the unwound road

My visit to a bookstore yesterday has me questioning one of my assumptions about myself: that I love books.

Well, I do genuinely love the idea of books, the musty smell of a three-story used bookstore, the crisp riffle of freshly printed pages, the way that soft-shelled penguin paperback opens at random when you drape it over your hand… One of my fantasy rooms is a library with tall windows, a comfy chair, and walls lined with books on every subject (I’m undecided as to whether there should be a butler carrying in a glass of sherry in the mid-afternoon).

I’ve read quite a few books — besides the required school textbooks, I’ve read lots of science fiction, mysteries, biographies, short stories and Canadiana, along with classics such as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Homer’s The Odyssey. But, increasingly, I tend to pick up books that look intriguing, but then I don’t get around reading them, or I start and don’t finish (with the exception of mysteries, where sometimes I’ll skip the middle part and rush through to the end so I can get to sleep before 2 a.m.).

So there I was yesterday, leafing through a sale copy of John Ralston Saul’s The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World – and thinking, oh, how interesting – when suddenly I stopped and said sternly to myself, “Myself, you are not going to read that book. You are going to leaf through it, dip into a few chapters, then put it aside until you have more time, which will likely be never.”

Alas, another fantasy smashed on the cold tile floor in the kitchen of logic. I felt a sense of loss, then wondered if the internet is to blame.

Because I do read more than ever if you count the internet. I read constantly online, or perhaps I should say I mostly “scan”, because I only stop to read more than a few words when I find something that truly catches my imagination. And, all too often, I even put off that reading to “another time”, bookmarking the page for more leisurely digestion when I can give it my full attention.

Except it appears that I have no, uh… what was I saying? Oh yes, no attention span; it seems to have evaporated. Yet can I legitimately blame the internet for its ability to provide instant information and make me too impatient to bother reading a book?

The surveyors of society are currently claiming that the reading of books is increasing, not decreasing, notwithstanding the naysayers and Steve Jobs’ recent comment (“the fact is that people don’t read anymore”). I would say that about half the people I see riding the subway or in waiting rooms are reading.

So what do you think: are you reading less? Or are you just reading differently?

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Related Links:
Newsweek: “The Future of Reading”
Guardian UK: “Dawn of the Digital Natives”
New York Times: “Book Lust”

I experienced a mind slip the other day. During a casual conversation with another attendee at a recent event, I learned that she and I had a mutual acquaintance. I asked her name, checked the spelling, then said her full name again to make sure I had remembered it correctly. Then we spoke about other subjects for a few minutes, and I left the meeting. As I walked away, I searched my memory and her name had completely slipped my mind.

My friends would laugh and say that I just had a senior moment, but I don’t think it’s a sign of early dementia. And I did all the “right” things except actually write down the woman’s name: I said her full name twice, I looked at her face, and I was focusing fully on the conversation. I know how easy it is to not remember what’s being said to me when my mind is somewhere else (just ask my partner!), but how could this detail slip away so quickly?

I wonder if the problem is with my short-term memory. When I was growing up, my mother drilled us so much on the details of our day — who we talked to, what we learned in school, etc — that I learned to be good at observing and remembering detail. And then there was that memory game we always played at parties where someone would bring out a tray of household items and everyone would study it for five minutes, then it would disappear again and we had to list every item. That was one of my mother’s favourite games.

But my memory is getting a lot less exercise these days. So much of the short-term function is now filled by machines: my database of names, phone numbers, tasks and appointments is synced between my cellphone and my computers at work and home. I don’t have to remember information any more; I just have to look it up.

A recent study of 3,000 school children in Great Britain discovered a loss in “working memory” in 10% of the pupils. Working memory involves such things as remembering verbal instructions, new names or telephone numbers. The process of remembering things for a short period of time is fundamental to our experience of the world and is linked to many higher brain functions.

The researchers said that teachers rarely identify this problem, tending to label pupils as being unmotivated daydreamers. Yet if the finding of 10% of children having the problem held true for all children, then almost 500,000 in primary education alone would be affected.

