Do children in a keyboard world need to learn old-fashioned handwriting?

There is a tendency to dismiss handwriting as a nonessential skill, even though researchers have warned that learning to write may be the key to, well, learning to write.

And beyond the emotional connection adults may feel to the way we learned to write, there is a growing body of research on what the normally developing brain learns by forming letters on the page, in printed or manuscript format as well as in cursive.

In an article this year in The Journal of Learning Disabilities, researchers looked at how oral and written language related to attention and what are called “executive function” skills (like planning) in children in grades four through nine, both with and without learning disabilities.

Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington and the lead author on the study, told me that evidence from this and other studies suggests that “handwriting — forming letters — engages the mind, and that can help children pay attention to written language.”

Last year in an article in The Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Laura Dinehart, an associate professor of early childhood education at Florida International University, discussed several possible associations between good handwriting and academic achievement: Children with good handwriting may get better grades because their work is more pleasant for teachers to read; children who struggle with writing may find that too much of their attention is consumed by producing the letters, and the content suffers.

But can we actually stimulate children’s brains by helping them form letters with their hands? In a population of low-income children, Dr. Dinehart said, the ones who had good early fine-motor writing skills in prekindergarten did better later on in school. She called for more research on handwriting in the preschool years, and on ways to help young children develop the skills they need for “a complex task” that requires the coordination of cognitive, motor and neuromuscular processes.

“This myth that handwriting is just a motor skill is just plain wrong,” Dr. Berninger said. “We use motor parts of our brain, motor planning, motor control, but what’s very critical is a region of our brain where the visual and language come together, the fusiform gyrus, where visual stimuli actually become letters and written words.” You have to see letters in “the mind’s eye” in order to produce them on the page, she said. Brain imaging shows that the activation of this region is different in children who are having trouble with handwriting.

Functional brain scans of adults show a characteristic brain network that is activated when they read, and it includes areas that relate to motor processes. This suggested to scientists that the cognitive process of reading may be connected to the motor process of forming letters.

Karin James, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, did brain scans on children who did not yet know how to print. “Their brains don’t distinguish letters; they respond to letters the same as to a triangle,” she said.

After the children were taught to print, patterns of brain activation in response to letters showed increased activation of that reading network, including the fusiform gyrus, along with the inferior frontal gyrus and posterior parietal regions of the brain, which adults use for processing written language — even though the children were still at a very early level as writers.

“The letters they produce themselves are very messy and variable, and that’s actually good for how children learn things,” Dr. James said. “That seems to be one big benefit of handwriting.”

Handwriting experts have struggled with the question of whether cursive writing confers special skills and benefits, beyond the benefits that print writing might provide. Dr. Berninger cited a 2015 study that suggested that starting around fourth grade, cursive skills conferred advantages in both spelling and composing, perhaps because the connecting strokes helped children connect letters into words.

For typically developing young children, typing the letters doesn’t seem to generate the same brain activation. As we grow up, of course, most of us transition to keyboard writing, though like many who teach college students, I have struggled with the question of laptops in class, more because I worry about students’ attention wandering than to promote handwriting. Still, studies on note taking have suggested that “college students who are writing on a keyboard are less likely to remember and do well on the content than if writing it by hand,” Dr. Dinehart said.

Dr. Berninger said the research suggests that children need introductory training in printing, then two years of learning and practicing cursive, starting in grade three, and then some systematic attention to touch-typing.

Using a keyboard, and especially learning the positions of the letters without looking at the keys, she said, might well take advantage of the fibers that cross-communicate in the brain, since unlike with handwriting, children will use both hands to type.

“What we’re advocating is teaching children to be hybrid writers,” said Dr. Berninger, “manuscript first for reading — it transfers to better word recognition — then cursive for spelling and for composing. Then, starting in late elementary school, touch-typing.”

