Why can't we talk to each other? (Part 1)
I was specifically promised that technology would help us with this!
Introduction
This essay is too long. But one of the great advantages of Substack is that you do not need an editor to tell you this is a problem. I’m choosing to indulge myself and let this take the space I think it wants. But to spare you, I am only posting the first three sections. You can use this introduction to follow along:
I. The Confusion of Languages
II. Our Endless Subcultures
III. We Have Never Been Literate
IV. The Oral Culture of Online Life, begun
V. Old Wine In New Wineskins
VI. The Danger
VII. Inverting the Pyramid
I. The Confusion of Languages
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
Genesis 11:1-9, King James Version
Why are big things so hard to do and tall towers so hard to build? Ask anyone who has tried, and while the reasons are legion, communication always has something to do with it. It was at the beginning of human history that Babel was confounded, and the history of communication technology since then has been of one long attempt to pick up and reassemble the pieces.
Each of the inventions in the long history of of communication (writing, paper, double-entry bookkeeping, the printing press, the phone, the Internet) comes with the implicit promise that Babel could be undone. Neil Postman made this observation in Technopoly about one such invention, the telegraph:
Prior to the telegraph, information could be moved only as fast as train could travel: about 35 mph. Prior to the telegraph, information was sought as part of the process of understanding and solving particular problems. Prior to the telegraph, information tended to be of local interest. Telegraphy changed all of this, and instigated the second stage of the information revolution. The telegraph removed space as an inevitable constraint on the movement of information, and, for the first time, transportation and communication were disengaged from each other. In the United States, the telegraphies erased state lines, collapsed regions, and, by wrapping the continent in an information grid, created the possibility of a unified nation state.
Lincoln's inaugural address in 1861 was one of the most consequential speeches in American history. Americans waited for news of the positions he would take in the speech with breathless anticipation. But unlike other great speeches that had come before, the effects of the address could be felt immediately and everywhere: crowds surged to every Western Union office throughout the United States, waiting to hear the transcript coming over the wire even as the speech was being delivered. The affairs of the nation-state became the intense preoccupation of its citizens, and in a very real way it was the wires that conveyed Lincoln's inaugural that also made it feasible for the sixteenth president to remake the many states into a United States, a national entity.
The Internet in all of its manifestations is an intensification and personalization of this "information grid." In a way, we have been living with the Internet revolution since Samuel Morse sent the (in context, ambiguous) question "What hath God wrought" over the first commercial telegraph wire in 1844. The intensification and personalization of telegraphy in the form of the Internet has made each of us a node in the information grid, and has made that information grid able to convey much more than dots and dashes. We still all attend simultaneously to affairs of state, but without the minor inconvenience of crowding around the Western Union to hear the latest. The impulse is, however, the same: we want information, about everything, now.
II. Our Endless Subcultures
It is natural for one to think that ubiquitous communication would erase boundaries, usher in a new era of peace and harmony, and bring about the rise of a global and informed citizenry. Since we now share language, information, and media, one would be forgiven for thinking that we had everything we needed to understand each other. And for a brief time, we may have. The initial rise of mass media, at least in the United States, made our access to information ubiquitous via television, radio, and national newspapers, even as the sources of this information consolidated. The "big three" television networks, the newspapers of record, and nationally-syndicated radio shows reached nearly every household. The information they conveyed was constrained in scope by these large and monolithic news corporations and the expensive means they used to distribute.
There are a lot of people who carry a bit of nostalgia for the mass media era. This nostalgia is often expressed as a desire for the appearance of cultural solidarity conveyed to us by—you guessed it—the media of the age; its movies and shows and lo-fi clips of news broadcasts delivered in a staid Mid-Atlantic cadence. Arguably this nostalgia is not just an emotional response: a shared body of national information would actually yield a much greater sense of national unity. If you and your neighbors live in an information ecosystem together, your town may naturally cohere. If that information ecosystem is national, so too may your nation.
Whatever you may describe our current information ecosystem as, it is certainly not coherent. The institutions, conglomerates, networks, and publishers who wrought this feeling of unity still exist. But they are marginal players in the brave new world of the Internet. Recall that it was structural and technological limitations that gave these large institutions a monopoly over the production of information. It was expensive to nationally syndicate a radio program, or to run a national live TV network, or to publish and distribute millions of copies of a daily newspaper, every day. Now, it is free, and everyone is doing it.
This has done at least two things to our 'information ecosystems,' First, it has made them far more immersive. A mid-century American might consume a little information each day from these mass media sources. A modern American spends on average over two hours a day just on social media platforms, not even including radio, television, magazines, or newspapers. And this media is personalized, high-definition, comprising words and images and sounds and videos all at once, and is essentially free. Second, there is just more. This media is highly differentiated: about far more granular topics, and with farther-flung and more specific niches, and with far more detail and intensity.
This has let us develop endlessly differentiated subcultures of meaning inscrutable to outsiders. We have moved slowly from mass culture to bespoke culture. "Inter-cultural communication" refers now not to interactions between members of different nationalities or ethnic groups, but to everyday conversations in the grocery store, at the playground, between neighbors, family members, parishioners, and acquaintances.
The ubiquity of this media has spread the English language to every corner of the globe. Indeed, many who speak English as a second language today do so because they learned it on social media. This has not overcome the Babel curse, however. We have only substituted confused languages for confused meaning, and the tower is no easier to build.
III. We Have Never Been Literate
Why has this occurred? What is it about our psychological makeup that makes it harder for us to understand each other, even as technologies develop to give us more (and more precise) ways to communicate? To re-use a metaphor found in a parable of Jesus, It is because we are old wineskins, and this technologically-enabled communication is new wine.
