For the better part of a decade, we’ve been reckoning with the place that social media and online spaces should have in our lives. Are they tools to engage with only when necessary, or digital communities to exist and form relationships and have discussions?
As more and more young people and children live much of life online, we’re starting to see the negative impacts on attention span and mental health.
And at the same time, colleges and universities are making deep cuts to humanities programs — and Emily Anhalt says that’s a missed opportunity to counteract the negative psychological impacts of digital culture.
Anhalt is a classic literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College, and The Show spoke with her recently about an article she wrote on this subject for “The American Scholar.” Anhalt’s piece is called “The Art of Coping” — which, she says, is exactly what great literature can help students do.
Full conversation
EMILY ANHALT: I find this situation extremely tragic, but also ironic. Because we are systematically depriving students of tools that have been developed over centuries.
SAM DINGMAN: Well, this was one of the things that was so thrilling to me to read in the article that you wrote about this, was this idea that one of the values in engaging with the humanities and classic texts and stories in particular is that by and large these are narratives about human beings coping with the unfairness of life.
ANHALT: Yes, exactly, and these are, these are the works that have stood the test of time. And I don't just mean classical works. I think the work, the art and literature and historiography of all peoples and places has the value of having lasted, having endured, because it has a lot to say about the human condition.
DINGMAN: Well, so as an example in your piece about this, you write in particular about the stories of Homer. You go all the way back to the Greeks. Can you give us an example of one of the stories that illustrates this for you?
ANHALT: Perhaps the most obvious one, and because it's in the zeitgeist right now, that is the stories about Odysseus, and there are new movies coming out about Odysseus, and Odysseus is a figure who exemplifies the vicissitudes of fortune. He starts out as a very beloved king, very powerful in his own community. He's a conqueror. Then he is a shipwrecked sailor and he's totally destitute. He arrives home as a beggar, and he ultimately becomes a king once again.
So he exemplifies how, how do you deal with these ups and downs in human life? And for one thing, he never gives up. And for another, he actually kind of enjoys the challenge. And I think one of the things my students need to experience is the delights of persistence.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, and one of the other things that you write about is this idea that in many of these ancient stories, particularly in the Greek literature, when characters make it to a kind of paradise, a place that is ostensibly free from torment. It's not exactly gratifying.
ANHALT: Odysseus experiences this idyllic paradise on the island of Calypso, which is a magical place. He's hosted by a goddess who's exquisitely beautiful. He has every creature comfort. He's in a beautiful setting, beach, beachside setting, and he's miserable because he wants to go home. And when Calypso offers him immortality, he turns it down.
Part of his reason for leaving is that if he stayed in paradise, no one would ever know about him, and for the Greeks, the thing that you strive for is for everyone to remember your exploits ever after because they didn't think of the afterlife as anything desirable at all. And again, Odysseus is the example of that. He turns down an offer to stay there forever. It's sort of a fairy tale paradise, and he says no thanks.
And I liken it in the article to people spending a lot of time in virtual spaces …
DINGMAN: Yes!
ANHALT: With, with escapist television and film …
DINGMAN: Much of which, right, is designed to be free of torment to reduce any kind of friction between the consumer of that media and opinions, attitudes, ideas that they might disagree with.
ANHALT: Yes, exactly, and just like the places that Odysseus visits, those virtual spaces are designed to, to seduce you, to lure you in. But our time is such a valuable commodity that we have, so any time we spend doing that is time taken away from other things that might actually give us more emotional and psychological rewards.
DINGMAN: And there is such an interesting parallel, I think, between the supernatural elements that somebody like Odysseus encounters and the algorithms that power these online spaces, which are somewhat supernatural in nature, not in the sense that, you know, they're actually ghostly or something like that, but precious few people can actually explain to you how they work.
ANHALT: Yeah, even, even the designers and and the thing about the algorithms is they bring us ourselves, they bring us what, what we are interested in what we, what we believe. Whereas reading a work of literature can take you somewhere entirely new. I find for my students that reading these kinds of works takes them outside of themselves and gives them something else to think about besides their own anxieties. And at the same time, these works enable students to realize that their own struggles are not unique, but they are in fact part of the human condition.
DINGMAN: Yeah, and, and have been going back to antiquity.
ANHALT: Exactly.
DINGMAN: This conversation is making me think about a post I saw on social media recently. You may have seen the same one and it's of a piece with many others, but somebody who is a big AI evangelist put up something basically saying, you know:
I don't know why people are so against ChatGPT, you could either read a book a month or have ChatGPT teach you the big takeaways from 100 books a week.
And that makes me think about the way that you write about the role of AI in your classroom.
ANHALT: Yeah, I'm, it's, it's a hard sell, but I tell my students, AI can tell you what other people have thought about these works, but it can't tell you what you think about these works. And the point is in the process, it's what you discover by encountering them. I give the analogy that using AI, whether it's for reading these texts or for helping write student papers about them, would be like purchasing a gym membership. And then having someone else use it for you and thinking that you'll get fit that way.
DINGMAN: That's, yeah, I have often wished that I could find somebody to use my gym membership for me.
ANHALT: We all do, but it, but it doesn't really help us that much.
DINGMAN: Yes, well, it seems like the case that you're trying to make to your students here is I understand why it may seem like a way of addressing this baseline anxiety that you feel to take these shortcuts, but that in taking these shortcuts, you're actually deepening the problem that's causing you the anxiety in the first place.
ANHALT: That's exactly right. And when they're on social media or in their digital engagement, they can never escape their anxieties. Part of their stress and anxiety is that social media has trained them to think in very absolutist terms. Like they like and don't like are your options on social media, but reality is much more complicated than that.
So when they encounter complexity in real life, they get very frustrated. What I found in my class is that students can discuss really hot button issues much more objectively because they're not talking about themselves and their own lives. They're talking about representative figures. Fictional characters or real historical figures.
