Fake News in the Seventeenth Century

I just finished reading The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge UP, 1994) by David R. Olson, which I happened on at a library book sale and turns out to be even more interesting than I expected.  It's one of those wide-ranging books that casts light on many matters.  Not only does it address the psychology of reading and writing, it puts them in historical and cross-cultural context, with forays into their relation to modern Western science and art.

So, for example:

[O]nce a representational format had been developed for factual description, as exemplified by Boyle, for example, that form could be exploited for literary purposes.  Jonathan Swift’s A modest proposal gives no indication that it is irony; it adopts all of the features of an honest proposal.  Even more impressive are the imaginative accounts of imaginary voyages such as those of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Fiction is a new kind of allegorical writing in which literal meanings, that is meanings which normally report truth, are used to report things known to be false.  Medieval allegorical writing, such as Pilgrim’s Progress, made prominent the fact that the writing was allegorical by providing characters with names like Pilgrim and Envy; the story never pretended to be factually true.  Fiction, on the other hand, often pretends to tell the truth.  There is nothing in the fiction to indicate that the account is not factually correct.  Fiction remains allegorical in the sense that the reader comes away thinking he or she has learned something about reality but the reader knows that, counter to its appearance, it is not a factual narrative report.  Consequently, some literary sophistication is required to see truth, now allegorical truth, not factual truth, in fiction; to the uninitiated it appears to be a lie … [229]

And:

Similarly, right into the school years [children] continue to have difficulty understanding irony.  Sarcasm presents less difficulty presumably because it is marked by a strong, sneering intonation.  Sarcasm without intonation is irony.  Children tend to take ironic utterances either as literally true or as lies … To interpret an utterance as ironic requires that the listener or reader grant both that the utterance is not true and that the speaker does not believe it to be true nor want the listener to take it as true and yet that it be taken as informative [252].

As Olson also points out, many adults continue to have difficulty understanding irony.  On reading these passages I thought of the confusion many adults exhibit about satire.  Many people resent it, because they "take ironic utterances either as literally true or as lies."  I think of Harvey Fierstein's grumpy indignation when he learned that the meme he'd posted of Ted Cruz endorsing businesses' right to discriminate on religious grounds was actually satire: "Maybe I'm just tired, but I don't find that kind of crap at all amusing.  These are people's lives and reputations."  I don't believe that he doesn't find such "crap" amusing, as long as it mocks people he wants to see mocked, or that he cares about Cruz' reputation.  (Or was it his own reputation he was worried about, since he's a comic actor and writer revealing that he has no sense of humor?)

I also think of the Clinton Democrats who took an Onion piece at face value, although it was clearly from the Onion and they knew full well that the Onion does satire.  And I think of all the people who have trouble recognizing satire and irony, while fancying that they're smarter than illiterate, ignorant Rethugs.  Learning to recognize irony doesn't come naturally or easily, and Olson goes on to discuss the failure of most schooling to equip students to deal with the complexity of the things they will read -- not just rarefied literary material, but day-to-day stuff.

Not many people had access to the Internet when The World on Paper was published twenty-three years ago, and far from hampering literacy the Internet has made tougher demands on readers' abilities to make sense of what they read.  Much of the fuss over "fake news" springs from confusion about the different kinds of text and video purporting to be news that people will encounter: there's satire like the Onion, which imitates the format of print and TV news for pointedly humorous purposes, there's fraudulent material like the dishonestly-edited videos put by organizations like Breitbart, and there's supposedly real news by respectable institutions like the New York Times or CNN that ranges from the honestly erroneous to the disingenuous to fraudulent stories like Judith Miller's articles that laundered Bush-regime propaganda about Iraq into news (or "news"), which might just as well have come from Breitbart.  And more, none of it really new.  So it's hardly surprising that most people, whose education in literacy was intended to prepare them to read newspapers, fill out forms, and follow recipes, not to to evaluate what they read, have trouble applying their skills in the stormy media seas.

Show Me the Critical Thinking; or, The Digital Natives Are Restless

Recently I read bell hooks's Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (Routledge, 2010).  I haven't read much of hooks's work, mostly her first book, Ain't I a Woman? (South End Press, 1981) and the occasional article or interview since then.  It seems to me that she does better in short pieces than in books -- some of her critical essays on African-American film interested me, for example -- and that she gets lost when given the length of a book to move around in.

