writing – The Extensible Librarian

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport. New York: Grand Central (Hachette), 2016. 296 p. ISBN 978-1-4555-8669-1 $28.00 list

Cal Newport became a guru of study hacks after publishing Study Hacks, two other books, a dissertation, and six articles. Clearly “do as I say and as I do,” he knows his subject. Deep Work extends his thinking to sharper critique of the glut of social information that distracts many people.

Newport is especially sharply critical of Facebook (including the new Facebook headquarters building), Twitter, and the well-recognized Fear of Missing Out (FOMA) that can drive compulsive distraction and seriously erode the quality and quantity of work. His critique is well-sustained, but its claims to be counter-cultural or disruptive are overblown: numerous other writers have critiqued the culture of distraction, including Neil Postman, Nicholas Carr, and Sherry Turkle.

Newport’s positive formulation of deep work betrays a certain ambivalence at the heart of the book. Deep work is “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limits. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”(p. 3) By contrast shallow work is “noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”)(p. 6) His hypothesis: "the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare . . . [and] valuable . . . . The few who cultivate this skill with thrive."(p. 14) His goal: to help you be one who can work deeply, a noble aim. His examples are not always convincing, however.

His leading example (which opens the book), Carl Jung’s creation of Bollingen Tower as a retreat for his writing, is more multi-faceted than Newport suggests. Jung retreated to his tower to write without distraction, but based in large part on his interaction with patients in Zurich. Later Newport identifies Jung’s “bimodal” pattern, contrasting the Tower with Zurich, a “busy clinical practice,” “gave and attended many lectures,” “active participant in the Zurich coffeehouse culture,” all suggesting to Newport the hyper-connected, digital-age knowledge worker: “replace ‘Zurich’ with ‘San Francisco’ and ‘letter’ with ‘tweet’ and we could be discussing some hotshot tech CEO.” (p. 107)

I think this is a serious, ideologically-driven misunderstanding of Jung’s life in Zurich, and life's work. Jung’s own writings are filled with episodes, instances, and cases from his practice in Zurich. To suggest that Jung’s work in Zurich was “shallow work” devalues his clinical practice and Jung’s whole motivation for developing depth psychology and disputes with Sigmund Freud. The ideas and art work Jung picked up in his Zurich life provided some of the critical raw material from which he fashioned his singular and valuable insights in the Tower. Suggesting that Jung’s beautifully written letters are the work equivalent of contemporary tweets is simply preposterous and and fundamentally misconstrues Jung’s life’s work. Valuable as Jung's deep concentration in the Tower was, it never would have amounted to much without his corresponding life in the city.

Newport's other examples (Adam Grant, Jack Dorsey for example) probably work better, but tend towards the two-dimensional. This valuable book has to be read with caution.

In the end, I am left with the uneasy sense that Newport’s beloved “deep work” is really what computer scientists do. (He is an associate professor at Georgetown.) His concept of deep work is less applicable to those whose work is primarily leading people and organizations. I know in my own work as a library director that sometimes I have to work on a project uninterrupted. Some interruptions are shallow, but some definitely deep: the work I do listening to coworkers, helping them develop their ideas, skill and insights, indeed pushes my cognitive and emotional capabilities, improves my abilities, is hard to replicate mechanically, and (I hope) creates value. Every encounter with a colleague is not deep work, but I always have to be alert to the moment when it turns deep, sometimes on a dime.

I completely accept Newport’s critique of the numerous, superficial distractions of social media, e-mail, and news, and the confusion of busyness with productivity. But his concept of deep work needs broadening and humanizing. This seems to be the work of a very confident and highly creative young professor appropriately characterized as brilliant, creative, and important, but whose very brilliance and confidence may have drawn him towards an unnecessarily narrow conception of generosity, significance, and depth of insight. I wonder how his ideas will change over time, work, and experience. I would really like to find out, because it will be important.

This post refers back to the post (below) of May 14, 2010, and the post of August 25.

In those posts, I mentioned Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia) and his article Individual Knowledge and the Internet. Sanger analyzes three common strands of current thought about education and the Internet. "First is the idea that the instant availability of knowledge online makes memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary." The second strand claims that "individual learning is outmoded, and that "social learning" is the cornerstone of "Learning 2.0" (The third two strand will be examined more fully in a later post.)

