This pseudo-Platonist attitude is characterized by a youthful enthusiasm in the investigation of such polarizing subjects as "net neutrality", or the characteristics of "freedom of speech", both concepts relating to why the Net became so popular in the first place. And to deny the fact that information changes the manner in which people relate to each other is to deny the most obvious facts of the day: though we may not associate with our geographical neighbors, our family who live nearby, such potential acquaintances as even live at the same college campus, or even the members of our dorm, we will nevertheless associate with those people who, across the world, request to be our Facebook "friends", inasmuch as the word now has any meaning. We relate to "causes" over Facebook; we form "groups" of public interest; we even coordinate our real-world events through that medium. To restrict our ability to associate through such an incredible medium is surely an undertaking which must not itself be taken lightly. It is also important to remember Marshall McLuhan's identity, that the Medium is the Message, since in restricting the medium, we must therefore restrict the message. And Catholics, nowadays, are extremely hesitant to restrict anyone's message.
On the other hand, one has what I like to call, as referred to above, the "Hobbesian" outlook upon the Internet. This is not a very popular outlook, to say the least. One most often sees it represented in news stories by frightened parents and out-of-touch senators. Why this representation is prominent is a matter for another time; what is important is the examination of the truth of the attitude. I was once listening to a lecture from TEDTalks by Pranav Mistry, founder of the SixthSense pocket computer/projector technology, in which I discovered the claim made explicit that the more free availability and functionality of information makes man "more human." When I first heard this phrase, I thought it was a bold, yet nifty claim, to say the least. Could it be that the ability to shape the world of social information can help us to be more human? Surely newspapers have enabled us to know more about what happens in the world, foreign countries and even neighboring counties; the internet has enabled instantaneous awareness of the most minute details of our friends' lives. Yet the part of me that had read Hobbes, in whose work human life outside rule is described as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", realized that this was a perilous claim to make.
Hobbes was none too excited about human nature. The rights of men in what he regarded as the natural state were such that men could do, literally, whatever the hell they wanted. Kill someone, rob someone, lie, cheat; there's nothing stopping you. Whether you should is not the same question; man, as he came to be "naturally", could do all of these things, and thus they were "rights" of his. Society, in order to enable him to live well, removes his abilities to do things, putting him in bondage, as it were, to set him free. Society thus becomes a Leviathan, a great beast which prevents the many little beasts from being so through force. Man must be prevented, says Hobbes, from being a man in order to truly be a man. We ourselves recognize the role of restraint, in some fashion, in governance: vide, the role of the police in preventing murder, rape, theft, and other such naughty deeds. But even as the Founding Fathers thought in positing the "rights" to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and even as Adam Smith thought in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, there is evidently something in man that attempts to reach beyond himself in his happiness, that cares about the fate of others. This something seems to constitute a common good; else there would be no need for a "commons", or a government, except according to penal principles. If America was to be a country, and not simply a very specialized form of jail, some freedom must be preserved. Hence, we do not live, as Hobbes would have us live, under an absolute monarch who restrains us.
The Internet seems to give Hobbes evidence every day. The famous Rule 34, for example, which I will not go into in detail except to say that it is depravity made into a rule of behavior; the existence of free and prolific pornography and the easy access thereof; the character, indeed, of online debate, which is enough to convince almost anyone that such an idealized thing as an argument is almost a pearl cast before online swine. All these things point to a pervasive depravity at the very root of our cultural expression, and yet we laugh at people who speak of America as decadent, as the Great Satan, thinking that they are simply not with the times. Hobbes, seeing such depravity, would simply say he told us so. What would he suggest? Nothing less than an absolute clampdown on all such depravity, a ban on pornography based on pragmatic grounds, the closing of 4chan, and perhaps the closing of independent expression as it conflicts with such an opinion. Not to give too much away about where I plan to come down on this issue, this very blog would perhaps be terminated in such a new regime. This may sound shocking, but Australia and other countries, for example are far more in favor than we might suspect. China, itself, already adopts such a philosophy when it suits them.
