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This painting needs a Twitter client.
A lot has been made in recent days on the narcissistic nature of Twitter. While I’m probably the ten-millionth person to write on the subject, most of them have been looking at Twitter as a bastardized Facebook, or Myspace. The critics, it seems, have imported their paradigms from those social networks, and assume that Twitter users have as well. Without grossly overstating the importance of Twitter (it won’t alter the basic nature of human interaction), I think a more appropriate reference point is the printing press, or more specifically, the advent of literacy made possible by the invention of the printing press, or even more specifically, the ensuing flourish in written correspondence.
Before your head explodes with rage at the idea that 140 character “tweets” compare in any way to paper-and-ink letters, consider the early days of public literacy. Remember first that the telephone, our current favored means of transmitting trivial information to one another, did not exist. What did eighteenth century letter writers have to say to one another? Certainly the time, labor and expense involved, in those days, in mailing a letter encouraged the writer to consider carefully the content and presentation of her message. Certainly the correspondence from that time that survives today evidences these traits. We should bear in mind though that letters considered worth saving for 300 years are generally not your run of the mill correspondence. Not every letter written in the 1700’s was a treatise on human nature, we just haven’t saved most of the letters that weren’t.
Even the luminary minds of the pre-telephonic world produced letters that were far more akin to a tweet than Common Sense. I have, at home, a book of Lincoln’s correspondence, among which is a brilliant essay on the development of language, as well as many brief letters about women and the inanities of his attempts to enter government. In other words, even Lincoln wanted to let his friends know about what was happening in his life. Whether or not they viewed him as a solipsistic navel-gazer is a question whose answer is lost to time (or at least is unknown to me).
Be sure that the widespread literacy spawned by the invention of the printing press was, as Twitter is now, declared as the end of intellect and dignity. Imagine the chagrin of the former keepers of written language’s flame, the church, at the introduction of easily available text reproduction. People could write in ink, on parchment, easily enough before, but most were illiterate, mostly due to the rarity and expense of books. But with the printing press, that all changed. Once literate, the unwashed masses were suddenly able to express their base experience in a format formerly reserved for the holiest of holies. And not just to their immediate social circle, to everyone, pretty much anywhere! The horror!
But, as is their wont, the church overlooked the social value of the invention. They saw it as a means for transmitting information: political, religious, or worse, scientific. This is still the utility of the printing press, and of public literacy, that is most highly exalted in our textbooks, and rightly so. But it overlooks an important facet of human nature: we are social beings. I believe the ability for people to extend their social interactions beyond their immediate surroundings was, and is, nearly as important as the content transmitted in those interactions. Columbus discovered America with written information (albeit it bad information); colonists came to America because people they knew and trusted wrote to them about the place. And I’ll bet a lot of those letters included details almost no one would care about.
Which is what detractors say about Twitter: “Who cares about the details of our boring lives?” The answer, as they’ll rightly tell you, is no one. But as anyone who has ever made small talk with a new acquaintance knows, it doesn’t take an academic discourse to establish a relationship. And herein lies the real value of Twitter. No one is going to produce a unified field theory or great work of literature in 140 characters (although Hemingways “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” is a heartbreaking tale in only six words), but millions of people will “make small talk” with millions of other people. They’ll share interests and dislikes, and yes, inane blather about what they’re doing right now. With all we’ve heard in the last decade about how the world is getting smaller, Twitter may be the first step in getting to know our new neighbors. Plus, it’s a great way to show all your friends that Onion article that just made you pee your pants.
April 1, 2009.
love and hate and taste and crudity and the continental drift of dying empires and the perils of success and our hopeful efforts to outwit biology. On my own vanity and creeping awareness of the inherent ambivalence of the natural law. On the societal implications of that ambivalence. On the difficulty of marriage, of any human union, on the sad wisdom of the Buddhist. On Derrida and Dante (one of whose names elicits a scolding red squiggle). On the boundary between kindness and self-preservation, between heaven and hell, between wealth and dearth, between aware and deceived. On the reach of technology. On double-edged swords. On who we really are, on the things that really scare us. On the worst thing someone could say to you.
January 12, 2009
“Nobody reads anymore.”