As a pediatrician, I think this may be another case where we should be careful that the lure of the digital world doesn’t take away significant experiences that can have real impacts on children’s rapidly developing brains. Mastering handwriting, messy letters and all, is a way of making written language your own, in some profound ways.

“My overarching research focuses on how learning and interacting with the world with our hands has a really significant effect on our cognition,” Dr. James said, “on how writing by hand changes brain function and can change brain development.”

SOURCE: The NY Times

Crisis after crisis is being caused by a failed ideology. But it cannot be stopped without a coherent alternative.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 16^th April 2016

It’s as if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007-8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions, that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counter-productive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

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The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal International”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of think tanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way, among American apostles such as Milton Friedman, to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Milton Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The post-war consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Milton Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up.” With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the United States and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Daniel Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.”

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It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Friedrich Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism.” The freedom neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Milton Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.

Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that, Ludwig von Mises proposed, would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

The privatisation or marketisation of public services – such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons – has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man.

Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer points out in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had similar impacts. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is … unearned income that accrues without any effort.” As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.

Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Friedrich Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment.” When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Donald Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

Tony Judt pointed out that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”.

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Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his think tanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organization is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised.”

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Andrew Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entrepreneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.

The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom, Bureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom.

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For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.

Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 1970s, there was “an alternative ready there to be picked up.” But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was … nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21^st-century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 1970s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21^st Century.

George Monbiot’s new book, How Did We Get into This Mess?, Is published this month by Verso.

SOURCE

Who is most responsible for high abortion rates? The religious right.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 13^th January 2016
Here is the fact that everyone debating abortion should know. There is no association between its legality and its incidence. In other words, banning abortion does not stop the practice; it merely makes it more dangerous.
The abortion debate is presented as a conflict between the rights of embryos and the rights of women. Enhance one, both sides sometimes appear to agree, and you suppress the other. But once you grasp the fact that legalising women’s reproductive rights does not raise the incidence of induced abortions, only one issue remains to be debated. Should they be legal and safe or illegal and dangerous? Hmmm, tough question.
There might be no causal relationship between reproductive choice and the incidence of abortion, but there is a strong correlation: an inverse one. As the Lancet’s most recent survey of global rates and trends notes, “The abortion rate was lower … where more women live under liberal abortion laws.”
Why? Because laws restricting abortion tend to be most prevalent in places where contraception and comprehensive sex education are hard to obtain, and in which sex and childbirth outside marriage are anathematised. Young people have sex, whatever their elders say; they always have and always will. Those with the least information and the least access to birth control are the most likely to suffer unintended pregnancies. And what greater incentive could there be for terminating a pregnancy than a culture in which reproduction out of wedlock is a mortal sin?
How many more centuries of misery, mutilation and mortality are required before we understand that women – young or middle aged, within marriage or without – who do not want a child may go to almost any lengths to terminate an unwanted pregnancy? How much more evidence do we need that, in the absence of legal, safe procedures, such sophisticated surgical instruments as wire coathangers, knitting needles, bleach and turpentine will be deployed instead? How many more poisonings, punctured guts and burst wombs are required before we recognise that prohibition and moral suasion will not trounce women’s need to own their lives?
The most recent meta-analysis of global trends, published in 2012, discovered that the abortion rate, after a sharp decline between 1995 and 2003, scarcely changed over the following five years. But the proportion that were unsafe (which, broadly speaking, means illegal), rose from 44% to 49%.
Most of this change was due to a sharp rise in unsafe abortions in West Asia (which includes the Middle East), where Islamic conservatism is resurgent. In the regions in which Christian doctrine exerts the strongest influence over legislation – west and middle Africa and central and south America – there was no rise. But that’s only because the proportion of abortions that were illegal and unsafe already stood at 100%.
As for the overall induced abortion rate, the figures tell an interesting story. Western Europe has the world’s lowest termination rate: 12 per year for every 1000 women of reproductive age. The more godly North America aborts 19 embryos for every 1000 women. In South America, where (when the figures were collected) the practice was banned everywhere, the rate was 32. In eastern Africa, where ferocious laws and powerful religious injunctions should – according to conservative theory – have stamped out the practice long ago, it was 38.
The weird outlier is eastern Europe, which has the world’s highest abortion rate: 43 per 1000. Under communism, abortion was the only available form of medical birth control. The rate has fallen from 90 since 1995, as contraception has become easier to obtain, but there’s still a long way to go.
Facts, who needs ‘em? Across the red states of the US, legislators have been merrily passing laws that make abortion clinics impossible to run, while denying children effective sex education. In Texas, thanks to restrictive new statutes, over half the clinics have closed since 2013. But women are still obliged to visit three times before receiving treatment: in some cases this means travelling 1000 miles or more. Unsurprisingly, 7% of those seeking medical help have already attempted their own solutions.
The only reason why this has not caused an epidemic of abdominal trauma is the widespread availability, through unlicensed sales, of abortion drugs such as misoprostol and mifepristone. They’re unsafe when used without professional advice, but not as unsafe as coathangers and household chemicals.
In June, the US Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of the latest Texan assault on legal terminations, the statute known as HB2. If the state of Texas wins, this means, in effect, the end of Roe v Wade, the decision that deemed abortion a fundamental right in the United States.
In Northern Ireland the new first minister, Arlene Foster, who took office on Monday, has vowed to ensure that the 1967 abortion act, which covers the rest of the United Kingdom, will not apply to her country. Women there will continue to buy pills (and run the risk of confiscation as the police rifle their post) or travel to England, at some expense and trauma. Never mind the finding of a High Court judge: “there is no evidence before this court that the law in Northern Ireland has resulted in any reduction in the number of abortions”. It just warms the heart to see Protestant and Catholic fundamentalists setting aside their differences to ensure that women’s bodies remain the property of the state.
Like them, I see human life as precious. Like them, I want to see a reduction in abortions. So I urge states to do the opposite of what they prescribe. If you want fewer induced abortions, you should support education that encourages children to talk about sex without embarrassment or secrecy; contraception that’s freely available to everyone; an end to the stigma surrounding sex and birth before marriage.
The religious conservatives who oppose these measures have blood on their hands. They are responsible for high abortion rates; they are responsible for the injury and death of women. And they have the flaming cheek to talk about the sanctity of life.

