[This post was originally printed on my Hebrew weblog. Like many of my other posts, I was thinking about offering a English edition of it for your readers of Mainly on Israel. You will find high odds that as many instances just before, I would be as well lazy to translate it. Encouragement to perform so arrived from Janelle – many thanks!]
Much has long been explained of your gradual shift of humanity from a textually-based communication to a visual one (of course, the verbal factor prevails, although progressively mediated through visual and / or audio-visual means instead of textual ones).
Personal interactions in social networks is still mainly textual (responses, responses, messages, weblogs, and so forth.), but I feeling a depreciation of your written phrase towards the transaction alone. That is partly due to media which are not ‘text-friendly,’ or which render it significantly less important. Twitter limits every single tweet to 140 characters, and as a result generates a whole new mindset for formulating one’s thoughts, through which we conceive of our messages quantitively (and which has a significant restrict imposed on this amount) rather than focus on their material. Even prior to Twitter there have been text-messaging as well as the various IM computer software, who jointly pushed towards a development of the new orthography, one which was light-hearted and playful, but largely useful and superficial. A true Newspeak, certainly, which has a limited vocabulary as possible, created in the least letters achievable.
The a variety of approaches to convey quick messages, along the advancement of social networks lead to ascertain a actuality by which relationships are available and achievable in developing numbers than what would are feasible utilizing outdated media, and concurrently create the limited time-resources essential to take care of them (considering that every single connection of this variety demands less time).
This may be the closing demise of a soldier from an additional century,
Office Enterprise 2007 Key, composing one more page to his loved-one for the light of the fading candle. This is actually the stop of your lady who asked Mr. Postman to wait, because 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 a card or a letter, they will now be expecting a text-message or a ‘like’ on Facebook.
Unlike the ‘like,’ however, the letter required material, as well as the content material demanded some mastery of language, a vocabulary rich with synonyms, an ability to structure a paragraph and a whole letter, including the salutations and the opening, the anecdote, along with the concluding greetings. Letters piled up and ended up collected in a variety of anthologies and albums, commemorating fallen soldiers, artists, thinkers and public figures,
Office 2010 Pro Plus, 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 to the report, in Hebrew). What struck me was the eloquence of these soldiers, who at least some of them had been quite evidently no great authors by any standard, but instead simple people, who nevertheless were significantly better articulated than the average Israeli today. Naturally, by saying this I am thinking of verbal and textual articulation, given that contemporary soldiers communicate in a variety of methods that ended up non-existent in the first dozen years of the State of Israel.
In the late 1990s I recall reading in the newspaper of a young man who died under some tragic circumstances, and his family erected a tombstone shaped like a mobile phone. They stated, “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 one particular out will be the a single who doesn’t own a mobile, not the one particular who uses it regularly, and I doubt anyone would consider erecting such a tombstone, just as inside 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 a lot deeper elements of human communication. I recall an outstanding example from the effects of time from a publish a friend of mine, Yair, wrote on the differences between the pre-oil heating period, 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 resources 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 website never claims to bear such a nature. It could be the idle-musings of an academic, not his scholarly produce).
I then read something on the ‘attention economy’ of 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,
Office Home And Business, naturally, that Berne’s currency for attention is attention alone, such as within 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 one from the first pages with the book, if I recall correctly). In the age of internet, on the other hand, the attention economy is not merely a psychological trade of transactions of attention, but a concrete economy, through which attention is quantified by value and worth (the time of attention, its origin, number of viewers, and so on.), and has become a commodity which can be traded for hard currency. To 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 Purpose, on the way the internet is changing our attitude to and conceptualization of time.
The time and skill dedicated to a single letter, restricted 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 for the points raised in the letter. Berne’s transactions, replaced today by ‘like’s, ‘retweet’s, and remarks on a blog site,
Windows 7 Starter, and especially when contemplating the transactions are no longer taking place solely in a psychological market of attention, but also in actual financial markets of advertising and commercializing,
Office Standard, 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 could be the value and merit of your content constituted by visual communication. We may indeed observe that it renders aspects of textual communication superfluous. I admit this is only to a partial degree. But the fact that these are the consequences in alone raises severe doubts as for the propriety of the eulogy. If there is such a wide embrace of your new media, it is evidently responding to actual needs, which can be finding new paths and trails previously paved by letters.
In the meanwhile, a novel of letters that I have not yet completed, is becoming more and more anachronistic. A poem I wrote in 1995, could perhaps not be created today:
-
I gave you
A poem I wrote
In eight separate pages
Folded in two
So no a single could
See the words.
-
You returned them to
Me, folded in
Four
-
I did not ask
You to add
Another fold.
Office Enterprise 2007 Key The Death of the Addres
Linear Mode
