In Televised Redemption, a seminar on religion, identity and media led by Prof. John L. Jackson, we discussed the implications of SMS culture. Is our matrimony with technology destroying our closest bonds in the real world (among family and friends) and creating many new (but more superficial) ties across broad networks?
John Peters writes in “Speaking into the Air” that historically, we have been obsessed with the idea of medium-less communication, something like angel-speak that requires no words and no co-temporality/spatiality but simply mutual understanding. Spiritualism and animal magnetism are examples of human attempts to engender this kind of communication, but the “results” that were claimed to have been achieved usually required the kind of linguistic support that these endeavors sought to eradicate. Language muddies the expressions of our soul and the true nature of our thoughts, but when we tried to prove that communication could be achieved without some kind of medium or externalization (be it language, gestures, sounds or images) as Upton Sinclair attempted with his wife Mary in the 1930s, language was all we had to hold up those claims. Linguistic web spinning is exactly what the champions of spiritualism and medium-less communication abhor.
SMS, the medium-d’être of my generation, at once brings us closer to angel speak by eradicating the need to be co-temporal and co-spatial yet brings us further away by introducing additional significatory layers. Not only are there words, which are, underneath it all, arbitrary signs, but there are fewer of them, they are often shorthanded, and there are new symbols altogether, like emoticons. True meaning and clarity is hard enough to capture in a 300-page tome; a lot more gets lost when one must sum up his/her meaning in a phrase or two. So the meanings we convey change: adapt to fit the medium. You don’t tell someone you love him/her for the first time in a text message or talk about things that have deep meaning. And because the medium is suited for triviality or simple coordination, which is a lot easier than dealing with weighty matters, one finds oneself unable to detach from those sorts of communications and to engage in real conversations. Blackberries sit out on the table at dinner, students hide their cell phones on their laps in class and sneak peeks whenever possible. We aren’t spinning webs with our cell phones or trying to claim some spiritualist achievement, but a lot gets lost when we are unwilling to deal with the real world. We must not allow the convenience and effortlessness of one medium to halt attempts at externalizing the internal through others.
