I know technology is changing our lives. You probably hear about the topic everyday, unless you live the life of the Bigfoot.
I never gave the topic much thought and took it for granted until one day, hours before I turned in a research paper, I compared the internet-fueled writings on my laptop monitor and the writings I did on paper, notes taken from books and done with chicken-scratch penmanship. The laptop’s sentences read out common, all-purpose concepts like
“because of the Expressionist art movement, which pushed the boundaries of paint as a medium in art, future movements like Abstract Expressionism were allowed to take place.”
Decent punctuation, grammar, and diction. Meanwhile, the penned notes, with arrows drawn between half-finished, barely legible sentences, read more like a dyslexic’s nightmare:
- ‘inner truths’ could not be drawn directly from nature
- tendency toward abstraction
- flattening of composition
- bold colours __ spiritual tension created
- exaggeration of lines and rhythm (Barron p. 24)
- artists anima? Aura? (leading to Dada’?)
- precepts on making ‘anonymous’ art
I couldn’t believe I didn’t notice it before. It sounded like two completely different brains at work. Two different ways of thinking.
Being the biggest and best procrastinator in class, I was fortunate enough to have the internet reach its peak while I was in high school. That was during the Clinton Administration, and besides wooing the female and minority vote, the administration, or more specifically, Al Gore, pushed for the spread of what he coined “the information superhighway." Gore was quite taken with the internet as the ultimate tool for information and education. And teachers became quite taken with the internet, too - they dished out assignment after assignment which involved internet research. “It’s new technology – it’s the way of the future” my Info Systems teacher waxed. There was the occasional ‘donkey professor’ that would stubbornly insist on the tried-and-true book readings, but we, as ‘efficient’ and time-bankrupt students, insisted that internet research was okay.
At the time, I could see no wrong with research done purely through the internet. I found it to be an unquestionable dispenser of truths, and when such truths were dealt out at the speed of 50 kilobytes per second, I felt unstoppable. I could log into internet search engines like www.google.com, type in a keyword, and all the basic dates and demographics from world wars, art movements, and philosophies were right there in a second. Cut-copy-paste into my report, and voila. When the computer didn’t malfunction, I would kiss the monitor screen with a devout respect and wrap my hands around the monitor’s base – not in a chokehold, but in a gesture of love. The rapid internet ‘researches’ saved my grade, and hence saved my life. (I was too scared to even think of what my parents would do with a grade lower than a B. I’ll skirt that topic for now, though. I don’t want this to be a painfully revealing essay detailing all my childhood traumas and shortcomings, let alone an essay which points out my overwhelming laziness.)
***
The allure of technology – the beauty of the internet - lies in its accessibility. Gluts of info, instantaneously. I didn’t feel bad about cutting-copying-pasting facts from online documents into my own research papers; in fact, I carried this trend into college with somewhat satisfying results. (Heck, I thought. It’s still slightly better than plagiarizing.) Occasionally I would hideously bomb a paper, but could not fathom why (at the time). The teacher’s comments, in blood-red ink, cryptically said “too generalized, facts do not support thesis.” I brushed this off as a passing fluke but took no responsibility until my stay abroad at Oxford University.
This University churns them out. 25 U.K. Prime Ministers, including Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Pakistan’s first female Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto. Writers like J. R. R. Tolkein, Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, and William Golding. Scientists like Edmund Halley and Stephen Hawking (though the latter went off to Cambridge). Monty Python comedians Terry Jones and Michael Palin. Heck, even Mr. Bean – aka Rowan Atkinson – attended the school. And that was the abbreviated list. To churn out comedians like that, Oxford must have a magical mojo underneath all the stuffy prestige.
This sacred mojo, which Oxford and its sister-rival Cambridge are struggling to keep despite ailing funds, lies in its tutorial system. A single tutor is paired up with a student or two for lessons which take place once a week. A student usually has two subjects of study – a major and minor, if you will – so this means two tutorials a week for a grand total of two hours ‘in class’ a week. This means two research papers a week. Although it may not sound like much of a mental workout, a student really can’t afford to bullshit under the intense scrutiny of a 1:1 or 1:2 teacher-student ratio (unless said student utterly lacks any sense of scruples or is straight-up dumbass, both of which do occasionally happen), and the tutor assigns reading lists of up to twenty books per week. My art history tutor handed me this on my first week:
Dada & Surrealism
Ades, D. Dada & Surrealism Reviewed, 1978. (Open shelves at BOD Upper Camera)
Bradley, F. Surrealism, 1997.