Amidst two such radically different attitudes, what are we to do? Is there some mediation, or is it all or none for those taking a stand? Certainly, it is often regarded as all or none; either you side with neutrality, or you side with censorship! either you side with the regulation of content, or you side with libertinism! This, it seems to me, is the shallowest attitude, and yet it permeates our entire social fabric. Enough people have criticized labeling that the criticism has become passé. Yet it nevertheless needs to be said, passé as it may seem, that the tendency people have to label others conservative or liberal, republican or democrat, hermeneutically suspicious or hermeneutically kosher, is itself a suspicious manner of proceeding. If one wishes to argue with others, one must take their argument as they argue it, not as one thinks they do; likewise, if one argues with another, one must make an effort to understand. Such labeling as negates this process disables such an adequation of the mind to the argued thing, and there can be little truth in arguing so. As a critique, first, of the argumentation process, this is quite important.
The solution to this diametric dispute, given the good evidence for both sides, is likely somewhere in the middle. To get to the middle, one must really attack the sides. To start with the pseudo-Platonist, utopian view, it's quite clear that while technology is a wonderful tool for allowing people to relate to their environment, it is just that, a tool. A hammer is a tool for carpentry, when employed by a carpenter, but it is as well used as a weapon in a murder, by virtue of the same qualities that make it a good woodworking tool. And it is quite clear to most people's senses that no matter how much information is pumped into people, there is only so much action one can hope to provoke. Simply being "aware" of a problem does not always provoke us to action, although it may shame us not to act. And in fact Plato himself would disapprove of the Internet on principle, shockingly enough; such a source of unregulated information would spell doom for the soul; this is why I have tried consistently in the past to refer to this attitude as only pseudo-Platonist. To take such a sunny view of the power of this fire hose of information is, at best, naive, and at worst, downright delusional.
At the same time, the flip side of the coin is that the Internet is not entirely depraved, contra Hobbes. Evidently there are ways to use any tool not intrinsically, fundamentally ordered to an evil end in a good way; even the birth control pill apparently has some other uses which are not for the purpose of contraception. The trick is to decide the prudence of use. One must ask oneself what the purpose of this tool, the Internet, in fact is. Having asked this, one can actually get to the bottom of how the Catholic, who must see the tool in light of the purpose of human artifice as bringing man closer to God through the medium of man's intellect, will and senses, can use the Internet in a really profitable way. This may seem an incredibly obvious thing to speak about; surely I have already got some idea of how to use the tool, since I am right now using it! The Internet has been around quite a while now. You would think we would have figured this out already. But one must realize that there is a certain use in exploring and stating the obvious, in a still more obvious manner. We often forget the foundational purposes of the things we use, and thus misuse them. Hopefully what I am getting at will be clearer later in this same article.
So it has come to pass that we must give an account of the Internet. How it works is only incidentally important to this. We are not looking for the way it works (although I would like to state for the record that I do not believe it is a system of tubes) but its purpose. What is it and what is it for? The Internet, most basically, is a tool by which people make content available to others, or so most of the communications majors speak about it. I may not be intending to have a conversation with the readers of this article, at the moment of writing it, but I am intending that this article be available to readers. Of course, that begs further explanation, as most such definitions do: what constitutes "content", and what does it mean to make it available? Most define content in terms of information, as I have spoken of above; content is the information available at a given website, what it "contains." When I make this available, what precisely comes to pass is that the thing on the page, the content, is taken into the mind of another through the senses and that by which they understand the various media. In other words, content includes the account of communication; the Internet is a tool for the communication of content. Why this belabored account of what happens when one looks at a webpage, one may well wonder? The examination of the obvious reveals a core concept which is none too obvious itself: "communication."
