This post is the fourth chapter of my book “HOMO CELLULARIS: THE CELL TOWER OF BABEL”. Click here to read the previous chapter.
Main Ideas: Digital devices expand our capacity to communicate, but threaten our ability to control the fate of our words, which can lead to devastating consequences.
1. FAR AND WIDE
The history of Information Technology has been the tale of mankind trying to push our words further, get them into more ears, and keep them there. The first technology developed for this end was the alphabet.
These twenty-six characters, arranged and rearranged, can convey the full range of human thought.
Written on a wall, they can speak without ceasing day and night, while their author rests in bed.
Written on paper, they can be sealed in an envelope and carried across the land, bringing the voice of the letter writer to its intended audience despite miles and miles of geographical separation.
Printed, these words can be disseminated to the masses and live for all time.
But "bigger," "farther," and "more," are not the only goals of language. Not all words are destined to be set in print, bound, and sold in great quantities. There are also words that should only be whispered. Words that can only be uttered by a speaker to a listener in a private sphere. Words whose greatest gift is their ability to convey, and then to disintegrate.
Technology can help us achieve these goals as well.
One approach would be that employed in Mission Impossible: "This message will now self-destruct." But perhaps there's an easier way.
2. PROTOCOL BOTS
A friend told me that he doesn't feel comfortable sending a work email without an emoji.
"It just seems cold," he said. “All those letters and words without even a hint of a smile.”
I'm reminded of Star Wars. The emoji has become our C3P0 protocol bot, walking in front of us to greet the world with a beaming, yellow smile.
Some people see this as a degradation of our professional culture, but the fact that emojis have entered into the workplace doesn't bother me. Our technology pushes our language to grow and evolve. Sometimes this looks like a reverse progress (compare, for instance, "C U L8-er! 😊" to the works of Shakespeare).
But it is progress all the same.
Technology and language have a complicated and intertwined relationship. The easiest way to understand the connection between the two phenomena is to erase the line between them.
Language is technology.
Technology is language.
I've spoken already about the ways in which we invest our devices with our selfhood. But how does this relate to communication? The self, after all, is not an isolated entity. Our words, also, are part of our selves. They are the very part that blur our boundaries, allowing us to mingle as a society, self in self.
Our words go out into the world and do our bidding for us. In return, the words of others come to bear on us as well.
What's more, once our words go out into the world, they are no longer beholden to us. Sometimes they do our bidding, but other times they are snatched up by others and put to work against us.
3. BEING OVERHEARD
There's a certain café five minutes from my home where I like to go in the mornings. Often I bring friends and colleagues there for a chat or a meeting. The coffee is decent. The croissants are a bit dry. The real reason I go there is the music. It's just right.
I'm not talking about which albums or artists they play. I'm talking about the volume. The volume of the music at a café is one of the most delicate and important features of the whole operation, but few places really hit the nail on the head with this one.
The music needs to be quiet enough so that the person you're sitting with can hear you without difficulty or strain, but loud enough so that no one else can hear your conversation. The music's job, then, is essentially to place a small cone of silence and privacy around each and every table.
Have you ever been at a café when the music suddenly stopped? It's a funny moment – like those scenes in old movies where a tough stranger enters the bar, greeted by the screeching halt of the record and the dead, silent stares of everyone inside.
When this happens, everyone suddenly become self-conscious. Perhaps one or two people were caught in the middle of a sentence when the music cut, leaving them shouting to the entire café what they thought was for one pair of ears only.
It doesn't much matter what it was they were saying. It's embarrassing no matter what – it's the audio equivalent of being caught with your fly down.
4. THE WHISPER AND THE SHOUT
Language is girded by two principles that allow it to function in our society. The first of which is that certain words are for certain people. The second is that not all words have the same shelf life.
Some words are meant for the few or the one.
Some words are meant for the many or the all.
Some words are meant to last – like those engraved on tablets outside courthouses.
Some words are meant to fade – like a note to buy more milk on the refrigerator white board.
Linguistic technology, from pen and paper to Facebook, helps us in achieving all these aims. It gives us venues for speaking privately (a diary with a lock, a private message in Messenger) and venues for speaking publicly (a billboard, a Facebook post.) But because these technologies are external to our bodies, they also make our language more difficult to manage. By placing our words into our devices (and spreading them across apps and platforms) we lose control over their fate.
5. WORDS GONE WILD
Imagine you are out to dinner with your family. You are having a private conversation. Sure, other people in the restaurant might overhear what you say, but it's not like you're saying anything too private. This is a public space, why would you? You're in the company of family and you feel certain that what you say will be well received. If anyone else is eavesdropping, so be it. You don't know them anyways.
Now imagine that the next morning you wake up and see your face and the faces of your family members splashed across the front page of the newspaper. Someone heard what you said and wrote an article about it. Now people are saying horrible things about your family, calling you all self-involved and cruel based on how you gossiped about other family members and told some snickering jokes about the waitress when she had walked away.
People now recognize you on the street and sneer.
You get fired from your job.
News commenters discuss each one of your jokes and comments as if it's public property. And you can't complain. Because technically, everything you said was said in a public venue. No one broke and entered into your home. They only eavesdropped.
This story, as I've told it here, will probably never happen to you.
But now let's add some tech to the mix.
Imagine that instead of being at a restaurant, you are on Twitter.
You're not a celebrity. Your Twitter account is followed only by friends and family. You feel deeply confident that whatever you say in this forum will be heard only by those who know you and love you. Anyone else who happens to read what you wrote is just a stranger, and of no consequence.
So you speak freely.
And then you say something wrong.
And then someone sees it and reposts it.
And then it goes viral.
And then your picture is splashed across the internet.