Breton, A. Manifestoes of Surrealism, 1969. (Open shelves at BOD Upper Camera)
Carra, M. Metaphysical Art, 1971. (Open shelves at Sackler Lib.)
Caws, M.A. Surrealism and Women, 1991.
Lippard, L. ed. Dadas on Art, 1971.
Surrealist on Art, 1970.
Read, H. Surrealism, 1971. (Open shelves at Sackler Lib.)
Richter, H. Dada Art and Anti-Art, 1965. (Open shelves at BOD Upper Camera)
Rubin, W.S. Dada and Surrealist Art, 1968.
Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage, 1968.
Waldberg, P. Surrealism, 1966. (Open shelves at Sackler Lib.)
Waldman, D. Collage, Assemblage and Found Object, 1992.
Grosz, Heartfield, Hoch
Evans, D. Photomontage: a Political Weapon, 1986.
Hess, H. Gerge Grosz, 1985. (Open shelves at Sackler Lib.)
Lavin, M. Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch, 1993.
Lewis, B.I. Gerge, Grosz: Art & Politics in the Weimar Republic, 1971.
Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray
Ades, D. et.al. Marcel Duchamp, 1999.
D'Harnoncourt, A & McShine, K. Marcel Duchamp, 1974.
Lebel, R. Marcel Duchamp, 1959.
Moure, G. Marcel Duchamp, 1988.
Ray, M. Self-Portrait, 1963.
Rose, P. ManRay, 1975.
Schwarz, A. The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 1969.
Man Ray the Rigour of Imagination, 1977.
She was sadistic, I guess.
I kind of freaked out, kind of went pale, and kind of looked glazy-eyed when she told me about where to find the books. She didn’t even tell me ‘oh, Farrah, don’t worry too much about these books, I don’t like what their authors say, anyway. I just want you to be able to differentiate solid viewpoints from unjustified ones.’ Instead, she sent me home with a pat on the back, saying, “Good luck, Farrah, I can’t wait to read your essay! It’s going to be good, right?”
My rapidly diminishing personal ethics told me “well, she gave you the list, right? You’d better damn read the books.” But my more earthy side argued “why waste your time? You can just ‘Google’ it.” Unfortunately, my more ‘sensible’ side won out, and I plugged in ‘Grosz and Hoch’ in an internet search engine and later turned in a paper backed by the internet and research from only two books, one of which proved to be by an author my tutor disliked (she could have warned me). I still held onto hope when she handed back the paper. After all, I used some of my best last-minute internet-researching techniques. It turned out to be one of my worst papers.
It was time, I decided, to ditch the internet and make good friends with Oxford’s central library: the Bodleian. At the Bodleian library, you cannot borrow books. Elizabethan scholar Thomas Bodley, the library’s namesake, found that students were taking books and not returning them. Simple answer, he said.
“No book whatsoever can be lent
Nor any person whatsoever borrow
Nor any caution how great soever be admitted
Upon no cause assigned, or pretence whatsoever
And this Edict is declared perpetual and indispensable.”
The Bodleian is a ‘Copyright Library’, meaning that it automatically receives a free copy of every book published in the United Kingdom. The bad news is there are so many books (around 6.5 million and growing) that the Bodleian must keep 90% of it in a 105 sq. mile underground vault. Students must ‘order’ the books up to temporary shelves (it takes a day to pull it up), and they must do it quick before some other student takes that single, vital copy of Jacques Derrida’s Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. This system is known to destroy many a friendship, a fellow student once told me. I myself almost killed a student for taking that Derrida text. The library opens at 9 AM and closes at 10 PM Mondays through Saturdays, and again, students get only one week to do their papers. No book borrowing. As a result of so many restrictions, students of Oxford have to plan their life around the library in order to keep up with the intense workload. You absolutely cannot procrastinate.
I sat stunned in the Bodleian when I realized that the system finally broke my iron habit of scheduling last-minute trips for half-assed research at the library. All that work to get the blasted books, I thought, and I’ll be damned if I’m letting that effort go to waste. I found myself going through the texts carefully, and I was finally able to formulate my own theses and construct a sound line of thought. I grew to enjoy my required seven hours per day at the Bodleian - I grew to like the “huh, never thought about it that way” feeling. I never really got that from the internet, or broad searches. The blood-red ink that said “you’re using someone else’s idea” suddenly made more sense. What the internet gave me was hard, fast facts, but it never really inspired any critical thinking on my part. I just ate whatever it threw at me and I regurgitated the information on paper. The process is as gross as it sounds, because I had to weed through dozens of porn sites and useless facts.
