At home over Christmas, my father came into my room and declared I was spending too much time on the Internet.
Showing him the emails I was writing did nothing to assuage his feeling that I was wasting time that could be better spent. It wasn’t the solitary act of writing that bothered him, but the medium I had chosen for it. I ribbed him and called him a Luddite, because his complaint — that digital texts are an inadequate way to communicate — is mind-numbingly ancient, the literary equivalent of shouting about “kids these days.” Even Plato lamented that the written word rendered focal memory obsolete. But perhaps my dad had a point. There is a distinction of more than format between writing a letter and dashing out an email, or spending 10 minutes crafting the perfect tweet. I began to wonder: does the medium in which we write to each other change how we communicate? Could it even change what we choose to say?
Anyone with a university semester under their belt is probably familiar with Marshall McLuhan’s exhortation that “the medium is the message.” My father’s worries aren’t unfounded: when Facebook-chatting or emailing, I simply click lackadaisically between my 11 Google Chrome tabs. Browsing the web encourages a flightiness of attention that can result in serendipitous discoveries, but the experience of writing or receiving a letter is a sort of lexical solipsism — there’s only one communique existing at a time, only one text which is realized by the act of reading it. Digital communication naturally emphasizes the new: your phone buzzes with a new text before you can even hit send; you can follow a Twitter livefeed of a sports event and its ensuing riot. This flightiness is rewarded on the web, because the brain can easily make intuitive connections between pieces of information. Compare this to the physical act of writing on paper, which forces the writer (and the subsequent reader) to temporarily immerse themselves in individual texts in order to absorb their information.
Maryanne Wolf, a professor of childhood development at Tufts University, has said that humans were never meant to read. Each new reader’s brain must create its own method of reading; learning to read and write is not an automatic process which humans are as predisposed to as, say, spoken language. Rather, it is an “open architecture,” and how we learn to read depends on the formal structure of the language read (for example, readers of character languages which use logograms, symbols for entire words or syllables, such as Chinese, rely more on visual memory), as well as the time we put into learning how to read affects this architecture. This means, writes Wolf, that learning to communicate in a digital medium, where a shorter attention span is rewarded, could have dramatic effects on the fundamentals of how we read and write to one another. In 300 milliseconds the brain can access a huge array of visual and semantic information which allows us to decode what we are reading, but it takes another 200 milliseconds for us to further process what we have read, to begin critical analyses of the text. The way we talk on the web rewards skipping this second step, meaning we often don’t absorb or analyze this new information: in high school anatomy you might have been told to write out your notes, in order to better retain the names of 206 bones, but you can skim an email without fully absorbing its content, facilitated by the physical act of scrolling.
In his 1977 work Image-Music-Text, Roland Barthes, a literary theorist who had been bemoaning the decline of text since at least 1940, wrote about the distinction between an “author” and a “scriptor.” Though at the time of his writing the Internet was but a glimmer in the eye of the US military, this distinction between the two types of writers aligns quite neatly with the different mental processes and experiences of communicating on paper and on the web. Barthes’ “author” is our Romantic concept of a God-like artistic creator, one who forms an entirely new world out of their imagination alone. The “scriptor,” on the other hand, can only combine and re-combine existing texts and concepts in new ways, never creating anything truly original. Barthes was writing specifically about books, but we can see similar patterns emerging in e-communication. According to Barthes, the scriptor has no past, but is born with the text as it is written. This creates a new openness for the reader, who can discover in a scriptor’s text whatever she sees fit, but it also means that it is possible to get by on a much shallower relationship with the written word. Grammar sticklers decry the ruin of language brought on by instant communication, and practically speaking, they are correct: digital dialogue rewards reactionary speed and relevancy over accuracy and depth.
My father’s distaste for communicating on the web is two-fold: as a writer, I think he finds the very act of scrolling through emails, rather than holding them in his hands, to be inadequate, and he intuitively worries about what Wolf has confirmed, that when reading and writing on the web we skip those extra 200 milliseconds of analysis and understanding. As digital communicators, we choose words for their immediate value because the nature of the digital medium rewards peripheral attention to the present. This means that the web provides an amazing platform for minority opinions and marginalized voices (witness endless articles on the phenomenon of the Arab Spring and social media) where as hard texts, like letters, do not. Alternatively, physical texts protect information in a solid way that is simply unavailable to digital ephemera, but they are less intuitively accessible.
When we communicate via digital mediums, on Facebook or with email and texting, we can see patterns of shared thought emerging: on a cold day, everyone will be talking online about the weather. Social media urges us to take part in whatever the zeitgeist is presently, a communal reaction to the current mood. Alternatively, written communication like notes passed in class, or letters and postcards, is intimate by nature. We hold them in our hands, and the thoughts expressed by the writer are just for us, the reader. On the web, topics of discussion tend to be cyclical — what’s trending on Twitter, what links are being shared, ad infinitum — because our attention is so divided. No one was addressed directly, so no one was listening and everything must be shared again.
