Brave New Knowledge

Consider this paragraph by a fairly mediocre student:

Jesus is made to condemn the Jews as Satanic by John, while the Christians are now the Essenic ideals of the Children of Light with a special gnosis of revelation in understanding the Logos in its true form. John's nonhuman "superman" loses several qualities that we are familiar with from the Synoptic tradition. Notably, the birth narrative of Jesus is missing, we are told in the prologue only that "in the beginning" Jesus coexisted with God and that he is "full of grace and truth." John feels that to inform us of the particularly human trait of birth, even if virginal and thus not actuated by lust, would not be fitting of a God who is the Word. 

There are no quotation marks, no citations, not even a Works Cited page.  Nothing, in other words, to suggest that my student isn't performing a strong, smart, controversial, edgy analysis of the Gospel of John.

But of course a quick Google search plucks out James Still's essay, which reads in part:

Jesus is made to condemn the Jews as Satanic by John, while the Christians are now the Essenic ideals of the Children of Light with a special gnosis of revelation in understanding the Logos in its true form. John's nonhuman "superman" loses several qualities that we are familiar with from the Synoptic tradition. Notably, the birth narrative of Jesus is missing, we are told in the prologue only that "in the beginning" Jesus coexisted with God and that he is "full of grace and truth." John feels that to inform us of the particularly human trait of birth, even if virginal and thus not actuated by lust, would not be fitting of a God who is the Word. 

Tiresome.  The student fails the paper, and the course, and will wind up in my office complaining that she was never taught that you can't do this sort of thing.  And that's not credible: my own syllabus contains the definition of plagiarism, and she was obligated to read it at the beginning of the semester.  And we teach this at every level: her required freshman composition course contained a unit on plagiarism.

Two things make leaving teaching a bit less stinging.

One is that students are by nature slothful.  Always have been.  That's a pain, but it's just part of the game.  You can read the lamentations of Oxford dons all the way back to the 13th century and find that this is not new.  It's no accident that the prostitutes and bar-wenches of Paris spoke fluent Latin.

The second is more damning: students really don't see anything wrong with this sort of plagiarism.  They don't think it counts, or matters, not because they are immoral, but because knowledge has changed so much in the last twenty years.

It's not a matter of what you know: it's what you can find.

My plagiarist knows perfectly well that she can find this article again if she needed it  She knows she doesn't have to know what the Essenes were (she missed class the day we discussed them, according to my attendance records): she just right clicks in Firefox and a widget defines it for her.  Same for "gnosis."

So what's the problem?  I told her to present some knowledge, and she did.  It will be futile to explain the difference between comprehension and representation, or the idea of intellectual property.  There is no such thing.  All ideas are nuggets on the ground, and each is of equal value to the rest, if it fills out the ten page requirement.

I'm not sure one can fight this, as it's just the dark side of a very good thing: the availability of both good and bad information.  Nicholas Carr has argued that infotechnology makes deep reading almost impossible.   It's a new way of knowing, one that depends on the availability and accessibility of knowledge rather than the quality of the mind and its ability to do something significant with that knowledge.

The new knowledge represents a good thing for humanity.  If we find a cure for cancer, it will be because of the Internet, among other things.

But it represents a very bad thing for humans.

Or perhaps, putting it a little differently, the capacity to know without really knowing anything amplifies aspects of ourselves: the slothful become more slothful, the diligent more diligent. 

But it's discouraging to find that of all the values college students have, "knowing something" is low on the list.  I'm not sure universities really discourage that.  

But it's a brave new world.

Comments

[Natalie]

Obviously your regular dealings with young adults give you a different perspective than someone like me, someone fairly isolated from that age group. With that in mind, I disagree with the apprehension.

I'm not sure how this is "a very bad thing for humans". It feels like you are, perhaps, being too strict in your use of the word "knowing":

the capacity to know without really knowing anything amplifies aspects of ourselves: the slothful become more slothful, the diligent more diligent.

Students don't value "knowing something" as much as our generation did because they're too busy mentally cataloging the plethora of information at their disposal. They may not know everything on their mind's hard drive, but they definitely know how to create a useful folder tree. They may not have the luxury of reading deeply due to the vastness of information they must filter, but those inclined to deep reading won't be hindered by the file tree creation process. Those not so inclined still will be forced to create a mental filing system so complex that it'll assuredly be more mind-developing than that of the previous generation's own mediocrity, who were far more preoccupied with colloquial knowledge.

The article you linked mentioned Plato’s Phaedrus:

Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.

and 15th c. teeth gnashing:

The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.

They were wrong, weren't they?

A Brave New World, indeed. I'm very excited to see where this new world takes our minds and how it reshapes our brains. Our brains are fortunately not static, and we old-timers will adapt. Our young people? No adaptation necessary: it's all they'll know.