***
The infinite facts online are a boon to research, but the temptation to use the internet for cut-copy-pasting is just too, well, tempting. Especially to students already pressured with part-time jobs, extra-curricular activities that look good on a resume, familial obligations, and attempts to enjoy their lives in the moment. Of course, before the world wide web’s explosion in the 1990’s, other forms of ‘the lazy man’s research’ existed.
Clifton Hillegass, a Nebraska book salesman, unleashed his Cliffs Notes on the academic world back in 1958, and since then students have sworn by the yellow-and-black covered pamphlet-style books that delivers lines from Beowulf or Macbeth in plain, modern-day English. A lot of academes didn’t like this shirking of required reading and self-arrived analysis. In 1997 Villanova University banned its bookstore from selling Cliffs Notes in a move that was more symbolic than anything else (students could still buy the Notes off campus). Vice President for Academic Affairs John Johannes and 90 professors petitioned for the ban with the reasoning that, in Johannes’s words, “anything we can do to encourage open-mindedness and discourage a notion that you can capture truth in 20 pages is very important.”
In a sense, the internet is a faster version of Cliffs Notes. In fact, an online version of Cliffs Notes exists in the form of Sparknotes. Logging onto www.sparknotes.com gives you No Fear Shakespeare, a database which translates, like Cliffs Notes, esoteric Shakespeare into something more understandable (e.g. The Tempest’s “What a blow was there given” becomes “Ouch, what a comeback”). I guess it’s a decent summary in a pinch, but the phrase loses some of its witty flavour in the translation process. And it’s just not the same as painfully pulling a revelation out of your posterior after hours of reading books. With practice you get better at ferreting out ‘the truth’; you start thinking harder, and better. Spitting out someone else's thoughts wouldn't have given me the mental workout to come up with my own ideas. After all, no pain, no gain.
***
The official term for it is ‘passive learning’. I’m not sure if anyone’s come up with a shorter term for ‘cut-copy-paste’, but CCP-ing (cut-copy-pasting) is considerably more passive than the act of scribbling down notes until your hand cramps. Why else do teachers promote the liberal use of highlighters? Of using rhymes and mnemonic devices? Of drawings and diagrams? And old-fashioned note-taking? In the article "The Two Paradigms of Education and the Peer Review of Teaching", Dean A. McManus notes that the act of note-taking, the study of visuals, and the debates between teacher and pupil show that students learn to "care deeply about their own education" and “monitor and discuss their own learning."
If this all seems too rosy a picture for educators, a reading of Isaac Asimov’s “The Fun They Had” is highly recommended. In a futuristic world where school children are taught through computers, eleven-year-old Margie flabbergasts “How can a man be a teacher?” to which her 13-year-old friend Tommy replies “Well, he just told the boys and girls things and gave them homework and asked them questions.” It seems unfathomable right now, even in the year 2004, but imagine learning without human interaction and instead being taught by machines. The departure from physical textbooks toward internet databases seems to be pointing in that direction.
I don’t mean to bash technology. But there’s something about holding a tangible book, a presence painstakingly edited and bound with its own ‘book’ smells that demands my attention and scrutiny, if not respect. I’m forced to read complete sentences (rather than CCP snippets), and I follow the author through his or her own journey of discovery. To me, this is the very best one-on-one ‘tutorial’ scenario I can get right now in a current school system where a student gets drowned out in a lecture hall of 50+ other students.
When I sat on my bed, looking at what I typed on my laptop monitor and what I hand-wrote on paper, I saw that the hand-written notes held amazing bits of insights scribbled into the margins next to the facts I painfully extracted from tomes that went on for hundreds of pages. The stuff on the laptop was dry and sounded like someone else – a textbook author – did the writing. The document had plenty of facts to be sure, but it didn’t show an evolution in my thinking the way my scribbled notes did. It’s a subversive phenomenon that’s difficult to pick apart neatly: even if I CCP my own thoughts, isn’t that just a form of regurgitation? Do the insights result from the effort it takes to physically write down a new sentence every time on fresh paper?
A student from Oxford, before leaving the school, once told his tutor “thank you for teaching me how to think.”
Obviously, there must be a sound reason for Oxford and Cambridge to continue an incredibly expensive and antiquated study system dating back from the eleventh century. Instead of giving the green-light to internet research, the tutors expect you to read their lists. Though I spent only two hours a week with my tutors, the authors of the listed books spoke to me and served as tutors during the remaining hours of the week. It might sound silly, but having a book in my hands felt a lot more like having a real person with me than a white computer screen.