'did you know?' is a five-minute youtube slide show [with an apposite but forgettable sound track by fat boy slim] that presents a dizzying array of data on the present and future [plus just a dash of the past] of information technology. it appears to have been made in 2008, so some of it may already be dated. we are told that the material was 'researched' by karl fisch, scott mcleod, and jeff bronman, but there are no citations included for any of it. some of the factoids listed here seem to have been mentioned just because the numbers involved are impressive [e.g., the #1 ranked country in 'broadband internet penetration' is bermuda; the 25% of india's population with the highest IQs is greater than the total population of the USA]; perhaps these have some integral connection to the overall message of the piece, but i'm not clear on what that would be. and i'm not sure that fish, mcleod, and bronman were quite clear either: the final screen of the presentation says: 'so what does it all mean?' -- which might be an underlying message, of sorts, in itself.
i'd be interested to know what other viewers make of this piece; my first reaction was one of mild panic. this is doubtless partly because of the frantic pace of the presentation; but after some reflection [and recuperative silence] i'm coming to feel that the deepest source of my disquiet was the video's assertion that progress in technology is moving too fast for anyone -- even today's young people, even those young people who are studying to equip themselves for careers -- to keep up with. we can build, and are hastening to build, faster and faster computer processors; but we have not yet found a way to speed up commensurately the function of the human brain.
the closest i could come to finding a central message in this video was at 1:49: 'we are living in exponential times.' here is where the parade of statistics comes into clearer focus: there were, monthly, 31 billion searches on google in 2008, as opposed to 2.7 billion in 2006; to reach a market audience of 50 million, it takes [took?] television 13 years, as opposed to 3 years via ipod and 2 years via facebook; the number of internet devices in 2008 was one billion, as opposed to one thousand in 1984, and one million in 1992; it is estimated [by whom? when?] that a week's worth of the new york times contains more information than a person [where? of what level of income or education?] was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century; it was estimated that 4 exabytes [4 x 10^19] of unique information would be generated in 2008 -- more than in the preceding 5000 years.
at 3:28 my educator's antennae went up even further: 'the amount of new technical information,' they assert, 'is doubling every 2 years ... for students starting a 4-year technical degree, this means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.' i'm not sure that conclusion follows by logical necessity, but at the very least, one can say that the body of knowledge relevant to a technical-degree student's curriculum is expanding dramatically, even whilst s/he is in school.
so: 'what does it all mean' for teachers and learners in the humanities? the issue of speed is paramount here; while the totality of information in [say] classical studies is increasing annually, it is certainly not increasing at this exponential rate. and while some factors are shifting -- the length of an average student's attention span, for example -- some things are not appreciably speeding up: the rate at which one can learn to read ancient greek or latin, or the rate at which one can read, think about, and absorb ancient authors. these things continue at more or less the same marked pace as they have always done; and so do other human experiences, like digestion or orgasm or dreaming. and as in the case of such other human experiences, i'm not at all sure we would be wise in speeding them up, even if it were possible to find a way to do so. the number of good meals one can experience in a whole long lifetime is perhaps sizable, but still finite; and though i'm reading more or less constantly, i recognize that the number of books i will be able to get through, even if i live to a ripe old age, will be but a small fraction of all the books ever written. but those very limitations are an integral part of what makes me prize these experiences so highly.
so in the face of this gigantic mountain of pleasures, physical and intellectual, one becomes more acutely aware than ever of the importance of spending our days wisely [noting in passing that this may, sometimes, involve reclining under a palm tree at the beach]. but i doubt i am alone in feeling that this frantic acceleration of technological culture in the 21st century is not, by its speed, conducive to making wise decisions about such things. if anything, it serves rather to agitate, confuse, and unsettle me.
is the best solution, then, to dig in one's heels and become a luddite? i would not say so. on the contrary, i am constantly looking for ways to harness new technologies for more effective teaching and research in classics. my 1985 essay in vergilius, though it seems almost ptolemaically antique now, used then-novel software to search for and examine vergilian echoes in horace. my website, CORAX [www.corax.us], was founded in 1997, making it one of the very first websites devoted to classics. and so forth. but one of the most important things i've learnt about education in the past two decades is that new technologies, for all the dazzling impression they make, are and remain means for humanists, not ends. another is this very point about time, speed, and acceleration: that what it means to be human is profoundly bound up with the pace at which we experience each hour, each day. and a third thing is that -- a' propos of being human -- the humanities still offer wisdom that no other discipline seems to be able to impart. far from being a mere lagniappe of education, the study of the humanities [and of the greek and roman classics in particular] is still uniquely effective at preparing young people [and the not-so-young] to live more richly, more beautifully, and more thoughtfully each day. without such wisdom, we are not much more than droids -- regardless of how many trillion calculations per second our brains might someday achieve.
if an education of this sort has to be absorbed at a certain pace, and no faster, then so be it: chances are that that fact is itself connected to the pace of our inner [sensory and intellective] experience of the world around us too. but to the extent that fisch, mcleod, and bronman are correct about the extent of I.T. acceleration in this new millennium -- to the extent that these external, logistical aspects of human existence are speeding up -- to just such an extent will it be vital that we not lose sight of those aspects of our lives that cannot and should not be hurried.
to sum up: i'm as enamored of speed as the next guy. i'm as capable as anyone of being exhilarated by a speedier car or train, a quicker microwave, or a faster CPU. but if it turns out that there are some crucially human traits or functions that seem to proceed best at a certain rate, and no faster, then i think we should not only not apologize for that, but should also celebrate and cherish them for what they are. because, in the long run, we might just discover that they come very close to telling us what and who we are.