Teaching Critical Thinking confirmed that impression.  The writing is mostly slack, in the Culture of Therapy mode, and there's precious little critical thinking on display here.  To keep it personal, it takes very little critical thinking for me as a gay man to object to antigay bigotry and heterosexual supremacy.  I must also turn my critical faculties on my own views, on my condition as a gay man, on my responses to homophobia, sexism, racism, and classism in my own community.  It may not be fair to compare hooks to someone like Audre Lorde, but really, why should I read hooks when Lorde is so much more challenging, inspiring, and a much better writer?

I was especially annoyed by hooks's discussion of literacy.  She quotes some debatable numbers on American illiteracy and some typically bogus generalizations about the ignorance of Kids These Days, then goes on to complain:

Of course, there is much discussion about the role of technology, specifically about computers replacing books.  Yet reading books on computers can never be the same as holding a book in one's hand, returning to pages without the aid of electricity or batteries, reading passages aloud to oneself or another person, reading the book in bed, lingering over pages, reading aloud.  [Your Department of Redundancy Department.]  For many the book is vital to the practice of constantly re-reading, but more essentially it is necessary for genuine reading.  Books invite us to imagine [129].

And did I mention reading aloud?  This is appalling.  Oh, it's true, reading a book on a computer (and an e-reader like the NOOK or the Kindle is a dedicated computer) is not the same as holding a printed book in one's hand. But bookmarking -- to say nothing of the search function -- makes it easier to return to previous pages.  And there's nothing about a computer or a dedicated reader that interferes with reading passages aloud, reading in bed, lingering over pages.  Did I mention reading aloud?  As for re-reading, I do that often on my e-reader; perhaps too often.  Perhaps "many" find the printed book on paper to be "vital to the practice of constantly re-reading," but there doesn't seem to be any real basis for their compulsion.

"There is much discussion about the role of technology, specifically about computers replacing books." True, there's a lot of discussion about all kinds of issues, and much of it is empty babble.  I would expect a critical thinker to point out some of the history of failed predictions by technocratic triumphalists (analogous to the history of failed predictions of the Second Coming).  I'd also expect a critical thinker to point out that printed books are part of the history of technology, that the advent of printing in Europe inspired the same kind of panic and predictions of doom that e-books inspire now, and above all that "digital" and "electronic" books are still books.  A book isn't the material object but the virtual content.

About a week ago, FAIR reported on a New York Times story about the present state of e-books.  It appears that sales of e-books are slowing, sales of printed books show "surprising resilience," and even many younger readers ("digital natives," the Times calls them) say that they like physical books as well as digital books.  One of the more significant revelations in the story was that publishers had decided that "cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business," so they raised e-book prices, often above the price of physical books.  FAIR writer Jim Naureckas commented, "Well, yeah–when you raise prices of things, people tend to buy less of them."

Eastasia has always been at war with Oceania.  I seem to remember that corporate media previously touted and cheered on the "digital apocalypse," the inevitable trampling of print beneath the feet? hooves? claws? of the e-book.  Now that our Shadowy Publishing Overlords have changed their minds, the Times can exhibit relief that print is making a comeback.  The funniest part might be the surprise that many people -- even the hip, digital-native techno-savvy young! -- might use both print and e-books.  Just as they might collect vinyl LPs and listen to digitally-stored music on their phones!  Like, OMFG, are they allowed to do that?  Is it legal?  Is it even natural?

The science-fiction writer and gadfly John Scalzi wrote a good piece about the same Times article on his blog, reporting anecdotally that his teenage daughter, "(who now, as it happens, works at the local bookstore), ... [is] sucked into her phone as much as any person her age, or indeed, as much as most people alive, it seems. And yet, when she reads books, and she reads a lot of them, print is her preferred medium, and was even before the bookstore."  He then analyzes the article from the viewpoint of a successful writer who's attentive to the business of writing, publishing, and selling books.  He noted that the Times article didn't address sales figures by independent publishers, and declared: "[N]o matter how you slice it, if you’re lightly sliding over its existence, you’re not accurately describing the current publishing market."

There's good discussion in the comments too, some of which addressed "hybrid" readers and how we mix e-books and physical books.  Like Scalzi, "I like to read print books at home but am immensely grateful for eBooks when I travel."  Also, as an old man who's thinking about what to do with the thousands of physical books I already own, I anticipate that e-books are going to play an increasing role in my reading future.  I'd like to relocate, and I neither want to take all my books with me, nor can I, unless I get a massive infusion of money from somewhere to pay for shipping and other costs.  So far, the Prize Patrol from Publishers Clearing House has not shown up at my door.

