Skim culture - Living on a diet of CliffNotes

When 'appearing to know' is all that matters

Welcome to Wait! Just Listen, a weekly series of short essays dedicated to unpacking moments of humanness from the all-consuming web of digitisation. If this type of content enriches your life in any way, please consider subscribing. If you need more reasons to subscribe, then click here. Twitter is my primary method for tracking the cultural and creative pulse of various ideas, so feel free to get in touch (@trippingwords) if you have a topic or theme you’d like me to explore.

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Be Oscar Wilde in 5 mins.

In 1965, a series of books called the ‘Bluffer’s Guides’ arrived in the publishing scene with much aplomb. They were a collection of pocket-sized guidebooks, written by experts offering readers the opportunity to learn ‘how to say the right things’ so they could appear fluent on a topic. The ultimate social life-saver at dinner parties and office water-cooler chats. Topics ventured into life-oriented subjects such as wine and baseball. The series was eventually acquired by CliffNotes, the company responsible for those nifty summaries of classic literature books.

It proved to be insanely popular and it sold five million copies worldwide.

Its value proposition was simple - to provide readers with the skills necessary to appear culturally literate without having to delve into the depths of any primary text or research. The guides earned the reputation as ‘the CliffNotes for life’.

What the ‘Bluffer’s Guides’ set out to do some 56 years ago is not entirely different to what current day social media platforms have pervasively achieved - to inculcate and normalise a culture of skimming in an information saturated environment.

The Oxford dictionary defines ‘Skimming’ as:

noun

1. the removal of a substance from the surface of a liquid.

2. the action of reading something quickly so as to note only the important points.

My definition of skimming is loosely based on the latter meaning. It refers to any attempt to alleviate the perceived ‘pain’ of deep-reading. It removes the rigours of analysing, synthesising, solving problems and reflecting on preexisting knowledge in order to understand an author’s message.

The rise of digital media has allowed us to perfect the skill of skimming so we can multi-task across reams and reams of bite-sized and easy to digest content simultaneously. There is nothing quite as confining as having your hands occupied and head nestled into a physical book. Twitter isn’t going to check itself!

Throughout points in this essay, you my discerning reader, would notice my struggle with this intellectual shift towards ‘a culture of skimming’ particularly as someone who takes immense pride in reading old-fashioned physical books. It is perhaps one of my many millennial-isms. So, whilst I may come across as a luddite to some in my lamentations about our book-less digital future, I assure you it is coming from a place of genuine inquiry rather than judgement, of mourning rather than condescension.

Back when libraries were cool

There was a time when membership in the local library meant entry to the magical worlds beyond the senses. I remember my trips to the library as an impecunious undergraduate student: my gateway towards satisfying an insatiable thirst for knowledge across a variety of both commonplace and more niche-specific subjects, all for the price of nothing.

The scarred wooden checkout counter, the rickety chairs, the frayed noticeboard with the fluttering and raggedy notices, the neatly shelved books and the thick coat of dust on non-borrowable obscure reference compendiums. Collectively, these elements left an indelible imprint of what scholastic nourishment felt and looked like.

Collection of classics by Holy Farrell

The library wasn’t just a repository of books but it served as a meticulous curation of narratives, their authors and the readers who engaged with them. There is a lingering sense of immortality when one devours into a physical and tangible book in a library - everything around you stops, including time. Hours passed. Your imagination takes you into the crests and troughs of the creative process.

Then one day it all stops.

With the digital milieu firmly upon us, books as we know it and the libraries that house them have somehow faded in relevance. Its potency to enchant and mesmerise seems to have diluted amongst future generations of knowledge seekers. The book’s humble and analogue paper-based display seems static and monochromatic relative to all the technical wizardry found in TV screens.

But that isn’t the only change.

The process of reading has altered dramatically. No longer are we called to develop attentional skills and awareness of how ideas and plots in texts are structured and communicated. Traditional knowledge discovery has become antiquated. In its place is its more trendy city-cousin, ‘skimming’.

Drip-fed entertainment

A quick morning scroll through your Twitter feed, a glance at the algorithmically curated photos on Instagram’s discovery page and a look at Apple News for the gist of what’s happening in a Post-Trump America.

There is a common context that prefaces the above actions - they all involve a type of skimming, in a liberal sense.

