Can’t Get Smart on Junk

photo credit: SideLong

I treat myself to a latte at the coffee shop every now and then. It’s one of the few ways I can make myself get dressed in the morning. (I have concocted a dozen ways to drop my kids off at school without so much as brushing my hair. It involves disguises: hats, scarves, and not looking the car-door-opener-ladies in the eye when they wish me a good day). Recently, I began seeing a woman there with two children reading a workbook I recognized as Saxon Math—a popular homeschool curriculum.

I homeschooled my daughter for a little over a year: I taught her to read, to add, to user her imagination. After a while my patience wore out and I kicked her to the public school curb. However, as she gets older and her brain needs more challenging, I’m finding that her public school curriculum isn’t cutting mustard, and I’m needing to spend more time supplementing what she’s learning in the classroom.

Last Wednesday, I saw the woman again, and I decided to go over and talk to her. This isn’t something that I normally do. In fact, I’m very shy around strangers. When I was little my mother would give me a dollar at the grocery store to buy a candy bar, but I was always too afraid to give it to the cashier. No candy bar for me—my loss. My mother said she always thought I was just being a pain in the ass, but if I was, it’s an awkward proclivity that I’ve never quite outgrown.

But this is my daughter’s education at stake, so I walked over to her and introduced myself. “I noticed your kids doing Saxon Math,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I was wondering if I could pick your brain about a good English curriculum.” I explained my position and expressed a concern that my daughter wasn’t reading the right material to expand her vocabulary or sharpen her grammatical skills. “I read all the time,” I explained, somewhat exasperated, “and was an avid reader at her age. But I don’t know how to help her get the most out of what she’s reading.”

The woman said, “What do you spend most of your time reading?”

“I read on the internet a lot, actually,” I said, realizing the truth of it for the first time.

The woman chuckled. “Oh hell, that’s not reading. Can’t get smart on junk.”

Her comment took me aback for a second. All the blogs and articles I read—that doesn’t count? The intelligent conversations I contribute to, though admittedly few and far between, aren’t valid if conducted over the internet? But after I blinked a few times and realized that she wasn’t being condescending, I recognized the reality before me. That’s where we stand as internet readers and writers—purveyors and consumers of junk. That’s how bad our reputations have gotten. That’s how lousy the web is considered to really be.

A few weeks ago I was debating with a friend who said she would never vote for someone who wasn’t well educated. When pressed as to what that meant to her, she said she meant someone who had attended an ivy league school (“Or Stanford, I guess,” she stipulated) and earned an advanced degree.

“I don’t know why we cling to such a narrow definition of education,” I said. “We talk about being educated as something that happened to us in the past, mostly when we were quite young all things considered. I’m 31 now, and my education continues. There isn’t a day you don’t find my nose in a book or find me researching the things that I believe will make the world a better place. Those of us who care continue to educate ourselves long after we have graduated from academic halls. Yet it’s where we went to school, all that while ago when we were young, that continues to matter.

“Why are we so shortsighted?”

“Well,” my friend said, shrugging, “It’s a mater of verification. I know what it means to have a J.D. from Harvard. I don’t know what you mean by your laissez-faire education. For all I know, you’ve been doing all your studying on the internet.”

BAM!

The internet was supposed to be the savior of information. It was supposed to be a great educator. It was supposed to be bastion of knowledge, a crucible for new theories, new ways of thinking, new dialogues and interactions. Where did we go so drastically wrong?

The other day I read an article on Slate about blogging, and how most money-earning blogs produce quantity over quality. But the article does go on to address Merlin Mann’s recent announcement that he will quit wasting time writing nonsense he doesn’t care about and get back to the business of writing what he loves and making more time to do good work.

Mann’s decision to do this struck a chord with me the first time I read it, too: I felt a twin soul at work, striving to get the web—and his life—back on its feet as something valuable and cherished, not some place to spew bullshit and watch the dimes roll in. Mann’s passion may not be beautiful web content per se, but in his own way he certainly contributes greatly to that.

The article concluded, “Friends don’t let friends read bad content.” And I said to myself, “And friends don’t let friends write bad content, either. My daughter’s reading that shit. We’re educating ourselves with it.” If I stop writing bad content, and if you stop, and if we all focus on what is true and worthy and brilliant, there won’t be any bad content to read.

Fantasy? Maybe. Probably. But the dream is the thing.

But how do we know if we’re writing bad content? How do we know if what we’re saying is true and real? I admit, sometimes it’s hard to tell. How do we take what is real and true for us and present it in a way that interests others, that arrests attention, that makes others not only look but see? When everything around us is false and distracting, how do we get down to the business of being genuine? And how do we do it day after day, alone in a wilderness of bullshit?

Tenacity? Community? We’re talking about a fundamental paradigm shift. We’re talking about taking our work seriously and putting all of ourselves into it. We’re about recognizing that the words we write and publish shape the way people think and live. If education is the constant internalization and interpretation of inputs, then the web is a significant educator, and I’m not sure it’s doing the job as well as it needs to. In fact, that’s a lie. The fact is I’m sure it isn’t. And I know that I have been a contributor to that.

But not today. That’s my vow. Not today, and not anymore.