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The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice Weller, Martin. "The Medals of Our Defeats." The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 154–167. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781849666275.ch-013>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 15:42 UTC. Copyright © Martin Weller 2011. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 13 The Medals of Our Defeats y argument thus far in this book has been to set out how a digital, networked, open approach can change scholarship. I have attempted to demonstrate that it offers alternatives to a previously limited set of options which were often created to meet the needs of physical requirements, be it the pedagogy we use to teach, the way in which Mwe meet to share knowledge at conferences or the form of knowledge dissemination we adopt in publishing. I may not have portrayed the adoption of technology as an unalloyed force for good in scholarship, but it has largely been an argument based on the potential positive impacts. In this chapter then I want to counter this and explore some of the potential negative effects of technology because as we adopt new practices we may well fi nd others being abandoned, and we should be aware what the cost of this is to our practice overall. I would contend that the benefi ts will outweigh the negatives, but just as we can’t know what those benefi ts are if we don’t engage with technology, so will we be unaware of what we lose if we do not apply our critical faculties to technology adoption. Avoiding extremism The use of technology seems to divide people into strong pro- and anti-camps or perhaps utopian and dystopian perspectives. Lessig (2007) points out that such an extremist divide is occurring with regard to intellectual property, on both sides, as the law intersects with the digital remix culture. On one side there are the copyright owners who will prosecute any misuse or, as with YouTube, enforce a takedown of any copyrighted material regardless of fair use. This is the type of response I categorised as a ‘scarcity response’ in Chapter 8. But, as harmful, Lessig suggests, are the other extremists, who reject all notions of copyright and intellectual ownership. Similar extremism can be seen with the use of technology, in society in general and in education in particular. The pro-camp will make some of the more outlandish claims we saw in Chapter 2, about the imminent revolution, the irrelevancy of higher education and the radically different net generation. The anti-technology camp will decry that it destroys social values, undermines proper scholarly practice, is always superfi cial and is even damaging our brains. Lessig seeks a balance between the intellectual property extremes, and a similar balance can be sought between the pro- and anti-technology camps. The remainder of this chapter will examine some of the anti-technology charges in more detail, some of which have more substance than others. [ 154 ] CH013.indd 154 21/07/11 5:18 PM The Medals of Our Defeats [ 155 ] Superfi ciality Nicholas Carr’s (2008) article ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ struck a chord with many people. Carr’s (2010) argument, which he fl eshes out in his book The Shallows , is that our continual use of the net induces a superfi ciality to our behaviour. He says this is felt particularly when trying to read a complex piece: Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fi dgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. Carr cites the British Library’s Google Generation study (Rowlands et al. 2008) as evidence that people are losing the ability to read deeply, and when they are online they tend to skim, jumping from one site to another. The pervasiveness of the Internet means that this behaviour is then carried over into other, offl ine activity. The reason Carr’s article resonated with people was that many have intuitively begun to suspect this of themselves. On a less signifi cant level than deep reading, I know that, for instance, I cease trying to remember small pieces of information: people’s telephone numbers being a good example. As a child it was a point of honour to be able to recite the numbers of most friends and family from memory. Now I’m lucky if I can remember my own number. This is partly a result of changing practice; one doesn’t type the number in any more but dials from a contact list, and so the learning by rote that occurred previously has diminished, but it is also a form of cognitive economy – I don’t need to remember those numbers because I always have them in a list somewhere. Similarly, I don’t need to remember an exact article or book reference because as long as I have enough salient pieces of information, Google will fi nd it for me. I am effectively outsourcing some of that mundane memory to Google. The real question is ‘does this matter?’ Is remembering small, precise pieces of information a kind of intellectual morning stretching routine? It isn’t diffi cult and won’t make you super-fi t, but it has long-term benefi ts. Or are we just being practical, not wasting time remembering the rote information, which frees us up to engage in more creative pursuits? When Clay Shirky (2010) talks of cognitive surplus he is referring to it at a societal level, but maybe it operates at an individual level also; now that we don’t have to waste mental capacity remembering what fi lm a certain actor was in (because we have instant access to imdb.com) we are free to think how the narrative might have been better conveyed in that scene. The answer is that we don’t know which of these two is correct, and I suspect neither of them is, as they both suggest a rather simplistic mental model. CH013.indd 155 21/07/11 5:18 PM [ 156 ] The Digital Scholar Carr’s charge that superfi ciality bleeds over into other activities such as deep reading and analysis is a serious one for scholarship, which is almost entirely constituted of such activity. In this view engagement with technology is not just a distraction, or another pressure on an overloaded academic, but is positively dangerous. It becomes something akin to a virus, infecting the key critical engagement skills required for scholarship to function. There may be some evidence that this occurs online. Wijekumar et al. (2006) reported that this skittish ‘bouncing’ behaviour was exhibited by students with more computer experience, resulting in poorer performance when they needed to engage in an academic task. They concluded that the students were transferring negative affordances from their prior experience, when they may have been playing a game, while indulging in instant chat and reading email: [T]he students who had used computers for a long time tended to have multiple windows open on their desktop and then believed they were not affected by the multi-tasking. The results of their recall showed that their synthesis of the chat room was actually disjointed and quite incomplete. (Wijekumar et al. 2006) What we don’t know is the extent to which this is transferred offl ine. Carr makes a strong correlation between deep reading and deep thinking. One might suppose that if the type of behaviour he indicates was strongly manifested in society then we would see a decline in book sales because people would not fi nd them useful or they didn’t suit their new found behaviour. The opposite is true, however, with book sales increasing from $24 billion to $37 billion over 2000–2008 and internet sales being a main driver of this (Brynjolfsson, Hu and Smith 2010). Of course, we don’t know that people are reading, or indeed engaging in ‘deep reading’ of these books, but the fi gures do at least suggest that reading is not an activity in decline. What is also not clear is if people are engaging in new types of activity that replace the function of deep reading. For instance, if someone is writing a blog post they may be gathering several articles together to construct an argument. Similarly, is a student who creates a video mashup from images, video, text and music to make an argument learning less than one who writes an essay? The answer is that at the moment it is probably too early to know, but we should note Carr’s caution about superfi ciality for now. Quality Much of the success of Web 2.0 has been driven by its simplicity. This has seen a mass democratisation of expression, as anyone can now create a blog, or share CH013.indd 156 21/07/11 5:18 PM The Medals of Our Defeats [ 157 ] a video or a photo. This has led to innovation and inventiveness which would not have arisen through conventional broadcast channels. However, it has also given rise to an unprecedented amount of what we might charitably label ‘ephemera’.
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