Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
Tweeting, phoning, posting and coasting through globalization’s “communications revolution,” we’re stuck in the rut of a Bumper Sticker Stone Age.
Naturally, when time is short so is communication. Long ago, when God’s grand plan put our ancestors upright on Earth, humans’ heated need to communicate advanced from coquettish panting to cave painting. Lacking a nearby Staples store, writing materials and the time for primitive scribbling were equally scarce. Consequently, when combined with their time intensive "Homo Erectus Do" list, chores of hunting and gathering, questing for fire, mating and dying, our saber tooth tiger dodging, fur sporting forbearers’ pictorial epistles were necessarily terse.
Yet as time and man meandered on, technological advances improved our writing implements, thereby increasing the ease and our time to communicate. Possessed of more time to think, scribe and opine, humanity communicated enduring historical testaments with chisels and tablets, resplendent sonnets with quills and parchments, and literary masterpieces with ink and type face. Importantly, by not being sufficiently “advanced” to permit instantaneous expressions or replies, these technologies afforded a person (if they chose to use it) ample time to consider the contents of their received and sent communications.
But such time was running out. The Industrial Era’s advent of mass visual and audio communications, such as movies, radio and television, and personal communication innovations, notably the telephone, were curtailing individuals’ time to receive and send communications. While most heralded this change, T.S. Eliot noted the danger:
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
Today, in our Internet Era, we are besieged by communications. Armed with iPhones, laptops and Blackberrys, we incessantly struggle to chat, post, tweet and text in retaliation. Scant time is available to ponder or produce our expressions; and an irony arises: our ubiquitous time to communicate trash compacts our missives that litter this Bumper Sticker Stone Age.
Here, laden with the modernity’s unending demands while marooned in cubical caves bathed by a computer’s lonesome gloaming, we spot a tweet; in seconds we slip our mundane existence to traverse the vast expanse of Earth and convey to strangers our ideals, insights and intimacies in 140 characters or less. Thus ensnared by our communication innovations, we find ourselves culturally back at Four Square one.
But do not despair – yet. Soon, I shall peek from my cyber-cave to sift the communications miasma befouling our Bumper Sticker Stone Age and explore its debasement of etiquette, culture and politics. Until such time, my faux fur sporting, facebooking friends, beware spammer-toothed tigers!
What's that you ask with your curt, 21st Century cyber-hieroglyphics? "WTF????!!!!*"
Au contraire – FTW!!!!!!!
(“WTF” means “What the funk.”)
Thaddeus G. McCotter, U.S. Representative (MI-11)
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Comments:
Feb '11
Re: Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
Welcome, Congressman.
Oct '10
Re: Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
In the spirit of focusing on the medium rather than the message, the recent outbreak of poetry on Ricochet perhaps suggests there should be an easy way to insert br tags (or even pre tags, if we're going to get constructivist...)
Re: Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
I'm totally going to tweet a link to this.
Sep '11
Re: Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
"Twitter will be the death of communication..." is just the latest form of a complaint that has gone on since the British Navy starting communicating with signal flags. And astute observers have noted ever since that new technologies for communication engender new forms of communication. (Patrick O'Brian, writing of a naval ball in Post Captain, has the ballroom decorated with the signal flags for "engage the enemy more closely.")
When writers pine for considered thought, seemingly doomed in the heady days of electrical telegraphy (using the electric fluid, by gum!), they're really making a distinction between synchronous and asynchronous communication. Synchronous communication is instantaneous--you reach out and touch, and the other person gets poked right then. You dial, her phone rings; you text, her phone buzzes.
Asynchronous communication is not instantaneous--you send a letter, you may get a response back in a week or so; you send a fax, you may get a response back in a few hours; you send an email to your congressman (ahem), and two weeks later you get a response from an aide.
The synch/asynch issue has been around since the Chappe brothers invented the semaphore telegraph in 1790: you received a message, and the messenger stood there waiting for you to compose a reply. Further, the reply was strictly limited to a very small number of words--you had to be quick, you had to be terse. Ah! Zee death of zee discourse long-and-long-winded, no?
Morse and his associates use the electric fluid (I love that term) to create the electric telegraph--new technology, same issue: instant transmission of a message to a local station; the message is handed to a messenger who delivers it--and waits for your instant response. And both messages are charged per five-character "word"--you have to be quick, and you have to be terse.
Bell's telephone made it worse: the phone would ring, and you had to drop everything to answer it. (Bell used to run television commercials emphasizing that you have to answer the phone within twelve rings--my children mock me for my Pavlovian response to a ringing telephone.) If you paused for a moment to offer a contemplative response your caller would think the call had been dropped, or that you had a speech impediment.
Fast forward ninety years, and we have instant messaging--first across mainframes, later across the Internet. Now we have texts, tweets, and emails delivered to our phones--lots of people spend over a hundred dollars a month to be rudely interrupted by their friends. This is progress?
But asynch communication is not dead: both email and forum posts (like this one) allow you to think, to research--even to find links to subjects you refer to. And if you can find a way around artificial limits, you can even post complete thoughts, instead of trying to stuff an entire argument into a mere 200 words.
Edited on October 10, 2011 at 4:08pmMay '10
Re: Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
The World is too much with us, near and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
-William Wordsworth
Aug '10
Re: Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
wtv
Oct '10
Re: Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
I'll just note the irony of responding to despair over truncated communications in 200 words or less... and let Lewis Thomas do the honors. From Lives of a Cell:
"An acive field of science is like an immense intellectual anthill; the individual almost vanishes into the mass of minds tumbling over each other, carrying information from place to place, passing it around at the speed of lights.
"There are special kinds of information that seem to be cheomtactic. As soon as a trace is released, receptors at the back of the neck are caused to tremble, there is a massive convergence of motile minds flying upwind on a gradient of surprise, crowding around the source. It is an infiltration of intellects, an inflammation.
"There is nothing to touch the spectacle. In the midst of what seems a collective derangement of minds in total disorder, with bits of information being scattered about, torn to shreds, disintegrated, deconstituted, engulfed, in a kind of activity that seems as random and agitated as that of bees in a distrubed part of the hive, there suddenly emerges, with the purity of a slow phrase of music, a single new piece of truth about nature."
Nov '10
Re: Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
Nov '10
Re: Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
Aug '10
Re: Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
Elizabeth Dunn · Oct 10 at 3:07pm
Edited on Oct 10 at 04:18 pm
well that was cryptic
Oct '10
Re: Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
Thaddeus McCott
ergo on with sharp wordplay
I like it a lot
Sep '10
Re: Bumper Sticker Stone Age Part I: WTF????!!!!*
Hey it's that rock n' roll dude