monbiot

Σε μια συζήτηση τις προάλλες στο ιστολόγιο του πρτφ, κάποιος από τους σχολιαστές (ClouD) πέταξε ένα σύνδεσμο που αποδείχτηκε πραγματική τροφή για σκέψη. Δυστυχώς το κείμενο είναι στα αγγλικά και αρκετά μεγάλο για να το μεταφράσω. Για τους αγγλομαθείς, που διαθέτουν υπομονή και όρεξη για σκέψη, το παραθέτω αυτούσιο:

What the Internet is doing to our brains

by Nicholas Carr

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum  observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing  proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor  carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In 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 because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of 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. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman  eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Αφού δεν βρέθηκε ούτε ένας Έλληνας να συνοψίσει τόσο καλά τα γεγονότα, ας αφήσουμε έναν Νεοζηλανδό συγγραφέα / ακτιβιστή (μεταξύ άλλων) ο οποίος ζει στα Εξάρχεια εδώ και 6 χρόνια να μας τα πει. Ευχαριστώ την φίλη Χριστίνα (επίσης κάτοικο Εξαρχείων) η οποία μου έστειλε το email. Προσοχή το κείμενο που ακολουθεί είναι άκρως διαφωτιστικό και γραμμένο σε τέλεια αγγλικά! Ακολουθεί μετάφραση στα ελληνικά.

Rant about Athens Riots

By Rowan Thorpe

Dec 8, 2008 (12:44 PM)

On 6 December 2008, a youth was shot dead by police in Exarcheia. According to police this was after a group of "approximately 30 stone-throwing people" charged their patrol car. According to other sources it was "a small group". According to other sources it was after an argument. This has escalated into rioting in several parts of Greece, particularly in Athens. Regarding these absurd events I am, as usual, most disgusted by how the mass media are relishing the chance to manipulate their viewers/readers by perverting stories and stirring up biased, sensationalist opinions.