What on earth is "communication"? There are a great many sources on this, but not all of them are so very clear as my two personal favorite sources for everything, nor so correct. St. Thomas Aquinas, in Contra Impugnantes Dei Cultum et Religionem, quotes Aristotle on the social meaning of "communication." From Part 2, Chapter II: "Aristotle, (VIII Ethics) classifies different 'communications'. By this term he means associations formed for divers objects, wherein the members hold communication one with the other." And regarding the meaning of "association", from the same chapter: "For, an association means the union of men, gathered together for the accomplishment of some specific work." Or, united into one definition: A communication is some union of people gathered for the accomplishment of some specific work, wherein the people "communicate" one with the other. Or, to put it still another way, a communication is some association for the sake of some good to be achieved through that association. Distilling all this, one realizes something important: communication is for the sake of some "good", whether true or apparent. To make a communication truly good, one must first ensure that the end of that communication, the good toward which it aims, is truly good, and that it is pursued in a truly good manner.
Hence, when two businessmen gather, for their business to be truly good, it must have happiness as its end, not merely wealth, and the means to happiness employed must be prudent. Likewise, coming back to the Internet, if the Internet is a tool for communication, it is a tool used for the sake of some good. Yet in the use of that very tool there is a prudence to be considered. If Pranav Mistry wishes people to be more human by its use, it is of the greatest importance that the one using recognizes, among other things, the characteristics of the way we communicate. This brings me to the less apparent part of the article: the ways in which the Internet, without noticing, makes people less human. For after all, the Internet is a communication among many, and there are greater and lesser communications; knowing this, it is possible to assess the Internet among other tools, impartially.
When we speak in real life, ninety percent or so of our communication is not in the words themselves. A good sized amount is in inflection, facial characteristics, body language, pheromone factors...the list goes on. Yet on the internet, we are limited to words, conveyed as input via our fingers and not our mouth, lacking any inflection beyond italics and other typeface, which themselves, if they have a set inflective meaning, are extremely limited in conveying such inflection. Body language and tactile factors are nonexistent. Realizing that we only convey ten percent of our communication in chat, email, and such means, we must be cognizant of the way that this degrades our normal conversation. As Thomas said, operatio sequitur esse, and esse sequitur operatio: operation follows being, and being follows operation. Do something enough times, and it will change you; when it changes you, you will do that thing more. That's habit and disposition. What does this mean for the Internet vis-a-vis our humanity? We are only partly human in our expression through chat, texting, email, and other such media. Yet this is how we relate on the Internet, just as speech is how we relate in reality. How we relate determines our relationships, and our relationships, in turn, condition us; thus, slowly, we remove our humanity if we give ourselves to the medium too fully.
Recognizing the limits of this technology, it is clear that to become dependent upon it is a dangerous proposition. Yet recognizing the limits of a tool also gives us an opportunity to use it prudently. Surely the claim that the Internet can make us "more human" is quite attractive and believable on some level, and I don't want to deny it myself, because to know the purpose of a tool is to know the good it is for, and the Internet is a most powerful tool. To deny this would be folly, and not the good kind. In order to shed some light on this claim, it's time for another obviousness examination. What is a tool? Clearly, something used by man (as other creatures do not use tools to the same degree or in the same manner) to achieve an end which is either unachievable simply or unachievable well without its use. A good example is the hammer. It could be that there is no tool at hand other than the hammer, and there is a nail that needs its work, in which case the necessity would be the former; or it could be that the nail would go in by hand or by a lesser tool, but not as well as it would with the hammer, which is the latter case. A tool, through its use by man, enables him to reach some previously unachievable good. In a matter of speaking, if one is said to be better off by the possession of some good prudently, tools raise man himself; they can make him able to live at his dignity, to really "be human". And it is perhaps fair to say that any tool, inasmuch as it brings man some new good prudently, makes man "more human". But the key here is prudence and the understanding of the good; only if we understand "humanity" can we understand in what way goods can make man "more human."