- Steve Jobs
I’ve been reading a lot lately about the death of reading. Shuttered newspapers, slow ebook reader sales and falling literacy rates, it’s argued, all portend the demise of the written word. To fill the void, those holding a still-fogged glass over literature’s ashen mouth offer us its replacement: image-based language. The king is dead, long live the king.
Flickr, YouTube and Google, they say, have the vocabulary for this new language languishing on their servers. All the “words” need is a taxonomy, an index, and fixed definitions. No problem.
Image-based language cannot approximate written language because of its difficulty with precision. Photographic or cinematic mise en scéne in all but the most controlled set-ups is imperfect: accidental signifiers appear, meaning is unfixable. Fine for impressionistic art, but less valuable for philosophical wrangling. We use abstract symbols to describe the world, because its reality is beyond our complete grasp. We cannot create the whole of existence from scratch. Images are terrific when used to depict the world as it exists. They fall shorter when asked to depict the world as it is experienced. Readers subconsciously fill in the blanks, the parts of the universe the artist couldn’t or didn’t summon, that viewers have unpurposefully completed for them. This new language of images is doomed to such fundamental imprecision as to be practically useless.
The problem of imprecision in language is important because it plagues us already. Language has always altered over time, but our time is unusual in the amount of words whose incorrect pronunciations or definitions have become standardized. Our fondness for colloquial misappropriations intertwines with our society’s utter disdain for propriety and formality in conversation, knots our collective tongue and we speak as the deaf. Our stilted English already feels the lack inherent in any image-based language. It is a language of greetings and concrete things – free from ideas, from action and abstraction alike. It is direct as a river of Hemingway prose, but bereft of the emotional undercurrent.
And so what will the visual vocabulary created by our tongue-tied culture look like? We supposedly see its unorganized protolanguage on YouTube and MySpace. Will we be crass Eskimos, with a hundred “words” for fart? What is the visual equivalent of “sorrow”? Will our new visual language need interpreters? Genetic and environmental differences in ocular sensory perception among different people seem to make a high-res hieroglyphics so much less universally approachable than our current arbitrarily abstract system. How do you translate images? So many questions.
If Steve Jobs is right about reading, as, sadly, he might be, we’re staring at a future of human interaction impossibly less nuanced and expressive than its already stunted present.
Andrea gave me A Moveable Feast for Christmas. It seeped into my brain to leak out in my first post, yesterday. I can’t help aping the style. Those short taut sentences are like Alexander’s blade through the Gordian knot that is modern life. They are simple in structure and lean heavily towards physical action. In the book, Hemingway says that writing hungry gave his characters great focus: they were always hungry too, always knew what they needed. Their actions and speech always represent this clarity of vision. There are no Focault-esque baroque oddities, spirals of abstraction, clause draped upon clause, endlessly supplementing, clarifying, hedging. The conventional thinking has Hemingway’s style as a product of its times, a counterpoint to the disorienting horrors of the first war fought with the full technological bounty of the Industrial Revolution, to the relativism of appocalypse. I think what makes that style so appealing today is the new universality of its application.
We live today in a continuous state of upheaval. New technologies supplant old faster than ever before. World changing innovations are on tips of tongues in labs and on campuses, not only across the country, but across the globe. Breakthroughs are shared at near the speed of light and critiqued, corrected and expounded upon nearly as fast. But the sword cuts both ways, and let us not forget, is a sword. War becomes smaller, faster and more deadly to the innocent, it seems everyday. Soldiers die less and less often, more and more return home wounded or changed or both. Industries emerge and collapse in fruit fly cycles. Today’s “conflicts” may not be “World Wars”, but the specter of their violence and confusion covers the globe.
So it feels good for me, like I’m sure it felt good for him, to put something in black and white, to cut through a knot I could never untie, to present my version of events and say simply: this is how it happened for me. Excise lengthy digressions on subjectivity and Heisenberg: writing is presenting an answer to a problem whose solution is unknowable. Every good piece of writing is a religion, presenting a universe within our own, with rules and norms askew or realigned to our own, varying assumptions about the nature of reality suggesting varying modes of life. Hemingway’s voice is authoritative as Moses’. He hedges no bets, makes no disclaimers on his prognostications. That’s a welcome relief in a deconstructed world and it’s the reason he’s the embodiment of American literature. Who could help ripping that off?