To the actual concerned parties, I have three things to say...

...to the so-called "police", I quote:

The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own.
- H.G. Wells

...to the so-called "anarchists", I quote:

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
- Wilhelm Stekel

...to the so-called "reporters", I quote:

There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.
- John Stuart Mill ("On Liberty"), 1859

By the way, I deliberately referred to "police", "anarchists", and "reporters" in quotation-marks, with a deliberate sarcasm, because as far as I've seen, an alarming majority of all three of these parties are not actually being what they claim to be. Disturbingly, most of them are in fact immature, uneducated pretenders running around playing "cops-and-robbers", making the situation steadily worse for those of us who are actually trying to make a real, lasting, positive difference.

I've lost count of how many times I've been in discussion with young people who make grand, heroic claims about the level of knowledge and motivation held by themselves and their peers regarding their "anarchist cause", but when I query the depth of their knowledge about actual Anarchist theory (as a system of political and economic concepts dating from as early as the 1600's, possibly earlier, and which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with chaotic violence), they quickly revert to breathless ranting, amounting to no more than "down with the system, man!". Equally, I've had several opportunities to be a bystander and witness young excitable police bordering on instigating violent reactions, in areas such as Omonoia and Exarcheia, and have been able to discern that the biggest reason they put themselves through police-academy was so they could legally carry a gun. For these people I quote (from http://www.wikipedia.org):

The word "anarchy" is often used by non-anarchists as a pejorative term, intended to connote a lack of control and a negatively chaotic environment. Because of this, some activists have self-identified as libertarian socialists. In more recent times anti-authoritarian has offered another similar self-identification. However, anarchists still argue that anarchy does not imply nihilism, anomie, or the total absence of rules, but rather an anti-authoritarian society that is based on the spontaneous order of free individuals in autonomous communities, operating on principles of mutual aid, voluntary association, and direct action.

...and my advice to all of these people is:

Educate yourselves. Don't claim to wave a flag for a cause you don't even understand. Equally, don't claim a level of authority which extends beyond your level of maturity and responsibility. It offends those who actually understand the causes, and actually have a sense of responsibility. If you use a trendy-sounding name as an excuse to vent your anger every time you don't get everything you ask for in life, then you are not an Anarchist, Socialist, an anything-"ist", or a "Police Authority" either. You are merely an uneducated vandal, destroying the hard-earned efforts of the mature members of this society who are quietly trying to make this a better place for our children to live in.

After living in Exarcheia for several years, and watching the farcical events that would unfold below my window every 17 November, I was left with one impression. With the exception of literally only one or two people, here was an excuse for a team of young thugs in balaclavas to have a bit of a "punch-up" with a team of young thugs in uniforms. That would in turn provide an opportunity for hordes of irresponsible "reporters" to write or broadcast absurdly unrealistic "articles" (complete with Mahler soundtracks and fast-cut special effects) about this mighty "clash of the titans", which would give all the couch-potatoes at home a brief moment's excitement, to stir them out of the frustrating boredom of their lives for at least a day or two. The level of bad-taste is so far off the scale that it makes me feel ill. Meanwhile, the biggest crime of all is that "the men behind the curtain" (politicians and international money-shifters) always systematically use these events to whitewash, cover-up and distract the public while carefully pushing through their most seedy policies and legislations. If you people in the streets realised just how much you are being used in this perverse chess-game, as pawns of distraction in order for the kings and queens (on both sides) to do exactly what they want (and have always wanted), then you would be really angry. And then you would actually want to do something more substantial than throwing firebombs and wielding police-truncheons. And if you "reporters" were to realise just how much your malleability is being cynically exploited by rich, powerful men for increasing their wealth and control, you would perhaps also be angry enough to free yourself from the money-fuelled mass-media circus and actually report some Truth.