Thus, we get to the core of our quandary, hinted at by the Hobbes/utopian disagreement above. The thing that determines the good use of the Internet is the way man is, anthropology. This is, naturally, where things get dicey. One may think a good many things about man, but ultimately each thing comes down to how one thinks man is ordered or disordered. If man is entirely material, then his highest good is material. Yet for some reason we have this tendency to seek the unchanging, which we do not see in material things. Why do we seek immaterial things, including things which do not exist, when nothing else seeks so high? If men were tools, we would guess our purpose from the way we were made, and clearly we are made to contemplate, as only we can. It makes sense from this view that our purpose is the end for which we can do what we do, and what we do is seek happiness. Everyone does it; if someone says they want something else, it is inevitably led back to either happiness or pleasure, and pleasure itself is for the sake of happiness. What, then, is our purpose? Naturally, to seek whatever it is that makes us happy. Speaking as a Thomist, I would say that Boethius aptly proves this to be God in his Consolation of Philosophy. Whatever the case, even if it is not taken to be God, we surely see that there are things that make man unhappy, naturally, or so the humanist atheists would have us believe. Were we to take up Aristotle's reasoning, as I will, this falls out readily enough: anything not in accordance with our rational principle detracts from that happiness, anything that goes against virtue, because happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, and virtue is activity in accordance to man's rational principle. So everything we do is given order according to that happiness.
Thus, some things are clearly higher than others. Family duties are more important than immediate pleasure. Politeness is important even in casual encounters, but not as important as getting the truth across, which sometimes requires a bit of rudeness. Everything comes down to the way in which the tool, according to its purpose of use, contributes to our happiness. So how is the Internet to do so? Firstly, by presenting us with content according to our good, not content that degrades us. This much was obvious once, at least to the people in charge of things; but now it is almost expected, owing to the success of the vitiation of our culture, that any man with working eyes and other organs will have looked at pornography, and this is regarded as the least of offenses, when in reality it destroys the human person, by reducing his faculties through violent habits. In this case, some censorship is actually necessary. We already do so to prevent violence against minors on the side of the acts depicted themselves, and in other media we strive to prevent such depictions from falling into the hands of minors, which is a sort of censorship; is it so shocking that we should try to do so in this medium? This is not to say that one should go into other areas with this censorship, necessarily, or that the possibility of this happening is realistic (the industry in question is the Goliath to anyone's David) but that the continued free availability of this cancerous growth destroys, even in the foundation, any good the Internet may do, simply because it is so pervasive that the smallest investigation can lead one to such a thing, even in unrelated topics.
Perhaps I seem a prude for saying this. I realize this seems a digression, or perhaps as though a tilting at such windmill-giants has been my point the whole time, but it is neither. It is, like Dante's Satan, at once central and peripheral. But consider the parallel; like all sin, where Satan brings it to be out of malice but makes it appear inoffensive, so the porn industry, which wants to profit from the inhumanity of its product, which they regard as a service, wants those who come in contact with it to think it harmless. And the Internet, really, has been the most perfect ground to subvert the popular morality, because there is no populum on the Internet. There is no commonality. My greatest pet peeve of late regarding modern communications studies in relation to the Internet has been to refer to my generation as "digital natives." This is pure idiocy. I am a native of my city in California, in the United States, and perhaps in a derivative way of the area of my college in "birthing" me into the liberal arts proper, according to which she is my alma mater. I am not a native of a place which is no place; I was not born into cyberspace, but real space. "Native", taken from natus, born, is a misnomer to describe any sort of connection to the use of a tool. There are cases in which one may use the term to describe a person who seems to have a particular talent: a "native blacksmith", for example, if such speech is even used anymore. But this is hardly the same thing. A native internet user would in this sense be one who uses the Internet with uncommon facility; it would certainly not apply to a whole generation, but can only be reserved to individuals, since it refers to a rarity of talent.