Others pointed out something I should have thought about before myself: audio books.  The reason I hadn't thought about them was probably that I don't use them.  I've listened to a few, but 1) they're too slow compared to reading -- I'm a fast reader compared to most people; 2) I find the narrators' voices distracting, compared to the inner voice I hear when reading text; 3) I find it difficult to concentrate on listening -- how do people listen, as many do, while driving to work? talk about dangerous distractions! -- and my retention of content when I've tried has been poor compared to reading text. One thing about critical thinking that I must stress when I talk to my friend's class next year is that it is not a purely individual process but depends on the input and ideas of other people, who notice things I don't.  Several of Scalzi's commenters remarked on the sales of audio books (whether on physical media like cassettes or CDs or in digital files) as a proportion of book sales overall.  That certainly should be taken into account in any discussion of electronic publishing, not least because many audiobooks are electronically stored and played.

It also occurred to me, though, that when people are wailing about the supposed decline of literary e-books will inevitably bring about, no one seems to mention audiobooks.  Maybe I just haven't noticed it before, but I don't think so.  Even the people who mentioned them under Scalzi's post only discussed their impact on book sales and the publishing industry, not on literacy or the survival of dead-tree books and brick-and-mortar bookstores. Yet if any book format constitutes a threat to literacy -- not to mention the sensuous pleasure of holding a book in one's hands, rereading favorite passages, etc. -- surely audiobooks are more dangerous than e-books, which still involve reading text.  Ebooks bad, audiobooks good!  The relative silence about the growing popularity of audiobooks, when people are wringing their hands about the Digital Apocalypse, indicates to me that not critical thinking but a highly biased and selective technophobia is at work.

Literally Literate

I wanted to do a post on this subject before, but I think I'll sneak around on it from the back, briefly. I'm reading Conversations with Octavia Butler, one of the University Press of Mississippi collections of interviews with a wide range of writers. It includes a transcript of a joint appearance by Butler and Samuel R. Delany at MIT in 1998 (which, happily, is also available online). The main topic they address is literacy, from a variety of perspectives. One person in the audience explains:

I'm in the computer entertainment industry. In the computer entertainment industry, literacy has vanished. Whereas in 1984 about one-third of the best-selling game programs were text-based games, by 1986, there were none--zero--on the market. And, in fact, I've just read a couple of interviews with John Romero and Ken Williams where they're asking, "How can we get the rest of the text out of the games. How can we get rid of these text-bubbles?" And there are still people writing text-games, but it's sort of goes on by samizdat; it's underground. And the thing is that the people playing these games are very literate; they're not unable to read. They don't want to read.

I was mildly annoyed by the misuse of "samizdat" and "underground" here. "Samizdat" means "self-published," but it originated among dissidents in the Soviet Union who copied forbidden material and circulated it hand-to-hand. When I read about it in the 70s and 80s, it involved typing the material on typewriters, often with as many carbon copies as possible (which meant a lot of barely-legible copies circulated). According to Wikipedia the practice extended "to printing on mainframe printers during night shifts, to printing the books on semi-professional printing presses in larger quantities." In any case it was illegal and dangerous for the people involved. "Underground" has similar origins. As far as I know, there are no laws against, nor any official suppression of text-based adventure games; the game manufacturers simply decided not to produce them any more.

Also annoying is the claim that "literacy has vanished" in the game industry. It's like saying that "literacy has vanished" in the movies since the advent of sound.

I never was very good at the text-based games, but I spent more time on them than I ever have with their all-graphics successors. As the speaker told Delany and Butler, the trend was toward "graphical violence games that introduced this concept of running around and killing everything you see and watching its blood spurt ... And I thought, 'This is interesting. This is the kind of thing that he wants to do and the kind of game he wants to make.'" This was socially acceptable as the US became an increasingly militarized garrison state that didn't mind if young males think of war itself as a video game.

Still, I think there were other issues involved. A popular buzzword at the time of this discussion (1998) was virtual reality, born partly of cyberpunk science fiction that imagined jacking in, direct brain-to-computer link that used the brain as both input and output device. Instead of a game controller, you used your thoughts; instead of a monitor, the visuals were generated in your brain, in your literal mind's eye. A year after this conversation, the Wachowski Brothers released The Matrix, which used these concepts to advance a postmodernist Gnosticism, though most of the fans didn't get it and just wanted to be able to do all those cool stunts.