I don’t know if the researchers identified a cause, but it makes me wonder whether technology is partly to blame. During a discussion this week on CBC radio about how technology has changed the way we remember, one of the interviewees was describing how he is constantly “googling” information during conversations with his friends. There’s no reason to remember who starred in that film, or the location of that hip restaurant, because all that information is as close as the nearest internet connection.

If we don’t need to remember this kind of information, is it possible that we will forget how to store and recall facts?

My biggest memory issue — aside from remembering peoples’ names — is remembering passwords. There are so many sites that require passwords, and I don’t remember which ones I use where.

All I know is that I’ve been relying on Firefox to remember for me, but I’ve heard enough about identity theft to wonder whether that’s a good idea. How many passwords can anyone reasonably remember? I can only think of five; the others are lost in memory.

At least I don’t work in one of those offices where the network password is changed every month. I’d have to write it down.

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Related Links:
BBC: “Memory issue hits 10% of pupils”
USA Today: “This is the Google side of your brain”
Wired: “Your outboard brain knows all”
Computers, memory and thought
The Neurological Scratchpad: Looking into Working Memory

Spam has become the bane of my working life. We’ve had to switch to an online quarantine system, set at its highest level, in order to keep viruses off our computer system. I usually receive about 100 spam e-mails per day — some of my co-workers have to deal with several hundred — and my biggest grudge is that I can’t just set up the filter system and forget about it.

I don’t think there’s any quarantine system that’s 100% reliable, unless you only ever get e-mails from a predictable list of safe senders. So for the sake of one legitimate e-mail which invariably is caught in the net with the 100 or so spam, I have to do my own visual scan of everything in the junk mail folder. Not only is this a slow and tedious task, but it is also odious: I dislike having to even skim through the subject lines — as laughable and ridiculous as some of them are — and I really resent the time I’ve lost to so-called businesses offering free prescriptions and sexual enhancements. So, not only are legitimate e-mails less likely to get to me (at least, in a timely manner), but I am also less confident that my e-mails are arriving at their destinations safely.

Chad Perrin, in his blog entry “The truth about e-mail spam”, says that spam now makes up about 85% of all e-mail. “Without a reasonable guarantee that legitimate emails will get through,” he writes, “email is useless, no matter how clean of spam it may be.”

He points out that spam has proliferated because it is easy and cheap — trojans and “spambots” do most of the work, linking infected computers in a loose network to send a mind-boggling number of e-mails.

Sadly, spam wouldn’t have become such a problem if personal computers were not so easily infected, or, in other words, if computer users were more careful about security. “Eliminating the means by which spammers defer their costs to millions of unsuspecting home users of personal computers,” Chad says, “would have a significant effect on the volume of spam.”

Similarly, Justin James refers to “E-mail’s swan song” in his programming blog. “E-mail was going to revolutionize our world,” he says, “but this is no longer the case. E-mail is hopelessly devalued to the point where I barely use it.”

He lays the blame at the feet of the SMTP protocol system which was designed to deliver mail, not protect it. “SMTP has its roots in an era… [when] e-mail delivery time was measured in hours and sometimes days. In other words, e-mail was fine for non-critical items. The SMTP standard[s]… are written to meet the demands of that environment. As a result, it is nearly worthless in today’s environment and, in fact, it makes matters much worse due to the security and spam issues involved.”

Justin suggests that this is another sign that the personal computer is headed the way of the dodo, and that the “cloud” and other internet-based programs are the sign of the future. “For many users (particularly in the consumer space), the blossoming of Web applications means that they really do not need a PC per se — they just need a device that can access the Web and preferably has a way of attaching a large display and a full-size mouse and keyboard.”

It’s true that many people today are relying on the internet for sending and receiving e-mail, storing documents, and working in collaboration with others. I can’t imagine not being connected to the internet. But I also depend on my computer for many non-internet functions, from photo processing to personal information storage. Maybe the best idea is that our internet connections could be separated — physically or virtually — from our vulnerable personal computers.

So perhaps e-mail will die, at least on home computer systems. Long live virtual communication!

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