To be a native requires a place, or, failing a place, a community, or failing a community, some sort of culture. Culture itself requires an unchanging commonality (since accidental commonalities do not tend to last), like Aeneas' household gods, or the grace of God, or the Pax Romana. The Internet, if it has any unifying interest to it, has only the unity of being available to all. Every fetish is satisfied--but none are banned. Every vicious sort of humor is enabled--but none are regarded as beyond the pale. The only thing keeping people from disrespecting one another, in many cases, is a sense of policy. This is not, at the same time, to classify the Internet as, so one person apparently put it, a "dystopic" space; that would be the Hobbesian outlook, which has many and manifest problems. People can be better. The problem, in most cases, is that presented with the choice they already have, they simply refuse to be so. This refusal is not simply the cause, though, of the Internet's problems; it's also the symptom. Before someone can misuse a tool, the misuse occurs in themselves in deliberation. This misuse is an attitude, not an isolated choice; and it is not simply one person, but a majority of Internet users. I genuinely think that to force some (but only some!) limits upon Internet users as to the content they may see, in this immature culture, would actually give people a greater sense of what freedom really is, and not simply by contrast.
Consider, if you will, this concretion of my rather controversial little yarn. We have, at this moment, most of the greatest works of Western Civilization online. For free, in multiple editions and translations; one may hear Eliot reading the Four Quartets or the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ("like a patient. Anesthetized. On. A. Table"), or Lewis reading the Four Loves; one may read More's Utopia or Swift's Gulliver's Travels free of charge, or if one is rather daring, most of the greatest works of political philosophy. We have the grandest possibility through the sheer power of this magnificent tool, and yet it is piddled away with degradation and vice. It is as though a grand piano were put in every living room, and all people decided to learn for recreation was "Shave and a Haircut." This is unfitting! If people were torn away from their pornography, and their YouTube idiocy, and their pleasantly enumerated cracked.com lists, they might, just might, be brought to realize how wasted most of the time they spend online really is. It is vital, too, to remember that this time wasted is not spent merely idly, but absolutely violently.
People make much of what it is to live in the so-called "Internet culture", and wild-eyed Wired editors routinely act as though technology will save the world. But people forget the most vital and essential thing about technology: it is supposed to serve man, and not the other way around.
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Wastelands aren't Eliot-esque. You could say "Wastelands that remind one of 'The Waste Land,'" etc. But there certainly isn't anything Eliot-esque about 4chan, or any other wasteland.
ReplyDeleteIt has a definition in it! I'm astonished! In fact, it's outright old-fashioned! I mean, snark is the new rhetoric and statistics is the new science -- who defines their terms anymore?
ReplyDeleteJoking aside, though, I wonder about this:
"When I make this available, what precisely comes to pass is that the thing on the page, the content, is taken into the mind of another through the senses and that by which they understand the various media."
First, then, the 'content' is only accessible through what is made present through the sense. In other words, if we don't sense anything, no content is conveyed.
Yet as you say, this is only the _means_ by which the content is conveyed. It leaves quite open the question of what the content itself is. One may say, "the content of a book is that which is taken into the mind by sensing those black squiggles" -- but it does not answer what that content may be.
Of course you provide several definitions in the course of the paragraph. If the internet is "a tool by which people make content available to others", then it follows that this "content" is that which is made available to others by the internet. You also say that the "content" is the "information" available at a site, or "the thing on the page", both of which seem difficult because "site" is itself a form of the content -- there is nothing about the internet which makes sites essential -- and they're somewhat vague besides.
For your purposes, it might seem that these definitions are sufficient. You only needed to derive the conclusion that "content" on the Internet implies something communicated, which did not require too much clarification. But I think a more careful investigation reveals some difficulties.
To return to the means you mentioned, we may say that at the moment, "content" is limited to what may be conveyed through color and sound (apparent motion being implicit in color). Further, to the best of my knowledge the "content" is always distinguished into "objects" or "entities" (which may be divisible into further entities). This is obvious on websites, and I think is universal even for games, social programs, Skype, etc. There are discrete "bits" of "content", which however related to other "bits" still are separable.