And then you become the subject of countless articles and blogs.
And then you get recognized on the street.
And then get fired from your job.
This story is far less farfetched than the restaurant story. It has happened to countless individuals in our society. Generally, we have no pity for them. They have been labeled "criminal" for a certain post and whatever happens to them is thus their own fault.
Lindsay Stone, of Plymouth Massachusetts, posted a picture to her Facebook page of herself, at the Arlington National Cemetery, giving the finger and pretending to shout next to a sign asking for "silence and respect," beside the grave of the unknown soldier.
Facebook groups were formed demanding she be fired (she worked at a non-profit helping individuals with disabilities live independently) and she was subsequently placed on leave. She became the target of countless vitriolic and enraged emails, comments, and articles.
There are many other stories out there just like Stone’s. Each one follows the same pattern. A problematic tweet, direct message, post, or text goes viral, leading to an internet shaming campaign and ultimately concluding when the offender has lost both his or her reputation and job.
Stone was "overheard" on social media. Unlike being overheard by a few people in a restaurant, she was overheard by millions on the internet.
She is, in a sense, a victim of technology's ability to amplify and preserve a whisper, broadcasting it to the world. But those who overheard her are also victims.
By using technology to communicate (perhaps without realizing its true power to amplify and archive), Stone broadcast her message to the many. Those who saw her post did not ask to see it, and perhaps they felt violated and deeply hurt by her flippant picture. Stone certainly didn’t ask to go viral, but the individuals she offended never had a say in the matter. They didn't choose to eavesdrop.
In this way, I think that the sense of anger directed at Stone is just as justified as Stone’s own sense of victimization. In this story, both the offender and the offended were victims of our unmanaged and unmanageable technological capacity for communication.
Let's look at another story, similar to the above but altogether different.
At an annual Python Developer conference in 2013, a female employee of SendGrid, an email vendor, overheard two fellow employees making an arguably lewd joke about a "dongle." Apparently, they were using the term (which refers to a computer accessory) as some sort of innuendo. She posted a picture of the two men on Twitter with a caption explaining what she had overheard.
The conference organizers saw the tweet and spoke to the two men involved about the incident. It would have ended there had the tweet not gone viral, garnering criticism and condemnation for both the men themselves and their company until one of the perpetrators was let go, career and reputation down the drain.
What makes this story so different is that these men were speaking, to borrow text parlance, IRL. They did not post. They did not tweet. They did not blog.
Yet they were posted, tweeted, and blogged about.
6. THE BLACK BOX
Spoiler Alert:
At the end of the movie Perfect Strangers, we see happy couples emerge from a pleasant dinner party.
The whole movie, in which the couples decide to make a game of placing their cellphones face-up on the table and sharing all texts, phone calls, and notifications with one another, is revealed to have just been a potentiality. None of it actually happened. None of their secrets were revealed. There was no screaming, crying, admission, shaming, or betrayal.
They get in their cars and go home.
As stated in this film, our phones are "the black box" of our lives. Everything is there. We all have secrets that would hurt us if they got out.
Even if we have nothing particularly dramatic to conceal, we guard the small secrets just as tightly: an opinion or belief that friends would ridicule or not understand, a hobby that doesn't "go" with our presented social selves, a health issue, a habit.
There are those with whom we choose to privilege our secrets. And there are those with whom we decide to be just one of our many selves. There is the self we broadcast to the world, and the self we only whisper to a friend, perhaps at a café under the cover of music.
We are social creatures. We love to talk. We talk over coffee. We talk with our therapists. At the water cooler. In chatrooms. Through email. Through text and Messenger and Twitter and Instagram. We have pillow talk. We even talk to ourselves.
Just what are all of these conversations for?
The truth is that we talk not so much because we have something that needs to be said but because we love to talk. We find ourselves and create ourselves within conversation. And this is why the advancements in Information Technology have been such a boon to our civilization.
Pillow talk can occur between two individuals while their heads are resting on pillows in different states. We can send our whispers abroad and have them remain whispers, unheard by anyone but the intended recipient.
When we want to broadcast, or to speak loudly, we can do this with ease. Digital technology has given us all countless soapboxes on which to stand and preach. But when we talk about expressing ourselves, which selves are we referring too? We are fractured and complex. In communicating we are trusting our technology to be careful with our words on our behalf, shielding our private conversations from eavesdroppers, while simultaneously amplifying our declarations.
Too many of us have experienced how delicate this situation truly is. It goes far beyond the largescale dramas of Lindsay Stone and Dongles. It is woven into the fabric of our lives.
A text notification from an ex, perhaps perfectly innocent, can cause a blowout for a happy couple. People often send texts to the wrong recipient, leading to embarrassment. Trying to show a friend an innocent picture, the friend scrolls through the camera roll and sees something that they were never intended to see.
Our attempts to shield ourselves from this are often as clumsy and damaging as the issue itself:
In Curb Your Enthusiasm, when Cheryl receives a phone call on speaker from a male friend, she quickly announces, "Larry's in the car," causing Larry to spin off the handle with jealousy.
What does she have to hide?
In Perfect Strangers, each member of the dinner party was resistant to playing the game, but to deny transparency would have been equivalent to an admission of guilt.
We're left with a tragicomic correlation. As IT continues to develop and enhance the ways in which we speak with one another, it makes this speech more dangerous. Any attempt to secure ourselves against exposure only makes us look paranoid or suspicious. This in turn leads to a future in which we are scared to speak, ever unsure of who is listening in.
“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.” Ayn Rand
This post is the fourth chapter of my book “HOMO CELLULARIS: THE CELL TOWER OF BABEL”. Click here to read the following chapter.
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