[This publish was originally published on my Hebrew weblog. Like a lot of my other posts, I was contemplating presenting a English version of it for your viewers of Largely on Israel. There are large odds that as many occasions ahead of, I would be as well lazy to translate it. Encouragement to perform so came from Janelle – many thanks!]
Much continues to be mentioned of the gradual shift of humanity from a textually-based communication to a visual one particular (needless to say, the verbal facet prevails, despite the fact that progressively mediated through visual and / or audio-visual implies rather than textual ones).
Personal interactions in social networks is still largely textual (responses, responses, messages, weblogs,
Microsoft Office Professional Plus, and so forth.), but I feeling a depreciation of the created word versus the transaction alone. That is partly because of to media which can be not ‘text-friendly,’ or which render it less considerable. Twitter limits every tweet to 140 characters, and hence generates a whole new mindset for formulating one’s thoughts, in which we conceive of our messages quantitively (and using a substantial restrict imposed on this amount) instead of emphasis on their material. Even prior to Twitter there have been text-messaging and also the a variety of IM application, who jointly pushed towards a creation of the new orthography, a single which was light-hearted and playful, but mainly purposeful and superficial. A real Newspeak, without a doubt, using a limited vocabulary as you possibly can, composed in the least letters possible.
The different approaches to convey small messages, along the development of social networks lead to determine a fact by which relationships are available and possible in increasing numbers than what would have been doable utilizing outdated media, and at the same time create the limited time-resources essential to maintain them (because every partnership of this type demands much less time).
This will be the closing death of a soldier from another century, writing one more page to his loved-one towards the light of the fading candle. This is actually the conclude from the woman who asked Mr. Postman to wait, since she’s “been standin’ here so patiently for just a card, or just a letter.” While girls may still have the fate of having days pass by to no avail, the waiting will be much less patient. Instead of the card or a letter, they will now be expecting a text-message or a ‘like’ on Facebook.
Unlike the ‘like,’ however,
Office 2010 Home And Student Key, the letter required material, as well as the content demanded some mastery of language, a vocabulary rich with synonyms, an ability to structure a paragraph and a whole letter, including the salutations as well as the opening, the anecdote, and the concluding greetings. Letters piled up and had been collected in a variety of anthologies and albums, commemorating fallen soldiers, artists, thinkers and public figures, allowing an additional peephole to their soul. About two years ago, on the occasion of Israel’s adjunct Memorial and Independence days, Shay Hazkani prepared a televisual report on letters of soldiers which have been read and documented by the military censorship (the link leads for the report, in Hebrew). What struck me was the eloquence of these soldiers, who at minimum some of them have been quite evidently no great authors by any standard, but rather simple people, who nevertheless have been considerably better articulated than the average Israeli today. Obviously,
Office 2007 Product Key, by saying this I am thinking of verbal and textual articulation, given that contemporary soldiers communicate in numerous methods that ended up non-existent within the first dozen years of your State of Israel.
In the late 1990s I recall reading inside the newspaper of a young man who died under some tragic circumstances, and his family erected a tombstone shaped like a mobile phone. They said, “this was what he liked to do” – talking on his mobile. With the time, I thought this tombstone encapsulated the beginning of the new era. I now realize it merely marked a transition period, a period through which someone who used his cellphone regularly was a curiosity standing out, and therefore this tendency became characteristic of him. I think that nowadays the odd a single out may be the one who doesn’t own a mobile, not the a single who uses it regularly, and I doubt anyone would consider erecting such a tombstone, just as in the 1990s no a single erected a tombstone of people who talked a lot on a dial phone, or who wrote letters.
The change of methods of communication affects and will continue to impact significantly deeper elements of human communication. I recall an outstanding example with the effects of time from a publish a friend of mine, Yair, wrote on the differences between the pre-oil heating period,
Office Pro 2010, and after. The post is in Hebrew, but I can sum up that Yair described how time-consuming pre-modern heating by wood was, and concluded that in a society that needs to spend so much time and assets on basic living conditions, very few have leisure for philosophy and arts. Yair himself admitted that this was rather simplistic, but I believe it is nonetheless a worthy point, even if in an academic-historiographical context it would need to be far more substantiated (this blog site never claims to bear such a nature. It is the idle-musings of an academic, not his scholarly produce).
I then read something on the ‘attention economy’ with the internet (alas, in Hebrew again). Actually, the association of attention and economics can be tracked to Eric Berne’s splendid book, Games People Play¸ where he describes all our attention-interactions with acquaintances, friends and family as transactions. The difference being, needless to say, that Berne’s currency for attention is attention by itself, such as in the case where I haven’t met someone in a long time and we are both in a deficit of attention from each other, which we will have to compensate for in our next meeting, until we balance it out (I think this example occurs in a single of your first pages with the book, if I recall correctly). From the age of internet, on the other hand, the attention economy is not merely a psychological trade of transactions of attention,
Microsoft Office Home And Business 2010, but a concrete economy, through which attention is quantified by value and worth (the time of attention, its origin, number of viewers, etc.), and has become a commodity which can be traded for hard currency. For the ideas I draw from Yair, Margolis and Berne, I add inspirational insights I read in Prof. Todd Rakoff’s book, A Time for Every single Purpose, on the way the internet is changing our attitude to and conceptualization of time.
The time and skill dedicated to a single letter, minimal the number of people that could be the addressees of such a composition. The addressee was carefully selected, a special person deserving to be the addressee of such an effort, who can be likely to reply and aptly respond to the points raised in the letter. Berne’s transactions, replaced today by ‘like’s, ‘retweet’s, and remarks on a blog, and especially when thinking about the transactions are no longer taking place solely in a psychological market of attention, but also in actual financial markets of advertising and commercializing, bring down the bar for selection. I am tempted, and I suppose this really is apparent at this point, to lament the loss of distinctiveness that accompanied the stature of an addressee. But truthfully, there is no way of predicting how this new culture will develop, and what is the value and merit of the content material constituted by visual communication. We may certainly observe that it renders aspects of textual communication superfluous. I admit that is only to a partial degree. But the fact that these are the consequences in by itself raises severe doubts as to the propriety of a eulogy. If there is such a wide embrace of the new media, it is evidently responding to actual needs, which are finding new paths and trails previously paved by letters.
In the meanwhile, a novel of letters that I have not yet completed, is becoming far more and far more anachronistic. A poem I wrote in 1995, could perhaps not be published today:
-
I gave you
A poem I wrote
In eight separate pages
Folded in two
So no one could
See the words.
-
You returned them to
Me, folded in
Four
-
I did not ask
You to add
Another fold.
Office Pro 2010 The Death of the Addressee Mostly
alfresco of
Hybrid Mode
