came to see themselves as authors in a recognizably modern sense, a shift that was "vividly documented by medieval illuminations," in which writers were shown until the 13th century being dictated to by divines, and thereafter copying texts held by angels-- the divine inspiration is the same, but the means of communication change. They also began to acquire desks and lecterns, which oral composition did not require.)

Books simultaneously got longer and denser. Because it became possible to see an entire (longer) manuscript at once, writers could develop more elaborate arguments, and use the manuscript itself to play with the structure-- moving sections around, cutting up and rearranging pages.

In other words, Scholasticism-- that body of thinking still admired for its logic and rigor-- was built on a foundation of parchment.

Why do I draw this comparison? Two reasons.

First, both the Saenger and Berrybite examples show how it's important to think about the impact of media on both reading and writing practices. We're accustomed to hearing about how the printing press democratized reading, made mass education possible, etc.; but changes in printing technologies can be changes in writing technologies as well-- and hence affect the way people construct arguments and think.

Second, I suspect that the Berrybite example may be an artifact of a particular moment in the history of mobile devices. Twenty years from now, when we're on the road, are we still going to be looking at documents through little screens? I suspect not-- or at least, I suspect that the option will be available to carry around big, foldable computers, pieces of e-paper, or what have you-- reading surfaces that are as big as magazines and newspapers today. This, in turn, will have an impact on how well we can process information-- process both individual documents, and the broader flow of information that we swim (or drown) in every day.

This is a subject I'm working on now, in a piece entitled "The End of Cyberspace." A preliminary version will appear in the 2006 Perspectives; watch for a much bigger piece later.