Print and thinking

In Understanding Media, McLuhan writes that print (or typography, to use his term) "had psychic and social consequences that suddenly shifted previous boundaries and patterns of culture" (233).  We can, with some thought about the historical period he is discussing, grasp what he mean by shifting social boundaries. But "psychic"?? It's a wacky word with supernatural connotations.Careful reading of the rest of McLuhan's chapter suggests that he is really thinking about thinking: print makes it possible to think in new ways.

Of course, from Plato to McLuhan and including hundreds of commentators in between, people have wondered and worried about what forms of media might do to our minds. It is only relatively recently, though, that scientists have had the tools to actually study what happens in the brain when it encounters and processes different forms of media stimulation.

As Hayles notes in the class reading ("Hyper and Deep Attention"), all of the evidence from a variety of branches of science suggest that there are changes in the brain when it encounters various media stimulation:  "the brain's synaptic connections are evolving with an environment in which media consumption is a dominant factor"  (192).  But as she points out, to note that we can now see  such changes (with technology like the functional MRI) is not the same as evaluating the changes, or evaluating which kinds of attention, hyper or deep, we should cultivate. In fact, she argues, we need to be more conscious of how we might deploy both kinds of attention. She uses the example of video games, then, as one way we might "buil[d] bridges between deep and hyper attention" (114).

What do you think of the idea of using video games in classrooms? Does this argument seem persuasive to you? More importantly perhaps, she suggests that hyper attention evolved before deep attention; other scholars note that reading is a very unnatural act for our brains to master.  Should we let our brains do what seems to come more naturally, using games in education for example? Or should we carefully train them?