Violence and impulsiveness is not Big, and it's not Clever. It's childish, and when everyone behaves childishly for long enough children inevitably end up being killed, and everyone childishly points the finger at all the wrong people.

Educate yourselves. Or we will all drown in hate-filled ignorance...


Μετάφραση:
Πομπώδη λόγια για τις ταραχές στην Αθήνα
Του Rowan Thorpe

Στις 6 Δεκεμβρίου 2008, ένας νεαρός έπεσε νεκρός από πυροβολισμούς από την αστυνομία στα Εξάρχεια. Σύμφωνα με την αστυνομία ήταν μια ομάδα "από περίπου 30 άτομα που ρίχνουν πέτρες" προς το περιπολικό. Σύμφωνα με άλλες πηγές, ήταν "μια μικρή ομάδα". Σύμφωνα με άλλες πηγές ήταν μετά από λογομαχία. Αυτό έχει κλιμακωθεί σε ταραχές σε πολλές περιοχές της Ελλάδας, ιδιαίτερα στην Αθήνα. Όσον αφορά αυτές τις παράλογες εκδηλώσεις , ως συνήθως, είμαι αηδιασμένος από τον τρόπο που τα περισσότερα μέσα μαζικής ενημέρωσης δράττωνται της ευκαιρίας να χειραγωγήσουν τους θεατές / αναγνώστες διαστρεβλώνοντας ιστορίες και υποκινώντας προκαταλείψεις, και απόψεις εντυπωσιασμού.
Για τα πραγματικά εμπλεκόμενα μέρη, έχω να πω τρία πράγματα ...
... για τη λεγόμενη "αστυνομία", παραθέτω:

Ο νομοθέτης, απ'όλους τους ανθρώπους, οφείλει περισσότερη υποταγή στο δίκαιο. Αυτόν περισσότερο απ'όλους πρέπει να υποχρεώνει ο νόμος. Αλλά είναι καθολική αδυναμία της ανθρωπότητας, αυτό που μας δίνεται για να διαχειριστούμε να το φανταζόμαστε δικό μας.
- H. G. Wells

... και για τους λεγόμενους "αναρχικούς", παραθέτω:

Το σήμα του ανώριμου ανθρώπου είναι ότι θέλει να πεθάνει ευγενικά για μια αιτία, ενώ το σήμα του ώριμου ανθρώπου είναι να θέλει να ζήσει ταπεινά για ένα.
- Wilhelm Stekel

... και για τους λεγόμενους "δημοσιογράφους", παραθέτω:

Πάντα υπάρχει ελπίδα όταν οι άνθρωποι αναγκάζονται να ακούσουν και τις δύο πλευρές. Είναι όταν παρίστανται μόνο σε μία που ισχυροποιούν τα λάθη σε προκαταλήψεις, και έτσι η ίδια η αλήθεια παύει να έχει ως αποτέλεσμα την αλήθεια, διότι μεγαλοποιείται σε ψεύδος.
- John Stuart Mill ( "On Liberty"), 1859