Why do I return to an article published a year ago? I believe that Sanger is on to something: a superficial, misleading articulation among certain educationists that learning has become fundamentally different with the advent of social web tools. On the contrary, Sanger see such tools as fancy tools, but only as tool towards a very similar end: the content and method of liberal learning which remains to be done, no matter what the technological environment. I agree with him. I think that Sanger's argument is worth continuing, if only because, as the bloom seems to be coming off some Web tools, this is a teachable moment to ask, what does it mean to be truly educated?

But back to Sanger's critique of a second strand of thinking about learning adn the Internet: that individual patterns of learning are outmoded, and the new pattern of learning (thoroughly invested in and enabled by Web social tools) is collaborate, social group learning. Just as some educationists' first claim that the Web has made memorization unnecessary (by in part caricaturing all remembered content as mere rote, unreflective memorization), so this strand caricatures individual learning as --well, individualistic-- as lonely, uncreative, and private to the point of solipsism.

Now group learning and social learning using social web interaction --wikis, online conversations, online fora of all sorts, can certainly be valuable. They can also have problems, and carry costs and benefits which a wise teacher can choose to use as time, attention, and the situation suggest. This is to say that these tools are exactly that: tools; that other tools (reading a book, an article, summarizing a paper, writing a poem, translating a passage, or other traditional activities) might also be useful, or not, as the situation suggests.

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler, however, go much further (in the article cited above). The go on to claim that "collaborative learning" is "the core model of pedagogy," and that of course digital platforms alone enable this. Asking what is meant by social learning, they claim:

Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.

In other words, social learning shifts focus from content to process, which "stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning." This view (according to Brown and Adler) views knowledge as a kind of "substance" and that pedagogy --the art of teaching-- concerns how to transfer this substance from those who know to those who do not yet know, i.e. from teachers to students. This "transfer" contrasts with the "constructed" knowledge students arrive at collaboratively. How "substance" differs from "construction" is left unsaid. As Sanger points out:

One could just as easily, and with just as much justification, assert that what is constructed in social learning is a "substance" that is socially shared. One can simply say instead that Cartesian learning involves the teacher causing the student to believe something that is true, by communicating the true thought.

In any case, Brown's and Adler's understanding of "Cartesian" (by extension, of Descartes) is laughably superficial. "Substance" is not a prominent term for Descartes, who though that each person's mind is a substance, not knowledge itself. Brown and Adler have simply adopted an idea from widely repeated (and vague) academic discourse that knowledge is a social construction (certainly a problematic idea --just ask a physicist). Knowledge as a kind of "substance" is much more Aristotelian or even Thomist, but those thinkers are too intimidating to serve well as a kind of fashionable foil for social constructivists. Thankfully Brown and Adler did not drag Kant into this.

The distinction boils down to learning with or without the presence and support of peers. Certainly some people need peers in order to maximize their abilities to learn; others need solitude. Isn't this obvious? The view that social learning is therefore superior is easy to claim, but very difficult to verify in any meaningful manner, because "social learning" simply lacks the definitional heft to test rigorously. The several tools which Brown and Adler present as examples of social learning are interesting, but cannot bear the entire weight of presenting an alternative to a straw-man "Cartesian."

Ultimately, you have to do your own reading, no matter how the Decameron or the Divine Comedy come to you (to think of two classic texts with extensive online tools). You may post your thoughts in essays on a blog or wiki (as I am doing), but the act of writing is still solitary, and needs practice for mastery. (I certainly don't claim the latter!) Discussion in any forum, whether face-to-face or online, is a great thing --but I agree with Sanger that a true scholar needs the ability to think independently. A scholar is not automatically a member of a herd. You might get a lot of help from peers to learn maths, science, management, economics, or a host of subjects --but if you don't master the material yourself, then you haven't learned it. If you can't do the problems yourself, you haven't mastered them. Your peers will not be omnipresent, whether in an examination, or on the job.

I agree with Sanger that those four activities --reading, writing, critical thinking, and calculating-- are crucial to liberal education. A person who can't do them can't really be called educated. Social learning is an important supplement to, but not a replacement of, individual learning.

Why does this matter to me as a librarian? I am involved with planning a library renovation --I am making sure that there will be both group and individual spaces for study. Part of liberal learning includes memorization, reading, writing, independent judgement, calculating --exactly the kind of independently responsible learning so much in demand by knowledge workers today and in the future. What goes on in a library is individual learning, supplemented by group learning. Individual knowledge is still necessary in the internet age, and "social learning" without individual knowledge is insufficient to the tasks of reading, writing, critical judgement, and calculating. At the end of the day, you have to wipe your own nose, say your own prayers, reading your own texts, and work your own problems.