~Natalie

[Otter]

Like I said.

It's literally all they'll know.

[Otter]

And no, Socrates / Plato and Squarciafico were not exactly wrong.

The shape of the human mind does change. What they predicted in terms of what would be lost was substantially accurate.

The question is how much we give up over time with each new sacrifice. The last few paragraphs of Carr's essay I think roll the dice that, no, they weren't wrong, and neither is Carr. And we'll see. The human race will go on. But my students ironically agree with Carr, in the main. They will never read Robinson Crusoe, even if they're required to. They will read the summary. They admit it. Some will go so far as to say that they literally can't read it.

They don't have to, and that part of the mind that can really read the thing is going out of business.

[Natalie]

Like I said.

It's literally all they'll know.

Where do you get such overwhelming optimism?

I guess we'll have to see what happens. My money's on human adaptability, not failure. And I do think if we graph various aspects of human understanding 20 years from now, we'll still get our bell curve...with the mean shifted to a slightly *higher* number, not lower.

The question is how much we give up over time with each new sacrifice.

I do hope you're not turning into one of those technophobes who pine for The Good Old Days. ;-)

[Otter]

Where do you get such overwhelming optimism?

From sending out several versions of this email at the end of every term: even in a very intellectually curious and interesting section, I keep this on my clipboard:

One other thing: would you like to submit (as the paper requirements require) a Works Cited page? You do not cite sources that I have a strong suspicion you looked at in your generally fine paper.

I do not mean to accuse you of plagiarism, because all your ideas come in your own voice, and I know from class that you have the intelligence to figure these things out. But could you talk to me about what your methods were and what you consulted? Specifically I need you either to tell me straight up that you connected the dots yourself between (for instance) Mark and ISaiah or I need you to tell me what sources were consulted. Your ideas fall into patterns that were set by a number of scholars, and I just need to make sure you're on the right side of the academic honesty line. If you're not, let's get you there before I put a grade on the essay.

I appreciate it: this is a difficult situation, but it can be easily remedied by a little conversation.

Most often, I know precisely where they get their brilliance from: Sparksnotes, Cliffs Notes, websites that lie down and put out for a Google Search...

It's not that they're malicious. It's not that they're stupid, or even lazy. It's just that they really don't understand the difference between having knowledge and finding knowledge; or between thinking about a problem and finding somebody's thoughts about it.

I guess we'll have to see what happens. My money's on human adaptability, not failure.

Oh, as I wrote above, I'm sure the human race will survive. And that the flow of information is a net gain for the human story.

But it'll just be boring as fuck-all on dates.

One of the most constant genial complaints I get from the young women I teach, when we hit the Song of Solomon or the Book of Ruth or some other romance-and-sex-heavy work, is that boys now have nothing to say. I'm not sure the girls are much better off, but at least they seem to sense a problem with this. The Song of Solomon gets to regions of the soul that you can't touch with the text, "IMsoN2U; ;)"

And I don't know whether that translates into any evolutionary advantages or disadvantages. I suspect it does. But it is worth noting that one EMP set off a mile above The Grid will mean we just don't know anything anymore.

And I do think if we graph various aspects of human understanding 20 years from now, we'll still get our bell curve...with the mean shifted to a slightly *higher* number, not lower.

Sure. And I mention that in my post. But it's "collective" knowledge. The "mean," though, needs to be defined in terms of the enormous quantity of information accessible to a person. It's like the growing of a gap between rich and poor that way: a very few people able to access a ton of information, will "wreck the curve" for the rest.

My mom's cancer went on a lot longer than it had to before they caught it because of a conundrum in the CT scans. And if the doctors couldn't add her tumor to the database on her, it wasn't there. (It took a nurse attending to the patient, who was not in the database, to put together what any Galenic doctor would have spotted immediately. I kind of give a hard time to the doctors, because the longer they treat my mother the more printouts they generate and the more they store on their wireless clipboards. But it took a nurse to just look at the patient and see the truth.

And that's my students. Right down to the ground. More than one of them has come to my office with two days to go on a ten page paper and said, "I can't find the answer." Well, no, you can't. I try as best I can to make sure they can't unless they read the text and think about it.

I was talking to one of mom's doctors, and she was telling me about the fact that so little knowledge is kept in the mind now, even by doctors. They have to know the basics in their field, but the knowledge-base is so huge, that from case to case they can't really count on the advantage of using "valuable brain space" for cases. Informatics will therefore play a huge role in curing cancer: it's astonishing how much information is in the databases.

I do hope you're not turning into one of those technophobes who pine for The Good Old Days. ;-)

No, just for people who have something to say when the lights go out and the wi-fi stops working.