Having already been infected by the heresies of various computer skeptics, I always viewed claims for this technology critically: as usual with computers and science, the claims always far outstripped anything that was actually possible at the time. I once had a funny conversation with an undergraduate who was thrilled by the possibilities of virtual reality. He didn't realize, and strongly resisted grasping, that any virtual reality can only be as "real" as the data that the programmers put into the host computer; he seemed to think that it would grow in there by itself somehow. I have some friends and relatives who play a lot of video games, so I've been able to sample the current state of the art; it's pretty impoverished, even worse than 60s TV sci-fi shows. I'm even less tempted to get one of these things than a smartphone.

Anyway, I think the reason why so many game programmers wanted to get rid of the text-bubbles (and I get the impression they haven't quite succeeded yet) was less hostility to literacy than a desire to engineer virtual reality: you wouldn't need a text-bubble to tell what is over the next hill, or what you're smelling or tasting or how many coins you have in your money pouch; you'd perceive it directly through your senses. If a guy who just wanted cooler 3-D blood fountains happened to be a talented game designer and programmer, so much the better, though of course it was convenient that he was in touch with the mindset of potential players and the Reagan/Rambo zeitgeist.

Another related topic that came up in the MIT discussion was "hypertext." The World Wide Web was touted at first as the advent of hypertext, and though it fulfilled its promise a little better than virtual reality, hypertext isn't the buzzword it used to be, for similar reasons. Delany pointed out, though not quite explicitly, that hypertext too is only as good as the links you put into it. He mentioned a few "hypertext novels" that he'd found interesting, but went on:

All texts, in a sense, are hypertext. You come to a word you don't understand, so you look it up in the dictionary. You read a passage and you stop and you think about another book; you may even put it down and go get another book off your bookshelf and read something about something else. Texts are not linear. Texts are multiple and for anybody who really reads and enjoys reading, it is an interactive process.

What hypertext and the interactive material do is make that a much less energy-intensive process; as such, on the absolute scale, they are less interactive than the ones we've got now because in order to interact with the ones you've got now, you have to put out more energy. Now I think something is gained by having the interactivity require less energy. It becomes a medium in itself that's interestingly exploitable.

But not only do you limit the amount of interactivity, you also limit the places you can go. So the interactive text is not an expansion of what we've got now; it's a delimitation of what we've got now. If you read, as I was doing a couple of days ago, Walter Pater's "Plato and Platonism," I stop every two pages or less and have to go read a section from Heidegger or read a section by Derrida where he's talking about Plato. "Is that where this idea came from? Oh! Why is he using this word 'parousia'? Didn't I see this word?"

Just bear in mind that the interactivity in the new different interactive art is less energy-intensive and there are less places that you go within it. It's fascinating, and it's lots of fun, but it's not more interactive than what we had before; it's less interactive.

Much of this linking is serendipitous. The writer of the text doesn't know where the reader will go from material the writer has put into the text, but the range of possibilities is much greater for just that reason. As Delany also said,

It's the same thing with the physical books on the shelves. Anybody who does actual research in a library knows that you look on this shelf and then you turn around and you look on this thing, it's not related alphabetically; it's not related subject-wise; it just happens to be the book you need. And if you don't have the physical propinquity of the way the books are arranged, you're going to miss out on this opportunity, and this limits the kinds of research gems that can come up.

This has happened to me many times. Something similar can happen when you follow a link to another page, which also contains links to some "related articles" generated by software. The possibilities of computer searching are also great -- I love the ability to search a book online for a word or idea that otherwise would take hours to find, if I found it at all -- but we need both virtual and physical libraries.

On a more cynical note, I have long believed that elites consider literacy dangerous. They'd love to limit it -- ideally, by direct intervention into the brain so that readers could only look for, read, or understand, approved texts. That's because elites need the rabble to have minimal functional literacy in order to serve elite ends; but once you teach someone to read, it's hard to predict or control what she'll read next. This is why schools teach reading and writing so badly, in order to get a few fluent readers and writers, and many who just stumble along, regarding text as something vaguely unpleasant. I'm not saying that someone sat down and consciously decided to do it that way; but our current, traditional approach works well enough for official purposes, to produce enough literates to do the necessary work while leaving the rest only half-taught. The ongoing drive by corporate and government elites to censor the Internet might just give a boost to physical print, though: the forbidden, as Butler pointed out in connection with slaves' great desire to learn to read and write, automatically becomes attractive.

And despite all the handwringing, the Internet hasn't killed literacy yet, and I see no danger that it will: people still need to know how to write so they can leave bigoted and misinformed comments on Youtube and their local newspapers' websites, after all.