Loud

The communicative nature of social media is presented as an evolution, development—progress, even—over the structured mode of writing that presents a single writer’s state of mind as a linguistic image. These two different aspects of the human animal have been set in a conflict by economic and cultural developments and I know no easy way to resolve the feud.

Conversation dooms writing. It’s not that texting breaks our brains or that a wall-to-wall post on facebook somehow cauterises all that is good and true and right from our moral souls. The idiot doom-mongers condemn new interactive communicative media because it provides us with new interactive communities and chant the paradoxical claim that new ways of connecting people somehow isolate them.

It’s not that.

It is a matter of the impossible simultaneous operation of text as writing and text as conversation.

Where people of a previous generation had a clear separation of roles for speech and text, conversation and writing, most people today are conversant in text and illiterate at writing.

They didn’t plan to be that way, they’re not lazy, nor do they suffer of some defect in character. What used to be a characteristic of the civilised person has been lost due to a simple change in priorities and understandable—inevitable—social changes.

Text as conversation interrupts text as writing. It doesn’t work in the same way, doesn’t draw its order, its rationales or structures, from the same centres in the brain and its creativity flows from different, darker, recesses of the soul.

The business of art consists precisely in making understandable and accessible that which might be incomprehensible and inaccessible in the form of reasoning.

Leo Tolstoy – What is Art?

To write as an act of writing is a different state of mind from texting to communicate. Comments, forums, discussions, twitters, facebook and blogs all function as conversation with the standards, protocols and even responses of a social situation.

They carry with them the expectations and obligations borne from their social context; they offer a different world of messages, symbols and metamessages. The frameworks for understanding social media come from a separate mindscape. The social medium of communication you could call texting does not work like writing.

When I sit down to write, even just a short note in my journal¹, I’m not conversing. I’m crafting my thoughts and emotions into text. I try my best to infect you with my feelings and lure your mental state along the path my mind has already travelled. This is not communication or information, this is an attempt to pass on a state of mind as an airborne pathogen. It is a black death as a blight on the soul, passed on from person to person through compassion. It is a form of art unique to the human condition.²

When I sit down to converse, even when it is in writing, I’m thinking about the conversation and the social situation I’m in. I am thinking about relationships, bonds; sometimes about status and career. I’m thinking of history and life. I’m thinking of the care and the vulnerabilities and the obligations of friendship and family.

I’m not sure you can be good at both, texting and writing. Competent, yes. Fluent, even. But, good? I worry that we’ve lost a generation of writers whose priority for the act of writing is to see text as a social function.

Text as conversation and text as writing are lives apart; our lives apart. One is an attempt at obliterating solitude. The other is an exultation of solitude, of its serenity and thoughtfulness, no matter how many people surround you with their chatter.