Another point is that the significance -- what is conveyed -- by any entity or its properties may be either immediate or meta. It has immediate significance if it is immediately adequated to some sense or faculty, whereas it has meta-significance if it concerns an element as element. If I make the words at the top of my website red, white, and blue, it has immediate significance because it is a reference to the American flag. But when the "TECHNE" word at the bottom of your post is blue, that has meta-significance because it indicates that the word is a link -- that it will cause my browser to display a different website (which are all meta-concepts).
The most common elements are images, text, and sounds, but this is not exhaustive at all. Buttons, scroll bars, menu bars, health bars, motions with a deformed third derivative, screen shakes, notifications, level ups, entire rule-systems (often called games), similarities, timers, ratings, proximities, "bling", and so much else it is hard to list, may be the "bits" of content conveyed through the internet. Oftentimes, we are so focused on what we are doing that we are hardly aware of the particular sensations that make us know, for example, that we just went up a level -- the concept of "level up" is immediately present to our awareness.
Well, I'm being vague and I probably said some incorrect things, but I've been writing for nearly an hour now, and I have other things that must get done, so I'll be almost done now. I just want to add that this more expanded account of "content" (which I never got around to defining, I just gave some examples that might help) could pose a problem to what you said.
ReplyDeleteIn brief, because you make three critiques, as I understand it. I don't have time to develop it so I'll just list the conclusions. First, as to how the capacity for relationships of certain kinds may decay from relating to others only in other ways, as determined by the permitted modes of content. Second, as to the existence of content which is destructive of human good. Third, as to the possibility of wasted time through useless content, which precludes any community.
I'll focus on the first one. Your argument, as you presented it, takes as a premise that the way we relate on the Internet is by means of words. As should be clear from the above, words are perhaps one of the more common forms of content on the Internet, but far from the only one. Even Facebook allows one to share images (though it tends to encourage mere photographs). On a blog, the very layout of one's page is under one's control, to convey whatever one wishes. On deviantArt, it is one's art that is shared and conveyed. On Fictionpress, it is stories, poems, and essays (yes, mostly bad ones, I know). On Kongregate, it is games, in the IFDB, interactive fiction, on YouTube, videos. And this is merely creative works (which I happen to be more acquianted with): there is much else. Within MMOs, one has whole systems of rules within which various kinds of expressions and therefore 'relatings' are possible. There was even a strange story I once heard, that a certain person strung up an assortment of interlinked pages throughout the entirety of the Internet, each referring to the next in sequence. Perhaps it would be a Google image search, next a blog comment, next an message in an ancient BBS, or perhaps a small flash game. If one read through all in order, a tale would be unraveled. Post-modern or not, it is a kind of 'relating' that is far from limited to words.
Keep in mind, too, that much of the specifically "social" or "relational" Internet sites and programs are quite recent. Google has been prominent for little more than ten years, I believe? (and is eagerly trying to expand the possible range of content we may share -- think of Google Wave.) As to Facebook and the rest, they've been popular for only a few years, as I recall. The limitations we presently labor under are to no small degree because the field is so new: we hardly know what might work yet.
Now in theory, is it not true that there are built-in limits to the Internet? Certainly, so long as the means are limited to sight and sound. It will be no time soon that I can take a club and bang my brother's knee with it on the Internet, as I can in his presence. As to the possibility of playing my guitar while listening to the ambient sounds of the household, I wonder if that is possible even in theory on the Internet -- the whole effect is lost if one seeks it out. And likewise many subtleties, possible because of the intricate complexities of our own world's rules, are lost in the necessarily simpler rules of a game or world.
Yet note too that the Internet makes possible relations or 'relatings' either difficulty or altogether impossible in person. Could I bomb you with an endless post that I wrote in an hour and a half of free time (very fast, aren't I) in person? Likewise I think no words or expressions could convey the strange bleakness of "Babies Dream of Dead Worlds". There are similar cases as well, but I'm out of time, so there you go. If you can extract any meaning from my confused thoughts, that is good.
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ReplyDeleteJamie: I think you didn't read that comment before you posted it, or else you must have no respect for Eliot's poetry. I'll presume the first in the interest of charity and withhold comment.
