In Defense of the Smartphone

      James Marriott has composed a particularly eloquent elegy for reading, now that humanity seems to be turning in another direction: toward screening—toward the smartphone. Marriott’s elegy is also particularly frightening, for he sees “the post-literate world [as] characterized by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation.” This website excerpted a chunk of Marriott’s depressing argument the day before the essay you are now reading is being published.

      And how can any of us whose thoughts have been formed, in large part, by newspapers, magazines and books—by descriptions and propositions, by sentences—not feel some sadness watching them being made redundant. How can we avoid some disquiet about the ongoing triumph of that flickering, know-it-all, video-jukebox-busybody, smart-alecky phone—to whose siren song even we often enough succumb?  

      Indeed, it is tempting to connect the replacement of the sentence by the iPhones’ barrage of quick images and unchecked gossip with the political triumph, in the United States in the past year, of the bullies, the bigoted, the science deniers.

      But I wanted to hear Marriott out not because he is right but because his argument—which is showing up in many forms lately, forms not often as literate and eloquent—is profoundly and importantly and demonstrably wrong.

      I count three major flaws in his argument that the mix of fast-cut video and snappy wordings that dominate our iPhones are making us stupider:

First flaw in the panic over smartphones:  New forms of communicating and creating always cause defenders of the old ways to proclaim that “the sky is falling.” Yet humankind continues to progress.

      If you are old enough, you heard a torrent of such attacks on “the boob tube”—television—when it was new. Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in the early 1960s, famously called TV “a vast wasteland.” And there seemed a real fear among adults that a few hours a day of exposure to My Little Margie and Bonanza could “turn” young people’s “brains to mush.”

       Franks Sinatra, hardly a luddite, was among those who went after another potential despoiler of the young:

The most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear — naturally I refer to the bulk of rock ’n’ roll. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons … this rancid-smelling aphrodisiac I deplore.  

      Movies inspired a remarkably similar reaction when they were new. Here is a minister in 1915: “The moving-picture theater is an ever-present invitation to licentiousness and moral laxity.”

      Novels, which you and Marriott would probably dub the most noble of media, were for quite a while considered the most depraved. This is from an 18th century play: “Miss reads – She melts – She sighs – Love steals upon her – And then – Alas, poor Girl! – good night, poor Honour!”

      The esteemed commentator and essayist Joseph Addison was the Marriott of his time. However, in 1714 Addison’s target was, of all things, the very information technology Marriott is now defending, the printing press: “It is a melancholy thing to consider that the Art of Printing, which might be the greatest Blessing to Mankind, should prove detrimental to us, and that it should be made use of to scatter Prejudice and Ignorance through a People.”

      After another century or two had passed, Tolstoy, who arguably made better use of the printing press than anyone else ever, concurred:  The “most powerful of ignorance’s weapons,” he concludes, on page 1441 of my edition of War and Peace, is “the dissemination of printed matter.”

      And then there was Socrates, trashing, according to Plato, what James Marriott might consider the most noble of technologies: writing itself. Socrates’ argument: Writing provides only a “semblance” of “wisdom,” not “truth,” because it comes without “a teacher’s instruction.”

      Yet, despite all these dastardly disseminators of ignorance—writing, printing, movies, TV, rock ‘n’ roll, etc.—science has strengthened, poverty has declined, lifespans have increased, and most of us have managed to keep ourselves well stimulated and entertained.

      Is there not, therefore, some reason to believe human flourishing might survive even the smart phone?

Second flaw in the panic over smartphones:  It takes a long time before new forms of media manage to demonstrate their real talents.

      We have to stop comparing the accomplishments of a teenager like the iPhone with the achievements of even a septuagenarian like television, let alone a medium that has been around for half a millennium like print.  

      Part of the problem is that inventors tend to invent things like writing, printing, television or portable phones without much understanding of what people might do with them.

      So, in the early years of film audiences were treated to exciting entertainments like a film of a train arriving. (Spoiler: people got on and off.)

      And most media in their youths have significant technological limitations.

      Early motion pictures, once they started telling stories, were limited to telling them without sound. So, you couldn’t hear people talk. So, it was very difficult to tell any but the broadest, most simplistic stories.