Walter Ong, the historian, philosopher, and Jesuit priest, put the problem less prosaically in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy. First, he roughly sorted the history of words into three phases: primary orality, when cultures had only the spoken word to go by; literacy, when writing (and crucially, technologies like paper and the press) enabled us to communicate complex concepts permanently; and secondary orality, when the massification of electronic media made it possible to communicate using oral techniques, but using modern technologies.
Ong's observations are many and deserve careful consideration in their own right. But for our purposes, let us spend time on two of his contentions. First, the way we communicate does not just shape culture but it shapes us, too, transforming our psychology in fundamental ways. Second, even though we all know how to read, we still retain strains of orality that can interact in unexpected and volatile ways with both our literacy training and modern technology.
On the first point, Ong wrote this:
Primary orality fosters personality structures that in certain ways are more communal and externalized, and less introspective than those common among literates. Oral communication unites people in groups. Writing and reading are solitary activities that throw the psyche back on itself. A teacher speaking to a class which he feels and which feels itself as a close-knit group, finds that if the class is asked to pick up its textbooks and read a given passage, the unity of the group vanishes as each person enters into his or her private lifeworld.
And on the second, he described the strange mixture of orality and literacy we experience today:
Secondary orality is both remarkably like and remarkably unlike primary orality. Like primary orality, secondary orality has generated a strong group sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in on themselves. But secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture – McLuhan’s ‘global village’. Moreover, before writing, oral folk were group-minded because no feasible alternative had presented itself. In our age of secondary orality, we are groupminded self-consciously and programmatically. The individual feels that he or she, as an individual, must be socially sensitive. Unlike members of a primary oral culture, who are turned outward because they have had little occasion to turn inward, we are turned outward because we have turned inward. In a like vein, where primary orality promotes spontaneity because the analytic reflectiveness implemented by writing is unavailable, secondary orality promotes spontaneity because through analytic reflection we have decided that spontaneity is a good thing. We plan our happenings carefully to be sure that they are thoroughly spontaneous.
These words were written in 1982. Were he alive today, I do not doubt that he would have keen observations to make of our social media-inflected lifeworld. With apologies to his memory, let us continue. In this era, there has been a profound shift in both the content of information and its form. If the first age was brought about consensus reality, and the second enabled an informational environment that was individualistic but universalizing, the third is best called bespoke reality.
IV. The Oral Culture of Online Life
As children, even before we are taught to read, we live in a world absolutely dominated by literacy. By 'literacy', I do not mean just knowing how to read. Literacy as Ong uses it refers to a mode of thinking dominated by writing. Writing and recording our thoughts is a way of thinking. It allows us to enter the minds of the past and to extend our thoughts and ourselves into the future. It gives us tools to develop complex thoughts alone, and to turn our examination inward to understand more about ourselves.
Our parents raise us with a theory about our internal psychology that changes how they speak to and interact with us, a theory that has developed in them because of how they were raised and because their training in literacy gives them a reflexive self-consciousness. They seek to cultivate our inner lives, not just our outer lives, and to read and understand our inner thoughts and feelings even before they have full formation. This, in turn, makes us introspective. Who are we? What is going on in our minds? Who do we want to be? And if something unique and needing analysis is going on in us, certainly it must also be going on in the minds of those around us!
Then we learn to read, and find in the written word new wonders. First, we discover that we can pin down thoughts as words like butterflies on a card, opened for all to see, no longer flitting in and out of the garden of our mind but captured and preserved for careful study. We also learn how to enter the interior of another mind, another writer, by reading the words that they pin (or pen) down for us to examine.
At some point, we inevitably encounter social media, and we find that we are no longer limited to the written word as a means to produce or examine our inner thoughts. Now, we find that we can freeze and share images, gestures, the spoken word, dances, experiences, views, and voices. By itself this is interesting enough, but on social media, we can also do so in a kind of community. When all we did was read, we could find solitary authors and probe their inner thoughts in their writing. But on social media, not only are the authors (the 'content creators', we call them) so much more viscerally present with us--we know what they look like, what they had for breakfast, what they did last night, what their hopes and dreams and fears are--but we know all these things together in solidarity with so many other 'readers' who have found this content with us. As Ong said, we can become "groupminded self-consciously," able to enter the internal lifeworld of a community of individuals, not just our own or (briefly, temporarily) another's.
This hyperactive, multimedia literacy is not all that is operating on us, however. Remember, in Ong's argument we are squarely in the third stage of secondary orality. Deep within us remains those oral chords, the subconscious strata of humanity that makes us so naturally capable of building and maintaining cultures infused with the spoken word. What actually characterizes traditional oral cultures? Ong has much more to say on this, but I will summarize a few of his observations:
Orality is the foundation of the language we all use, while writing and reading are only a secondary overlay
Wisdom is transmitted through discipleship and apprenticeship in oral cultures
Complex thought and analysis in oral cultures is difficult to do alone, so it typically involves a conversational partner to play off of and provide counterpoint
Rhythm, repetition, alliteration, and mnemonics are important tools for facilitating the recall of information in oral cultures
Oral cultures can only maintain knowledge in close relationship to the immediate and natural world; regular contact with the natural world provides ample reminders and reinforcements of this knowledge
Oral communication is agonistic in tone and style
Orality displays a structural amnesia; it adapts to new information and the passage of time by simply forgetting wrong or irrelevant knowledge and assimilating new observations
Oral culture uses hero narratives to help signpost memory; everyone loves a character
What would a medium, combining both the nature of our predisposition to orality, and the nurture of our training in literacy, look like? Unlike this medium, you cannot simply swipe your finger to get to the next part. Check in again next month, or comment below if you can’t wait and I’ll send it to you.