ReplyDeleteNewbot: Thanks for the very well-reasoned comments! It's true that content concerns more than simply the means through which it is suggested, as you say, and given recent inquiries into technologies of smell, touch and taste simulation (which, by the way, give me the willies) I would hardly put a limit on the differences in this way; as far as the five senses go, man is ever striving for newer ways to integrate himself into his surroundings and vice versa.
But it's also a fact that even in reality, in which all our senses are engaged in their immediacy, our primary signification (primary in that most of our signification inheres in it, sometimes as accidents, like the expressions and inflection which go with the spoken word as proper accidents) is in the spoken word itself. Not many people deny that when we wish to convey more than a feeling, we use words. So at least one can argue that they are closest to us in their use as significations. Same with the senses of touch, sound and sight, as the most immediate, I think...but that's harder to argue. Whatever the case, talking's important, and by not doing it we degrade ourselves, at least that much is obvious.
Skype's the obvious rejoinder. We do talk, we just do so over video. But then your own reflection on playing a guitar in a room satisfies that question, I think, hopefully to both our satisfactions. Knowing that there's a mediacy there, however good the simulation, is not the same as being there immediately. It's like having a synthetic diamond instead of a real (non-vitiated) diamond in a ring, or living in the Matrix instead of reality. Living that way, getting used to that detachment, can destroy the ways we relate in reality. Especially when people find that the decreased function of chat is more convenient than a face-to-face link.
Thank you. I do hope you don't mind some more (hopefully well-reasoned) comments. Forgive me in advance for going on at length and including interesting digressions.
ReplyDeleteYou say that the spoken word is primary for communicating. This seems true (in a limited sense), though I'm not quite sure why. It's true that we're not able to change color, and only able to change shape in a limited way -- so much the more are we unable to change with regard to other senses -- but we can make very specific sounds. It may be that sound is a particularly apt sense-medium as well. And in point of fact it's clear that we have many systems in our brain dedicated to producing and interpreting significant sounds, i.e. speech.
The written word signifies the spoken but, as you say, misses out on many of the subtleties. Again, I'm not sure why, especially with handwritten words, but it seems to be true. Also, there are many conventions and complexities of the written word that serve as substitutes for those subtleties (imperfect though they be). In addition, there are some characteristics (like paragraphs, the way the parts do not pass away, etc.) peculiar to written words. In general, I think written words are far superior for scientific discourse, worse for dialectic and more casual speech.
As always, of course, this is merely the means used. The content may be an intellectual understanding, a feeling, .
(Thus when I said 'in a limited sense', I meant that for certain contents, words (written or spoken) are indubitably the best mode of communicating. For all intellectual acts (science, dialectic, rhetoric, understanding, etc.) I'd say, as well as non-visual sense acts. For associations (everything comprehended under psychology, or what Aristotle calls "experience") stories seem best, which again are usually in words. Pictures (primarily drawn ones, but also rendered, and sometimes even photographs) are better for seen things, though. Games convey a set of rules, which if used well can, according to some, be quite 'meaningful', whatever that means. Just an interesting little digression.)
With regard to Skype, I must say that it conveys the entirety of both the means and content of our verbal communication. It carries all the tones, inflections, facial expressions, and the rest. Of course one can't give the other a friendly punch through Skype. (And I'm talking a little theoretically. Skype doesn't actually do all that. One sees a small, pixelated, blurry box containing a flat image of the other person, with tinny mono audio of his voice. But all that's just technological -- it can be fixed.)
The difficulty with Skype is that something other than the mere communication is lost. In the case of the guitar, it is the shared atmosphere, and something else hard even to put into words. When I play alone in my echoing dorm room after seeing the misery of the world, it is a different atmosphere than when I play for a few friends at their house, and different again from when I play after dinner at my own home as others read before the fire. The guitar is the same, and I am playing the same songs, producing almost the same sounds, but the atmosphere is different. (Which is, incidentally, why it irritates me that our culture requires that we talk incessantly and 'do things' before we make friends. If I play guitar after dinner as my friend reads before the fire, I am drawn much closer than if I go out and 'do something'.)
