When the written word first replaced oral storytelling, what was lost? The truth is, we don’t know.

We are so far from what it meant to be human in the preliterate era that we can’t accurately guess what kind of information from that era might be lost to us forever today. We don’t know enough about what was lost and what function it might have served to really understand what was lost.

We don’t know what we don’t know, and because we don’t know, most of us don’t much care, either. In fact, we barely think about it all, assuming as we do that progress is the default mode for human civilization. Surely writing is better than storytelling and oral history, that’s why it won out.

Is this a good attitude? Is it even accurate? Lots of social critics aren’t so sure anymore.

A new installment of the always-insightful PBS investigative news program Frontline makes the compelling point that we are at a similar historical moment right now regarding the move from written information to digiital information.

We know what we are gaining. Or at least, we think we know. But what are we losing? Will we remember what we lost ten years from now? Do we know the answer to that question even now?

Digital_Nation examines both sides of the sea change occuring in information technology today and its impact on how we live, think, and relate to each other. (If you missed the documentary on TV, you can watch it anytime at the PBS link embedded in the Digital_ Nation title in this review.) During the show, we get to see how virtual worlds are being used to boost employee confidence, create meetings and networks among telecommuting coworkers, and even treat Iraqi war veterans for PTSD.

The program doesn’t flinch from presenting the dark side of this brave new world alongside the benefits, and a very dark side it is, too.

We discover that most students now multitask throughout their day—during academic lectures, while driving, while talking to each other, at work—and most feel that multitasking on a variety of digital devices (lap top, PDA, wireless phones, iPods and iPhones, Blackberries, etc.) makes them sharper and smarter in school and at work, better able to perform the tasks required of them. Yet we also see recent research that clearly shows that multitaskers actually perform much more poorly on a wide variety of academic and job-related tasks than their counterparts capable of sustained single focus.

In other words, the illusion of higher competence is just that: an illusion.

We meet a student who is excelling in a variety of advanced college classes at a top universtiy but is unable to write more than a paragraph without losing focus. His term papers and essays are a string of disconnected blurbs; a trend professors say they are seeing more and more often. He cannot connect the dots no matter how often he is urged to do so, and he isn’t bothered by that. His attention span is simply not long enough to pen or understand a simple essay, and he sees no reason he should change—nor do his future employers.

We meet a high school principal who turns around a failing inner city high school by issuing every student a laptop, and is so pleased with the results he is moved to remark, (in paraphrase), “Books and articles were the way to get information for a long time, and now digital media are replacing that means of delivering information. Things change and there’s no going back.”

In one cavalier comment an education professional throws away Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and Hunter Thompson for all time.

Who has time for that stuff anyway? The kids won’t need it in their future call center jobs, will they?

One A-student who is still finishing up his final year of high school, remarks without regret, “I don’t have time for books. I can get everything I need to know about Hamlet online in five minutes. Why would I waste time reading it? I haven’t read a book in years.”

I had to wonder what on earth a 17-year-old had to do that was in any way shape or form more important than reading Hamlet, but that’s exactly what makes me a geezer.

Perhaps the most alarming facet of the shift to digital information is the way that instant gratification discourages questioning, hard research, and non-virutal experience (formerly known as ‘real life’). Perform any search on any keyword and about 90% of what comes up is commercial information spewed out by corporations or people wanting to sell something. Why search an academic database, wander the stacks, read a book, or, God forbid, talk to an actual human being, when you can get the gist of it from Amazon or Wikipedia?

In fact, the capacity to shape what we perceive as ‘reality’ is possibly the most pernicious aspect of the digital age. A distracted, bored, addicted populace with a short attention span is easily controlled in much the same way that one of those pigeons in B.F. Skinner’s positive reinforcement boxes was easily controlled. Skinner taught the pigeons to play tic-tac-toe by delivering a pellet of corn each time a key was pecked.

The internet is like that. We hit a key, we get our pellet of corn, our instant ‘hit’ of information (real or not), and we keep hitting the keys for more. It’s fun, we feel like we’re doing something effective because the pellets keep right on coming. We don’t realize a pigeon will do the exact same thing under the exact same conditions.

I studied B.F. Skinner as an undergrad, and learned, among other things, that if the schedule of reinforcement is intermittent, many animals will peck at the designated key until they die.

Similarly, kids in some foreign countries are now having seizures and even dying of starvation in front of online video games. In South Korea the problem became so severe that internet addiciton is now openly addressed in all the public schools, and the government runs 12-step internet addiction programs for people having problems getting off the net.

At gaming cafes in Asia, several deaths by starvation have occurred during weeklong gaming marathons. Like the pigeons on Skinner’s intermittent schedule of reinforcement, the kids who die keep pecking and pecking for an uncertain chance at winning a game rather than stopping for the certainty of real food. But it isn’t because they are shallow, stupid, or bad: Such behavior is a hard-wired tendency in ALL animals, and we’ve known that for decades.

If no one is minding these kids, they keep at it until it kills them. Maybe we’re all too busy online ourselves to care.

During the Digital_Nation documentary, several experts make the facile point that whatever critical opinions we might hold regarding the digital changes in store for us personally and culturally, the changes are coming anyway, ready or not. Indeed, they are already here.

What will we lose though?

As much as it makes me sound like a fogey and a crank, I felt sad for that smug kid who ‘got’ Hamlet in five minutes from online Cliff notes (hint: everybody dies); the kid whose lack of interest was validated by a high school principal.

Sure, kids have always used Cliff notes to avoid Shakespeare, but listening to that kid and his teachers I realized that we may be witnessing the first generation that will not ever bother to even try to read Hamlet, the first generation that won’t value Hamlet because they won’t ever experience the play firsthand and know the intangible value of the story, the language, the poetry. They won’t know what that loss means.

By the time another generation follows that one, Hamlet will be, for all practical purposes, gone, washed away like footprints at high tide.

Future generations won’t know what they don’t know about beautiful writing and art, and they won’t care, either.

But I will.

Take the red pill if you dare. The blue pills are free now, but the hidden cost is very high.