Digital Dieting: From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness, by Tara Brabazon

Once upon a time, university lecturers swanned around market towns and small cities across Europe wearing impressive black gowns. They spent their days earning a decent crust teaching the teenage sons of the middle classes and nobility how to read books and understand them. Indeed, if you walk around modern Cambridge and Oxford, you can see the vestiges of this post-monastic university structure in the design of the colleges and the rhythm of the day. It weaves its way through the curriculum as well – it’s hard to leave there as a student without inadvertently experiencing some of the joys of the medieval trivium and quadrivium in their various contemporary forms. This might mean learning the point of mathematics from someone sat next to you at dinner, discovering how to debate (aka “disputation”, albeit no longer in Latin) and being encouraged to take a casual interest in astronomy via open evenings at the university’s fine observatory. The medieval curriculum and its quest for knowledge may be under the modern radar, but it is certainly still there – quiet, timeless and deep.

This respect for the life of the mind is something all universities still aspire to. We see the words “knowledge”, “scholarship” and “collegiality” in most of the documents that pass across our desks as academics in the 21st century. Students are encouraged to visit libraries, to read and to discuss what they are learning. We gently try to share this knowledge, so carefully nurtured, with the outside world. We hope that students will be of like mind and that they will, in turn, take over the baton of knowledge from us on behalf of mankind. In many ways, to be an academic is ultimately to have faith in human nature.

Do not despair. This accessible, informative book is replete with strategies for addressing students’ information-age malaise

That’s the ideal, anyway. In her book Digital Dieting, Tara Brabazon highlights how precarious this model of learning has suddenly become in the aftermath of the post-1980s technological revolution. (Before that, all lecturers had to worry about was the introduction of the printing press, making dictation by candlelight unnecessary, and forcing them to raise their game a bit when actually interacting with students.) If you want to feel frustrated and anxious in equal measure, read this book’s introduction, which includes extracts of student emails sent to Brabazon in the course of her work and which she carefully analyses. It is clear in reading these spurious essay excuses, cheeky requests for editing services and frankly lazy demands for bullet-point summaries of complex subject matter that education has become as commoditised as it is possible to be, enabled all too often by university administrators keen to force lecturers to use clunky and frustrating multimedia delivery tools in the name of progress.

Linked to this commoditisation, argues Brabazon, is the newly unlimited access to knowledge. Previously if you wanted to know something, you searched in an archive or library and gradually drilled down into the subject matter. Building one’s own knowledge from this process was often uncomfortable but was immensely rewarding. Much has changed. We are now presented with large volumes of knowledge that satisfy us easily with comparatively little intellectual effort. Brabazon uses the analogy of fast food to represent this shift, which links nicely to the title of the book. Yet it leaves any sane lecturer feeling hopeless and rather depressed at the apparently sinking prospects for students’ intellectual development. Even those who do read books and journal articles often do little more than skim the surface, plucking quotations out of context and bandying around half-understood nuggets of knowledge in order to sound scholarly. (And if any of my former students are reading this, I’m sorry to say that for quite a few of you it’s true. You are in good company, though, because I can think of at least one government minister who has made this his stock-in-trade.)

Readers of Digital Dieting should not despair, however. This very accessible and informative book may be frank about the down and dirty of teaching in the modern university, but it is replete with strategies for addressing students’ information-age malaise. Brabazon backfills this via her detailed analysis of the problem. Let me give a few examples. Relatively early on in the book, she introduces Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical concept of hyperreality – an unknowing copy of a copy or a representation of a representation, rather than something authentic in its own right – and links it to students’ confusion about the value of different sources. She then maps this across to different courses (the chapter on PhD study is particularly shrewd). Brabazon discusses trying to deliver on that holy of holies, the “student experience”, in the face of organisational techno-panic (here her chapter on developing an online and offline master’s module is very instructive, although it did bring me out in a cold sweat). She uses the work of Paul Willis to highlight the role of social reproduction in compromising educational outcomes in the chapter “Learning to leisure”. It’s a massive undertaking, locating what seems like the whole of higher education within a research-based digital literacy context, but she manages it very well.

Then there’s the Brabazon view of social networking and gadgets, gadgets, gadgets, which appear to have replaced sex as the undergraduate obsessions of choice. Her analysis of the iPad is deployed as a means of discussing obsolescence, for example, but it goes beyond this point to illuminate the lived experience of technology for lecturers and students alike. (It also addresses the infernal problem of how to autocue self-recorded lectures without a handy film crew camped in your study, and for that I am very grateful.) Finally there is a damning critique of the way PowerPoint slides are habitually used and how it undermines students’ abilities to follow a narrative and develop their own notes. I am put in mind of the comments of a chemistry undergraduate I once interviewed for a research study looking at how different higher education courses were structured. As he put it so eloquently: “I felt like saying to the lecturer, hey mate, instead of just reading the slides out in a monotone, why don’t you bugger off and have a coffee and we can read the slides for ourselves?” Out of the mouths of babes…

By the time we get to the conclusion, we learn that the way forward is comparatively simple. We need to discourage social networking, at least at the level of intensity experienced by many students today. We also need to remove a lot of the institutional technology we are using, which involves students experiencing a significant degree of text-based disorientation, before going back to basics and teaching students in a way that our medieval forebears might recognise. In essence, this means teaching them concentration, attention and focus above all else, even if it is uncomfortable for them. Brabazon closes her book with a call to arms, urging us to fight for intelligence rather than ignorance and wisdom rather than gluttony.

I can’t argue with that; can you?