are constantly asking questions about something they saw on YouTube but not about an article or a book. They very often rightly ask, âYou said so-and-so. Whatâs the evidence for it?â In fact, in an article I wrote the same week as that talk, there might have been footnotes and discussion, but it doesnât occur to them to look for that.
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What does that mean for an intellectual culture, then?
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Itâs going to degrade the intellectual culture. It canât help but do so. Itâs a mixed story. Take, say, electronic books. They have advantages. You have half a dozen books you can read on an airplane trip. On the other hand, when I read a book I care about, I want to make comments in the margins, I want to underline things. I want to make notes on the flyleaf. Otherwise I donât even know what to go back to. You canât do that the same way with an electronic book. Words just pass into your eyes. Maybe they donât even stay in your brain.
The same is true of the Internet. Access to the Internet is a great thing. A huge amount of material is available. On the other hand, itâs evanescent. Unless you know what youâre looking for, and you store it properly and put it into context, itâs as if you never saw it. Thereâs no point in having a lot of data available unless you can make some sense out of it. And that takes thought, reflection, inquiry. I think these capacities are being degraded to an extent. You canât measure it, but I have a sense thatâs true.
Â
What do you think about Twitter? You have one hundred and forty characters to express something.
Â
Yes. Bev Stohl, who works with me at MIT, told me about it. I get a ton of e-mail. Increasingly, the messages I receive have been one-sentence queries or comments, sometimes so brief that theyâre in the subject line of the e-mail. Bev pointed out to me that those are the length of Twitter messages. If you look at them, they have a fairly consistent character. They give the impression of being something that someone just thought of. Youâre walking down the street, a thought comes to you, you tweet it. If you thought for two minutes, or if you had made the slight effort involved in looking up the topic, you wouldnât have sent it. In fact, it has reached the point that sometimes I just send a form letter saying I canât respond to a one-line question.
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Getting back to books, your lectures are replete with references to information that you learned in books, for example, something about Martin Luther King that Taylor Branch wrote or something about the U.S. labor movement by David Montgomery. Youâre able to bring this reading knowledge into the intellectual formulations you then present.
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Anybody can do it. Itâs not a special talent. But you have to be willing to think about what youâre reading. You can be led down a false track. You can be deluded. The same is true in the sciences. You can be pursuing some idea that you really think is exciting, work hard on it, get what looks like an explanation, and then you find out you were going in the wrong direction and you have to backtrack. You can learn from that, too. But if you donât stop to think, reflect, and find a context, itâs wasted effort. You might as well not be reading.
Â
I was struck in a talk in New York that you mentioned E. L. Doctorowâs Ragtime. 4 Was that the last novel you read?
Â
I think the last novel I read was by the Icelandic Nobel Prize laureate Halldór Laxness. I was in Iceland. Somebody lent me one of his novels, and I read it on the plane back. Itâs great. When I was in England about a year ago, a friend gave me A Case of Exploding Mangoes , a Pakistani novel by Mohammed Hanif. 5 It was very good. I canât read as much fiction as Iâd like.
Â
States around the world, from China to Syria to the United States, are becoming increasingly
Â
What does that mean for an intellectual culture, then?
Â
Itâs going to degrade the intellectual culture. It canât help but do so. Itâs a mixed story. Take, say, electronic books. They have advantages. You have half a dozen books you can read on an airplane trip. On the other hand, when I read a book I care about, I want to make comments in the margins, I want to underline things. I want to make notes on the flyleaf. Otherwise I donât even know what to go back to. You canât do that the same way with an electronic book. Words just pass into your eyes. Maybe they donât even stay in your brain.
The same is true of the Internet. Access to the Internet is a great thing. A huge amount of material is available. On the other hand, itâs evanescent. Unless you know what youâre looking for, and you store it properly and put it into context, itâs as if you never saw it. Thereâs no point in having a lot of data available unless you can make some sense out of it. And that takes thought, reflection, inquiry. I think these capacities are being degraded to an extent. You canât measure it, but I have a sense thatâs true.
Â
What do you think about Twitter? You have one hundred and forty characters to express something.
Â
Yes. Bev Stohl, who works with me at MIT, told me about it. I get a ton of e-mail. Increasingly, the messages I receive have been one-sentence queries or comments, sometimes so brief that theyâre in the subject line of the e-mail. Bev pointed out to me that those are the length of Twitter messages. If you look at them, they have a fairly consistent character. They give the impression of being something that someone just thought of. Youâre walking down the street, a thought comes to you, you tweet it. If you thought for two minutes, or if you had made the slight effort involved in looking up the topic, you wouldnât have sent it. In fact, it has reached the point that sometimes I just send a form letter saying I canât respond to a one-line question.
Â
Getting back to books, your lectures are replete with references to information that you learned in books, for example, something about Martin Luther King that Taylor Branch wrote or something about the U.S. labor movement by David Montgomery. Youâre able to bring this reading knowledge into the intellectual formulations you then present.
Â
Anybody can do it. Itâs not a special talent. But you have to be willing to think about what youâre reading. You can be led down a false track. You can be deluded. The same is true in the sciences. You can be pursuing some idea that you really think is exciting, work hard on it, get what looks like an explanation, and then you find out you were going in the wrong direction and you have to backtrack. You can learn from that, too. But if you donât stop to think, reflect, and find a context, itâs wasted effort. You might as well not be reading.
Â
I was struck in a talk in New York that you mentioned E. L. Doctorowâs Ragtime. 4 Was that the last novel you read?
Â
I think the last novel I read was by the Icelandic Nobel Prize laureate Halldór Laxness. I was in Iceland. Somebody lent me one of his novels, and I read it on the plane back. Itâs great. When I was in England about a year ago, a friend gave me A Case of Exploding Mangoes , a Pakistani novel by Mohammed Hanif. 5 It was very good. I canât read as much fiction as Iâd like.
Â
States around the world, from China to Syria to the United States, are becoming increasingly
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