In our quest for the next dopamine fix, we have intricately constructed a way to consume as much content as we can with minimal effort. Quantity and ephemerality are typically prioritised over depth - Twitter ‘fleets’ and Instagram ‘stories’ serve as an ideal example here. They are drip-fed to provide short-term immersive experiences just enough to scratch that itch for distraction and fuel the addiction for more.

For digital platform creators (and content-makers to an extent), the pay-off or reward for audiences, needs to be quick enough to lure them in and seamless enough to keep that ‘content-carousel’ moving. A constant, ubiquitous and uninterrupted stream.

While there will always be well-intentioned visions for digital learning through shared epistemologies and collaboration, the presiding digital infrastructure seems to suggest otherwise.

Online platforms have integrated, by design and function, elaborate dopamine-reward systems. The idea of delayed satisfaction (such as reading a long-form article like this one) remain, for the most part, a distant prerequisite for people in their online engagement journeys. So if you’ve made it this far in the piece, you my friend, are part of the select few!

There is however a consequence to our revised pleasure-seeking ways.

The need to know has become greater than knowing itself. The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) has been pathologised as a legitimate state of mental despair when one feels left out from the bustling everyday trappings of life. Research has also showed that the fear of missing out is greater in individuals who spend more time on social media.

Whether it’s the latest in R&B album or the football scores, being across a topic of cultural relevance is a clout-earner. A confidence-booster of sorts. It is also immediately validated either virtually (e.g. likes) or socially in-person.

Knowledge has now become a measure of how much immediate satisfaction we derive from engagement, thus moving away from its epistemological roots. The meat and bones of specific ideas remain a secondary affair as it has no discernible cultural capital or ’street cred’. Cultural literacy of the contemporary era is about appearing to know rather than actually knowing.

The Future

I typically start each essay with an interesting book (the physical variety) that I’ve recently completed. However for this week’s release, it seemed appropriate to include Anthony Grafton’s 2007 evocative spellbinder: ‘Codex in Crisis: the Book Dematerializes’ towards the end. Because it offers perhaps a rather extraordinarily bleak observation of what’s to come for reading and knowledge processing in the future.

Grafton’s essay offers a thoughtful and judicious consideration of the future of reading and libraries in a scholarly world dominated by Google and other global digitisation projects to make information (rather than knowledge) more easily accessible.

Digitised books, according to Grafton, have been plagued by poor metadata and inadequate Optical Character Recognition (OCR). More generally, he thinks, the future will not produce a universal digital library (*gulp*), nor a universal digital archive. He envisages that in its place will be the emergence of a patchwork of interfaces and databases created solely for skimming an exhaustive collection of cliff-note type summaries of classics.

At the end of the essay Grafton quotes Greek philosophy maestro Jonathan Barnes' frank but poignant assessment of knowledge transfer in the digital age (from "Bagpipe Music", Topoi 25, 2006, 17-20):

“Load it into your laptop, and you have instant access to virtually the whole of Greek literature. You cut and paste snippets from authors whose very names mean nothing to you. You affirm -- and you're right -- that a particular word used here by Plato occurs 43 times elsewhere in Greek literature. And you can write an article -- or a book -- stuffed with prodigious learning…”

Barnes’ doesn’t mince his words. In fact, if you’ve read his work (I highly recommend you do), alot of his stuff has an unintended gamified quality.

You begin to get the sense that online knowledge repositories and social platforms provide you with an opportunity to ‘level-up’ in gaming speak; to redeem the aura of a hallowed intellectual in 15-mins.

You can appear thorough in your understanding of a topic without knowing much about its constituent parts. What’s more, computing power (i.e. the search function) will allow you to conduct extensive analysis of particular texts to show your ‘depth’ of understanding.

There is hope…maybe

One however can’t help asking both Grafton and Barnes, if the digitisation of information offers something beyond ease of access. For example, what possible outcomes would there be when people skim surfaces more than they plumb depths?

Despite my reverence for Grafton’s scholarly outputs he rather ironically skims the surface of what it means to search for content in the digital age.

How many times have our random google searches led to a never-ending rabbit hole of new knowledge culminating with the discovery of a subject we’ve previously had no intention of engaging with?

Maybe we are skimming over skimming.

Perhaps, and I’m playing devil’s advocate here, we should start embarking on a more in-depth understanding of how skimming uses both old and new models of cognition to deliver a ‘new kind of depth’. What that is, I’ve yet to find out.

But I do know one thing, brick and mortar libraries will always be my intellectual temple.