New Literacies: The whole of human history leads here.

I hit my browser icon and type in the username and password to log into the Internet. This step always annoys me. As soon as I’m authorized, I open 2-5 tabs to different pages… whichever one loads first gets the first 5 minutes of my attention. It doesn’t matter whether I’m doing homework, looking for a friend online, or googling images of Jordan Gordon-Levitt, I’m going to flick back and forth between those 5 tabs every few minutes. A new window takes about 8 seconds to load. I will spend those 8 seconds on another page. I’m in two separate instant-message conversations as I write this.

Am I a spoiled, shallow cross sample of a generation of Internet Divas? “Oh my gawd, the internet is, like, soooo slow!” Is Google making me stupid?

I think the changes in the way we think and read (now, “browse” and “surf”) are both a symptom and a product of humanity’s cultural history. And I think it’s important to honestly assess those changes without being quick to make value judgments. Things change. People change technology, technology changes us… it’s a dynamic relationship that flows both ways, in which fear is our only enemy.

Our priorities have changed. Richard Foreman’s “cathedral-like” person – dense, complex, and articulate – is no longer the primary cultural ideal. A cathedral is a particularly apt simile. Who builds cathedrals anymore? They don’t, not like they used to, hundreds of lives and hundreds of years, stone by stone. We can throw up a church in a couple of months, now, but so what? What is the meaning of a cathedral built in a single summer of crane-crossed skies?

We want something different, now. We want to free ourselves from the generations of trade knowledge that taught the peasants how to cut stone and build arches. The arch was successful, and the road, and soon, ideas and information were coming from across the world. It’s too much. We can’t store it all. We need a repository.

Humans dissociated themselves from time so that trains could run on a uniform, legible schedule. Henry ford dissociated us from the manufacturing process: reduce what you must know. Store the rest in a system. Technology multiplies information, and it’s too much. We live in a global world, now. I’m a 21-year-old female: a hundred years ago, I might well be darning socks by candlelight for my husband. That’s all I needed to know. Now, I need to have access to vast quantities and unbelievable varieties of information, just to competently interact with the world around me. When I wake up in the morning, I wake up to a globalized existence.

The Internet – this patchwork of screens that I live in – is that repository. From any portal I can access any bit of information. Thank God. I cannot imagine having to remember all the width and breadth of my knowledge for myself. The knowledge is stored and organized for me, without relying on my memory. Yesterday I talked to a guy from Korea. The city of Haeundae-gu, to be precise. While I was talking to him I looked up the Wikipedia article for his hometown. Now I know about one city in South Korea. It has great beaches. I was able to make this reference by looking up the article in my browser history. You need your socks darned? There’s a how-to website somewhere. I share knowledge with a 19^th-century housewife and a South Korean student. The homogeneity and universality of the Internet is what enables me to access that knowledge.

Now I function not as a data storage unit, but as a node of relationships. “On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective,” Kevin Kelly writes in his article, “Becoming Screen Literate,” “The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link.” How postmodern of you, Kelly. But those are our priorities: not to discover “absolute” data, but to draw new relationships between existing ideas. Hyperlinks are the ultimate expression of modern intelligence. Direct. Succinct. Impersonal. In this manner, we create and use thousands upon thousands of new relationships every day, between data, between ideas, between images and words and knowledge. Retaining data is not important. Drawing relationships between data points is our life and breath.

Is Google making us stupid? Or are we now still primitive man, chipping away at stones, making new tools to free ourselves from old labors to seek new ones?