On the word, afterthought

In the beginning was THE WORD and it has got some magical power to deliver us the communication network, and please remember, it’s an important part, the network is like a child to be delivered. Over time, each participant became a sender – but previously they were only, or in overwhelming majority to be more specific, the recipients — and everyone began to have something to say on every topic available, worldwide. Today, and ten years ago when I’ve written polish version of these thoughts, today even more than before, our words are starting to become discredited, as it is increasingly difficult to find valuable combinations of them, there is a simple math to prove that there are more and more usless content made with some words. We usually encounter poor or even impaired “representations” of word combinations, especially when we explore the corners of the global spider’s web. What, exactly, was initiated by the sending (unsuccessful^[1], by the way) of the first digital word? Why do language development trends seem terrifying? And finally, what could be the end of this story, begun with the word?

Talking around nothing – startpoint

The phenomenon of THE OLD BEGNINNING, or old beginnings, it seems to me to be something disastrous, like a trap or something like that, primarily because it’s very difficult to get to those beginnings, which history has colored and distorted many times, in many ways. Nevertheless, according to my premonitions and, let me paraphrase Norwid, Polish famous poet: the approaching finale, with each step, hints more and more intensely to the beginning. In the beginning, depending on the concept, there were, among others: lustfulness, chaos, hydrogen… and the word.

I don’t think it’s necessary to scientifically prove the claim “society is getting stupider” — just look around. Well, for sure, we should take into account the discourse according to which we discriminate against younger generations; in my opinion, we’re all walking to some maliscious madness, regardless of age. I blame the above-mentioned state of affairs, among different things, on the universal desire to treat science and culture as a means to achieve other goals. I blame the cult of instrumentalism!!1 What does the word have to do with it? According to the “saying is believing” paradigm, the belief — that education should be set in line with the requirements of the market, economic calculation and narrowly understood utilitiness — is constantly being revived. We use words to create pipe dreams that we then act on.

Conversations about nothing leading to nowhere, sometimes by choice, from time to time because of symbolic social violence forcing to communicate with each other, so-called small talk is certainly not an invention of the digital (as well as being on-line and able to be reachable all the fucking time) era, although before its advent, in post-communist countries such as Poland, this phenomenon practically didn’t occur.^[2] Worldwide web with its aftermath has degenerated _{small talk}. Friends and “friends-strangers” (everyone who orbits round the people you’re interested in) instead of exchanging polite “how you doing?” or “what’s up?”, they started throwing insults or unkind digital memes at each other and the problem is that all this cynicism, whole oceans of irony and sarcasm climaxing as fuck, all these entities aren’t longer “seasonings”, so I’ll put forward a little bit risky hypothesis: they’ve become the main course, which seems 2B the inevitable — as an ancient curse — mainstream.

When browsing online discussions, it’s pretty hard to come across the rhetoric of empathy and it’s pretty impossible not to come across the rhetoric of hatred. The miserable ersatz of online approval are: “likes” and smiles via emoticons or — if it puts some extra meaning — emojis. It seems awkward that acronyms such as LOL were once used to transcribe some real laughter; now instead of laughing we say “lol”. Slightly more extensive descriptions of negative emotions are rather little consolation, because the dichotomous view of the world that these statements emanate, it leads to blindness and deafness to reality and to the loss of the ability to express one’s own thoughts. It’s also disturbing that many charming expressions are dying out, and the newly created ones demean the dignity of a rational human being (see the not-so-recently triumphant “cure for pain in the bum”, well, it’s hard to translate “maść na ból dupy” into English, but I tried, at least). Some, probably mostly positive, phrases lose their original meaning and turn into caricatures (e.g. „I feel sorry for you” which is increasingly a mockery, often with additional meaning “sorry not sorry”, often as not the words of a compassionate person).