      Early TV was produced on the assumption that each week’s installments had to stand on its own. So you had to wrap up each story in a half-hour or an hour.

      And in order to attract television audiences large enough to support television’s costs, television’s producers perpetually feared wandering too far from the least common denominator. Plots stayed mostly vacuous. Characters—ditzy Lucy, irascible Ralph Kramden—experienced their inevitable comeuppances but otherwise rarely deepened or varied from type.

      Until, more or less, Bob Dylan, rock ‘n’ roll often confined itself to such sentiments as “Baby It’s You” and such wordings as “tra, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.” No, rock music wasn’t sung “by cretinous goons,” but some of it, at the beginning, was indeed, as Sinatra put it, “phony and false.”

      There are some interesting things on YouTube today, and some people are pretty good at podcasts. But it seems pretty clear that the smartphone has not yet found its Bob Dylan or its Orson Welles or its David Chase, let alone its Virginia Woolf.

      Before we accuse it of ending civilization as we know it, might we allow the smartphone some time to find its way?

      Jane Austen was born more than 300 years after the invention of the printing press. The iPhone debuted, as this is written, 18 years and five months ago.

Third flaw in the panic over smartphones:  Print has its own limitations.

      There is little doubt that print—which is under threat—has been the most important and the most vital medium of the last half millennium. I’m with Marriott there.

      Much of the most profound artistic creations in these centuries since the invention of the printed press—including the work of Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel García Márquez—arrived as published books. And Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Rachel Carson changed the world through printed books. Again, no disagreement.

But print tends to be longwinded and, for the most part, rather sluggish. Perhaps because it can’t easily show how things are, print likes to spell things out.

Yes, print is good at at description. But you don’t need descriptions of things you can just see. Yes, print is a good explainer. But who needs an explanation when you’ve gotten the point.

Surely one of the reasons young people are reading less nowadays is because they are impatient with the lugubriousness of newspapers, magazines and books.

Print tends to take the long way around. But there are proving to be shorter paths to the point—many of them to be found on smartphones.

Fourth flaw in the panic over smartphones:  There are things print cannot say.

I have not yet mentioned one hugely accomplished producer of print here because his two major works, Ulysses and Finnigans Wake, border on the unreadable—a sure sign that something is amiss.

      In those books, James Joyce’s was aiming to capture some of the randomness and fluidity and rhythm of human thought. Print does okay with rhythm, but it doesn’t do randomness and fluidity well. It leans instead toward the narrow and carefully worked out. Print is, after all, very one-thing-after-another—very (and literally) linear, to use Marshall McLuhan’s telling term.

      Here are the last lines of Ulysses—the erotic thoughts of Molly Bloom:

…I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Lovely. And this writing—this print—takes us somewhere we have very, very rarely been taken by an artist: for a ride on the rollercoaster of someone’s thoughts—a decidedly nonlinear ride. But can require work to get there. I have never actually made it all the way through Joyce’s Ulysses. Too hard. James Joyce is bumping up against the limitations of this medium. He is saying things that print is not well equipped to say, cannot easily say.

      One could imagine Molly Bloom’s mostly unpunctuated words put to music and sung. And, indeed, Kate Bush has attempted that, in her song “The Sensual World.”

      The video made for Bush’s song—available on a smartphone near you— doesn’t add all that much. But one could imagine a video that mixes images, music, sounds and Joyce’s words in a way that gets us, in essence, deeper inside the head of Molly Bloom. One could imagine—indeed I have imagined a whole genre of video more fluid and hop-step-and-jumpy than print. One could imagine a video that is more capable of representing human thought than print—a video, if not more intelligent than print, at least capable of expressing a different kind of intelligence than print.

The video currently available on YouTube or TikTok is mostly not that. Yet. But humans are inventive. Let us take our risks. Let us make our make our mistakes. Give us time.

      In which case, “The End of Literate Society”—the smartphone world that Marriott dreads—rather than ushering in, as he predicts, “simplicity, ignorance and stagnation” might indeed be the beginning of new ways of understanding and communicating. And screening might actually take us deeper into human heads than reading. Screening might take us further than reading.

In due time.

For a paper Mitchell Stephens wrote 14 years ago on related subjects see here.

Or see his book, the rise of the image the fall of the world (Oxford University Press).