ReplyDeleteAgain, it is nothing about the diamond that is lost when it is synthetic -- it is some sentimental or other association. The boasting rights of saying 'this is real', or even the mere fact that it is rare, or the romance of its ancient history -- that it was being formed long before the first human words were written or the first wheel crafted. Similar to the way one keeps some special ring, even though one could easily get another identical one, because it is the one that he gave you. The Matrix is more difficult, because one is seeing lights which appear to resolve to objects but do not, and at best are signs of the internal electrical state of a machine.
So it seems to me that something other than the mere means or content of our communication that is lost. And, it seems to me, it's not simply intermediation. There is always a medium, the air if nothing else. The voice ones hears when someone speaks into a microphone is just as synthetic as that which one hears over Skype. Consider this extreme case. Suppose a man were stuck in a dark sound-proof capsule, but was able to communicate with someone else through mental texting (which is at least in theory possible). Suppose he receives a text from someone describing a capsule which, as he reads, he realizes is his own. He would feel a sense of nearness or immediacy, even though he lacked any subtlety in the means of communication. Skype (in theory) seems precisely the reverse of this: all the subtlety of sight and sound, without an sense of nearness.
With the example of the guitar, it was such as these that I tried to get across. They are senses (though not, I think, communications) which are possibly theoretically impossible through the internet, at least without deception (as in the Matrix -- and definitely _not_ self-deception: for in the subtleties on ones psychology, I think self-deception is always different from actual belief).
All this in theory. In practice, communication through the internet is far more limited, even in means and content, but is likely to expand drastically in the immediate future.
I think we're in agreement about the fact that it's more than intermediation that is lost. That's why I mentioned the Matrix. The simulation of presence as material could be so perfectly simulated as to fool every sense we have into thinking it's real, but the second one is able to show someone that the Matrix isn't the real deal, our intellects do something funny with our apprehension of things; there is something in us that is not satisfied with even the most brilliant lie, but needs truth even to the degree that it will not settle for the most perfect representation.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a really incredible thing, too, because the fact that there IS such a "truth-need" in us with respect to the presence of things outside us becomes rather stunning when we realize that even the other people we know and love are used providentially as representations to us of a Truth beyond even ourselves and the other ones we see, which we must know and love in a way so much higher that it needs the very raising of our nature.
For Aristotle, to realize this wouldn't be possible. As far as he was concerned, the world was the world, as we apprehend it via our senses and intellect, and some things were just beyond us. But he recognized the "truth-need" in us, and this is why he would not settle for merely studying the natural sciences, but devoted his life to philosophy as their purpose, and metaphysics as the wisdom philosophy pursues, the most true things we may know naturally.
Thomas, though, recognized this, I think, in the understanding that nature points to grace as a thing points to its fulfillment, and that grace fulfills nature. It's sort of like a skyscraper; you can see the bottom, while the top disappears into the clouds. But in Theology, the clouds (sin and fallen nature) are cleared away, and we are given new eyes of faith, that can penetrate beyond our normal vision to see even higher. Yet nonetheless the base of the skyscraper, which we see normally (naturally) points to the height, as a length points to its own increase.
It's this "truth-need", which transcends even the material conditions of our sensations and has to do, I think, with the interrelation between our body and soul, specifically what Aristotle calls the cogitative sense, which points to the "truth-need" Augustine recognized so well, professing despite the goods of the world: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."
A technical note:
ReplyDeleteI say the spoken word is primary in signification in that we cannot convey determinate ideas in the same way through our other modes of expression. One cannot explain the distinctions in the manner of our knowing God through expertise in interpretive dance; we simply don't convey that sort of information that way. This is not to put down dance, but to raise the spoken word, as it points to the manner in which the Word Himself proceeds from the Father.