Crap and vicious crap. Crap thrown with intent.
McLuhan foresaw the World Wide Web almost thrity years before the fact. He was not sanguine about its yackety-yackety-yak. In his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan wrote:
The world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction . . . And as our senses have gone outside us . . . we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence . . . Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.
McLuhan predicted that advances in electronic media would create a “Global Village.” At the time a lot of us thought that was a swell idea. McLuhan didn’t.
In a 1977 program on Ontario TV McLuhan was interviewed by the Canadian journalist Mike McManus.
McManus: But it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly.
McLuhan: The closer you get together the more you like each other? There is no evidence of that in any situation we’ve ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with each other.
In the middle of the past century there was a quaint idea that what the world needed was “communication.” If only parents and children could communicate, the Generation Gap would be bridged with a hug.
If only white folks and black folks could communicate, the struggle for civil rights and integration would end in handshakes and backslapping.
If only we had “cultural exchange” so that the ordinary people of the United States and the Soviet Union could communicate . . . Therefore an exceedingly dull publication called Soviet Life showed up in American public libraries and a sort of bowdlerized version of Life magazine, Amerika, published by the U.S. State Department, showed up—or didn’t—somewhere—or not—in the U.S.S.R. (The Cold War was not noticeably defrosted.)
All of this was nicely satirized in the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke when prison warden Strother Martin beats the (decent and freedom-loving) crap out of Paul Newman and says, “What we’ve got here is . . . failure to communicate.”
Or, as it was put more succinctly by Joan Rivers: “Can we talk?”
The hazards of talking too much are proverbial. The Oxford Dictionary of American Proverbs has fifty-two entries on the subject of “talk” and “talking.” All of them admonishments.
Big talk will not boil the pot.
Idle talk burns the porridge.
Talk is easy, work is hard.
Big talker, little doer.
Who talks the most knows the least.
People who wouldn’t think of talking with their mouths full often speak with their heads empty.
A child learns to talk in two years, but it takes him sixty years to learn to keep his mouth shut.
Money talks, but all it ever says is goodbye.
Or, as my mom also said, “Not everything that runs through your mind has to pour out your mouth.”
With social media, we’ve done something worse than create a world where we can hear what everybody says. We’ve created a world where we can hear what everybody thinks.
And that’s a scary thought. Scary enough that it’s the premise of a terrifying 2008 YA novel by Patrick Ness called The Knife of Never Letting Go. Ness describes the phenomenon, which is driving his twelve-year-old protagonist mad, as an “ever present cascade of ‘Noise.’”
Hearing what’s going on in other people’s minds is also the premise of a 2000 romcom starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt, What Women Want, which is also scary—in the sense of being a frighteningly bad movie.
Mel Gibson gets a shock from his electric hair dryer. (He has a hairstyle from the year 2000.) This causes him to be able to hear what women think. They aren’t thinking good things about him. Being that it’s a romantic comedy—as opposed to something closer to real life such as a terrifying young adult novel—this makes Mel Gibson (after a lot of predictable plot) a better person.
Although not in real life. In 2006 Gibson got in trouble for an anti-Semitic outburst at a Los Angles County sheriff’s deputy who’d pulled Mel over for suspected DUI.
After we got to hear what Mel was thinking, he had to enter a substance abuse recovery program. Which should remind us that we’ve always had a way to hear what everybody thinks. It’s called booze.
Sure puts my mouth in gear. Meanwhile, what social media should be drinking is a big cup of shut up.
A Brief Historical Digression on How Communication Has Devolved
If there be e-volution, there surely is de-volution, a degradation of the species.
—sermon by Rev. Hugh S. Carpenter, 1882
They tell us that
We lost our tails
Evolving up
From little snails
I say it’s all
Just wind in sails
—Devo, 1977
The computer is a handy device. It’s terrific for looking up who played Wally Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver. But the computer is essentially meaningless to wisdom, learning, and sense.
My laptop may be a great technological improvement on my old IBM Selectric. (Wally was played by Tony Dow—I just Googled it.) But there is no historical indication that technological improvements in the way we inscribe our ideas lead to improvement in the wisdom, learning, and sense of the ideas themselves.
The opposite case can be made. When words had to be carved in stone, we got the Ten Commandments. When we needed to make our own ink and chase a goose around the yard to obtain a quill, we got William Shakespeare. When the fountain pen was invented, we got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, we got Jack Kerouac. And with the advent of the smartphone keypad we got Donald Trump on Twitter.
It’s not just the written word that exhibits “degradation of the species.” The quality of what’s communicated seems to