Κατά τα άλλα αναφέρομαι στην "αστυνομία", "αναρχικούς", και "δημοσιογράφους" σε εισαγωγικά, με σκόπιμο σαρκασμό, επειδή όσο μπορώ να δω, μια ανησυχητική πλειοψηφία όλων αυτών των τριών κατηγοριών δεν είναι πράγματι αυτό που ισχυρίζονται ότι είναι. Ανησυχητικά, οι περισσότεροι από αυτούς είναι στην πραγματικότητα ανώριμα άτομα, αγράμματοι ημιμαθείς που τρέχουν και παίζουν "κλέφτες και αστυνόμους", κάνοντας την κατάσταση να επιδεινώνεται σταθερά για εμάς που προσπαθούμε να κάνουμε μια πραγματική, διαρκή, θετική διαφορά.
Έχω χάσει τον λογαριασμό πόσες φορές έχω έλθει σε συζήτηση με νέους που κάνουν μεγάλους, ηρωικούς ισχυρισμούς για το επίπεδο των γνώσεων και των κινήτρων που διακατέχονται αυτοί και οι συμμαθητές τους όσον αφορά τον "αναρχικό σκοπό", αλλά όταν διερεύνησα το βάθος των γνώσεών τους σχετικά με την πραγματική αναρχική θεωρία (ως ένα σύστημα πολιτικών και οικονομικών εννοιών που χρονολογείται από το 1600 κιόλας, ενδεχομένως και νωρίτερα, και η οποία δεν έχει τίποτα να κάνει με τη χαοτική βία), γρήγορα επανέρχονται χωρίς ανάσα και με στόμφο,σε τίποτα άλλο παρά "κάτω το σύστημα, φίλε!". Επίσης, είχα πολλές ευκαιρίες να παρευρίσκομαι και να παρακολουθώ ευερέθιστους μικρούς σε ηλικία αστυνομικούς να κάνουν πράγματα που συνορεύουν με βίαιες αντιδράσεις, σε τομείς όπως η Ομόνοια και Εξάρχεια, και μπόρεσα να διακρίνω ότι ο μεγαλύτερος λόγος που βάζουν τον εαυτό τους μέσα στην αστυνομική ακαδημία ήταν ότι θα μπορούσαν νόμιμα να φέρουν όπλο. Για αυτούς τους ανθρώπους παραθέτω (από http://www.wikipedia.org):

Η λέξη "αναρχία" χρησιμοποιείται συχνά από μη αναρχικούς ως υποτιμητικός όρος, που προορίζεται να υποδηλώνει την έλλειψη ελέγχου και αρνητικά χαοτικό περιβάλλον. Για αυτό το λόγο, ορισμένοι ακτιβιστές έχουν αυτο-προσδιοριστεί ως σοσιαλιστές ελευθερίας. Σε πιο πρόσφατες περιόδους η λέξη αντιεξουσιαστές έχει προσφέρει άλλο ένα παρόμοιο αυτο-προσδιορισμό. Ωστόσο, οι αναρχικοί υποστηρίζουν ακόμη ότι αναρχία δεν σημαίνει μηδενισμός, ανομία, ή η πλήρης απουσία κανόνων, αλλά μάλλον μία αντι-εξουσιαστική κοινωνία που βασίζεται στην αυθόρμητη τάξη των ελεύθερων ατόμων σε αυτόνομες κοινότητες, που λειτουργούν υπό τις αρχές της αμοιβαίας βοήθειας, του εθελοντικού συναιτερισμού, και της άμεσης δράσης.

