Skimming the Clogosphere
During the holiday I’ve been idly skimming the internet and whilst I’ve come across several well-constructed sites with thoughtful, intelligent commentary, so much writing, I’m afraid to say, is mere white noise (the clogosphere) designed to fill a vacuum. Not counting the ubiquitous cybersludge this writing is rarely well articulated, being snippets and sound lollipops, a gallimaufry of juvelinia, truisms and nostrums.
“Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.”
Marshall McLuhan
I confess I am bored by the Panglossian exaltation of the various new media. The press blitherings about twitterers, for example, were neatly skewered by The Guardian in their recent April fool. “Novelty?” opined Frederick Lemaitre in Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, “It’s as old as the world itself”. I’ve been reading one volume of Virginia Woolf’s letters; she was a prolific scribbler - and I’m not talking frivolous billet-doux - but highly wrought literary pieces, presumably in the rafts of spare time when she wasn’t writing The Waves or To The Lighthouse. In the 1920s people would write letters with the same frequency as today they would text, twitter or e-mail – but what a difference… Modern written communication is functional (sometimes barely that) to say the least, often illiterate, without rhetorical beauty, a logorrhoea of diarised nerdlings rather than developed argument. Language is, or has the potential to be, an exquisite tool for expressing truths. We increasingly write as we speak and we don’t speak that well: words are disposable, tossed to the four winds. One expects writers to talk charismatically, wrangle fluently, to make elegant distinctions, harness aphorism and reveal subtle and remarkable ideas; however, it is only natural that that expectation will not be realised as they dwell, as it were, in privacy with their muse and spend time softening and polishing language into shiny affluence.
Dr Johnson expressed it well:
A Transition from an Author’s Books to his Conversation, is too often like an Entrance into a large City, after a distant Prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but Spires of Temples, and Turrets of Palaces, and imagine it to be the Residence of Splendour, Grandeur and Magnificence; but when we have passed the Gates, we find it perplexed with narrow Passages, disgraced with despicable Cottages, embarrassed with Obstructions , and clouded with Smoke.
Bearing Johnson’s image in mind we’ve seen a distinct move in recent years towards what I call “gizmoidal writing”. William Boyd observed that the advent of the word processor changed the way people wrote. One was able to shift text around and bolt ideas together, something that may not have happened with such frequency and deliberation were one writing long-hand. The medium, if not the message, creates its own style parameters. E-mail, for example, increased the frequency of written traffic but within that form sentences became pared down to phrases, then phrases to words and words themselves are thieved by symbols and abbreviations. Sending a message became its own lazy gratification, the written equivalent of a grunt of affirmation. Technology became the mother of the thought and the thought was a stripling. The message as the mediocre.
Technical progress, which for centuries grew by devouring nature, proceeds at the expense of culture and man himself. Having always in the past been a participant, or even a maker, of history, man is today furiously swept along by technical progress, whose stormy successes are contributing to a numbing of the person.
Our capacity for concentration and deep inner contemplation, which we are already forfeiting, is being overwhelmed by a tidal wave of inordinate superficial information. This avalanche leaves less and less room for spirituality, so that may have lost it altogether; less and less room for love not confined to sexual attraction alone. More and more, man is transformed from a cultural-historical type to a ‘technogenic’ type. This deep-seated psychological shift threatens humanity with the loss of its very self.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn - The Wall Street Journal 1999
The computer as an instrument can teach, it can illuminate, yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely circuitry in a box. The media celebrate the liberating value of technology, particularly the internet. With freedom comes responsibility; without restriction there is the opportunity for abuse, without censorship there is pornography and fanaticism.
Blogging attracts more than its fair share of extremists. The creation of a forum for response and counter-response and the fundamental freedom to express personal views leads to an assortment of vicious kings of nincompoops, princes of superficiality and anti-artists, to parade their slovenly invective-hurling literary tantrums in playgrounds of lyrical terrorism. They speak an infinite deal of nothing. A more odious collection of spleen-tossed weasels, mewling, boil-brained clotpoles, cankerous beetle-headed maltworms and lumpish motley-minded joltheads never stirred a bigger cauldron of vile racism and ignorant prejudice. The argument normally advanced is that it is better for these people to rant and peddle their propaganda in the same way that it is better to know where in the room the wasp is; however, the inarticulate, barely expressed rage is part of the problem for the inability to produce rational thought leads to incendiary drivel which in turn incites violence.
The medium in this case acts as a viral conduit for ugliness. One thing leads to another. The more you read such rantings the more you feel impelled to reply in kind. Sometimes, the forum is more like a bearpit.
This is not crabbed fogeyism. My laptop dwells permanently on my lap and I’m addicted to my crackberry with the best of them. It strikes me, however, that we communicate more and more about less and less. As we filter experience through the various media, our imagination, and then our language, becomes more impoverished as it is not being employed in a muscular fashion. We believe that technology can free us (remember Arbeit machts frei?), that it has the endless capacity to refresh our lives. We want it to do more and more for us. Isaac Schoenberg once remarked, with a twinkle, about television: “Well, gentlemen, you have now invented the biggest time-waster of all time. Use it well”. We wrongly equate technology with progress. We ourselves need to progress if we are to adapt to the challenges that technology brings.
As one of the characters says in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.”