It would seem that the structure of thinking as well as the rules of building discourse should be above ideology, but unfortunately the squadrons of fierce commentators bombarding from behind a virtual firewall apparently don’t share this view, and therefore online dialogue is less and less likely to allow for any nuances or complications. There is a saying in English “you talk like a book”, which is (was?) most often used during a discussion with an eloquent interlocutor. To the best of my knowledge this phrase usually has a pejorative connotation, because dignified, elegant, and — increasingly often even just — correct language in the perspective of novus homo ludens seems to be an attribute of a pert (smart but stupid) person. Of course, there are arrogant and bumptious intellectuals, but the hypersensitive heuristics of the global village members cause the author of any less obvious reasoning to be labeled as conceited or puffed-up. In the “best” case, the virtual settlers try to ward her or him or they off with an acronym TL;DR defense mechanism. This incantation can probably be read as a call to the patronus (just like in Harry Potter franchise), the teal deer.

No more words — illiterate and speechless society (or… muted?)

In the broadly understood humanistic tradition, the most important form of activity was considered to be the exploration of knowledge and the pursuit of truth. Moreover, most of intellectual work had been considered as something exceptional; it had got universal recognition ages ago. Meanwhile, the University of Białystok decided (some time ago) to close the “unprofitable” (SIC!) philosophy. Apparently knowledge is no longer something special — I’ve thought, but not really. The idea of the University has been violated and it was simply sad, sad as fuck. The comments surrounding this decision were terrifying testimony of failure that sheds light on the root of the problem. In my opinion, the abandonment of teaching philosophy at the University of Białystok was a repercussion of the scientific titles devaluation and disappointment with contemporary educational reforms. But you can probably guess, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Two parallel trends (not only linguistic ones): the cult of banality and the race to the bottom, to avarageness, to mediocre; these trends lead people, who actually have something valuable to say, to resign from participating in online discussions. Withdrawal (a step back) and apathy of the “elite” (the intellectuals, in a good sense) allowed for a much easier escalation of troglodytism, and in addition, the ambition to maintain high standards began to appear as an anti-democratic pursuit to the community.

The newspeak that constantly depletes our vocabularies, the promotion of technocratization and anti-elitist affirmation are changing the mentality of the tomorrow “digital” civilization. Michał Głowiński notes that the most important procedure of newspeak „is imposing a clear sign of value”^[3] and therefore “the meaning is subordinated to evaluation […] it isn’t important what a given word means, what matters is which qualifiers are associated with.”^[4]

Wading in a flood of netslang, a mess of marked keywords, or more current #hashtags and a thicket of business 🤮 jargon, newspeak seems to be a relic, replaced by lolspeak^[5] or, I dunno, wtfspeak. Users of the most current digital dialect are already, in fact, confused. They start using (also irl=offline) YOLO as a greeting (not as a bravado’s declaration), and SWAG means hipster’s style or it serves to emphasize uniqueness. Well, anthropological texts should be rooted in the time they cover and I’ve just written something past the expiration date, expired, out of date… why? Because SWAG isn’t SWAG anymore. 2023-10-24, we’ve got an occurrence which we know: the subculture of individualists is becoming more and more popular every year. We had: yuppies, celebrities wanna be, hipsters, influencers… we had it all, a rise and fall. ASAP is associated with something urgent, so let’s play hunt the thimble, and WTF is a negativly surprised mood demanding an explanation. Well, the cherry on the cake, representatives of technical sciences, especially related to IT, they’re loving the acronym RTFM, which is a polite request to check the manual with a hint of irritation, and I was joking with that politeness.

French anthropologist of communication, Jean Lohisse, asks whether a future society that is perfect at pressing buttons (and now I come in, and I add: or touching and brushing the screen) will be able to find a way to capture the universe with its fingertips?^[6] The answer comes to mind: “It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.” The promise of a bright future for the human species will most likely end with words, although I have fervent hope that an effective recovery plan will be developed and implemented as well. American novelist Jonathan Franzen was predicting in an essay, that was tumultuous and passionately discussed by half the English reading community, that our destruction will come online.^[7] When exposed to stories of increasingly poorer quality (regardless of whether they are spoken or written or shown), we regress. I don’t want to be a blackeyed prophet, but I feel – perhaps atavistic – fear that humanity will return to communication based on gestures and grunts.