... και η συμβουλή μου προς όλους αυτούς τους ανθρώπους είναι:
Εκπαιδεύστε τους εαυτούς σας. Μην ισχυρίζεστε κρατάτε μια σημαία για μια αιτία που δεν καταλαβαίνετε ακόμη. Επίσης, μην ισχυρίζεστε ότι έχετε ένα επίπεδο αρχής, η οποία εκτείνεται πέρα από το επίπεδο ωριμότητας και ευθύνης σας. Αυτό προσβάλλει όσους πραγματικά έχουν κατανοήσει τα αίτια, και έχουν στην πραγματικότητα το αίσθημα της ευθύνης. Εάν χρησιμοποιείτε ένα μοντέρνο όνομα ως δικαιολογία για να βρίσκει διέξοδο ο θυμός σας κάθε φορά που δεν έχετε ότι ζητάτε από τη ζωή, τότε δεν είσαι αναρχικός, σοσιαλιστής ή "Αστυνομική Αρχή". Είστε απλώς ένας αμόρφωτος βάνδαλος, που καταστρέψει ότι κέρδισαν με σκληρή προσπάθεια τα ώριμα μέλη αυτής της κοινωνίας που είναι ήσυχα και προσπαθούν να φτιάξουν ένα καλύτερο μέρος για να ζήσουν τα παιδιά μας.
Αφού έζησα στα Εξάρχεια για αρκετά χρόνια, και βλέποντας τα γελοία γεγονότα που γινόταν κάτω από το παράθυρο μου κάθε 17 Νοεμβρίου, εχω μείνει με μια εντύπωση. Με εξαίρεση κυριολεκτικά, ενός ή δύο ατόμων μόνο, ήταν μια δικαιολογία για μια ομάδα νέων κακοποιών με κουκούλες για να έχουν μια κάποια "μάχη" με μια ομάδα νέων κακοποιών με στολές. Αυτό με τη σειρά του θα δώσει την ευκαιρία σε ορδές ανεύθυνων "Ρεπόρτερ" να γράψουν ή να μεταδώσουν με παράλογο τρόπο μη ρεαλιστικά "άρθρα" (με τη μουσική υπόκρουση Mahler soundtracks και ειδικά εφέ) σχετικά με τούτη τη "σύγκρουση των Τιτάνων", η οποία θα δώσει όλους τους "καναπεδάκηδες" στο σπίτι μια σύντομη στιγμή ενθουσιασμού, να τους "ταράξει" από την απογοητευτική ανία της ζωής τους για τουλάχιστον μία ημέρα ή δύο. Το επίπεδο της κακογουστιάς είναι τόσο υψηλό που με αρρωσταίνει. Εν τω μεταξύ, το μεγαλύτερο έγκλημα όλων είναι ότι "οι άνδρες πίσω από την κουρτίνα" (πολιτικοί και διεθνείς διακινητές χρημάτων) πάντα χρησιμοποιούν συστηματικά τα γεγονότα αυτά για να ξεπλύνουν, να καλύψουν, και να αποπροσανατολίσουν την προσοχή του κοινού, ενώ ταυτόχρονα προωθούν τις πιο ελεεινές πολιτικές και νομοθεσίες. Εάν εσείς, οι άνθρωποι στους δρόμους συνειδητοποιήσετε πόσο πολύ σας χρησιμοποιούν σε αυτό το διεστραμμένο παιχνίδι σκακιού, ως πιόνια περισπασμού ώστε οι βασιλιάδες και βασίλισσες (και στις δύο πλευρές) να κάνουν ακριβώς αυτό που θέλουν (και πάντα ήθελαν), τότε θα θυμώσετε πραγματικά. Και τότε πραγματικά θα θέλετε να κάνετε κάτι πιο ουσιαστικό απ' το να πετάτε μολότωφ και να καδραίνετε αστυνομικά ρόπαλα. Και αν ήταν οι "ρεπόρτερ" να συνειδητοποιήσουν πόσο πολύ η ελατότης τους γίνεται κυνικά αντικείμενο εκμετάλλευσης από πλούσιους, ισχυρούς άνδρες για την αύξηση του πλούτου τους και τον έλεγχο, θα είσασταν ίσως αρκετά θυμωμένοι ώστε να ελευθερώσετε τον εαυτό σας από το με χρήματα τροφοδοτούμενο τσίρκο των μέσων μαζικής ενημέρωσης και να αναφέρετε πράγματι κάποια Αλήθεια.
Η βία και ο αυθόρμητισμός δεν είναι Μεγάλοι, και δεν είναι Έξυπνοι. Είναι παιδιάστικο και όταν ο καθένας συμπεριφέρεται παιδαριωδώς για αρκετά μεγάλο χρονικό διάστημα, τα παιδιά αναπόφευκτα καταλήγουν να χάσουν τη ζωή, και όλοι παιδαριωδώς δείχνουν με το δάχτυλο όλους τους λάθος ανθρώπους.
Εκπαιδεύστε τους εαυτούς σας. Ή όλοι θα πνιγούμε σε μια γεμάτη μίσος άγνοια ...