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jenny_islanderI continue with my reading of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.
"Lesson 9: Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing that you think everyone else is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books."
At first glance this appears to be partly a grumble about the young people of today and their darned social media.
However.
Has anybody ever told you that they can tell where you mostly hang out online by how you talk or write? And have they been right? And what does that say about where you get most of the information you think about?
There is a danger in online life, because it is often one's main or only friends hangout, of falling into the trap of focusing on one another's words instead of what inspired them; similarly, because of the sheer speed at which social media sites may update, there is a danger of reading the source, but only the quote and not the surrounding passage that was not quoted.
The speed of updates points to another problem. I, an old gray Internet user, remember the days before the megacorps took over online social spaces. I could rant. Here I will say only that there are significant differences between a neighborhood park and a megamall, even if the megamall provides something like a park among its offerings. One of those differences is the sheer speed of life. The influx never stops on a megacorp site. There is always something new to look at and tap on, and all of it is packaged in small portions. This is part of the underlying design; it is intended ultimately to maximize profit for the megacorp at the expense of your ability to stop and think.
Snyder is of a generation that did not grow up online, so it is natural to him to analyze this kind of media in terms of television. "Everything happens fast," he says, "but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is 'breaking' until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean."
I think that the developers of social media algorithms noticed how people watched cable news channels, and aimed for that.
Snyder goes on: "The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it."
And, I add, each channel, whether on TV or on the corporate Web, presents an increasingly limited selection of visual stimuli to entrance us by. You can also tell which stations someone watches most often by how they talk or write. And those stations are increasingly watched online, where, like anything else on the corporate Web, they are also venues for monitoring user activity, interests, and connections. People used to call surveillance software spyware. Now they call it by brand names, such as Chrome. And the data from that spyware is used to further refine the algorithm that keeps you staring.
Snyder mentions two novels, Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, that predict the effects of monitors (in both senses) everywhere you look. To these I add Brave New World, which includes chilling illustrations of a character's remark, "Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetĪ¹tions make one truth." The World State in that novel has seized on the real-world observation that if you hear something over and over, even if you stopped listening to it, even if you disagree with it, it is going to stick in your mind below the level of conscious thought. (Do you work in a store that has a music loop that you hate? And do you nevertheless find yourself singing those songs off the clock?) If someone combines that tendency of the human brain with algorithms designed to keep you fixated, and never gives you time to think, and furthermore removes the tools of reason from your field of attention--well, then you get modern social media.
Returning to the first part of Lesson 9, Snyder urges caution with use of politically charged words that are new or that are being used in new ways. It has long been known that high-demand groups that try to separate you from your daily life teach you an entire dialect that is opaque to the unchosen, and get you to think in it. If you argue against the group but use the dialect of the group, you are playing by their rules. Don't.
In Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis writes of an orator of manifest imperial destiny who attempts to impress a group of listening aliens, who do not have the underlying assumptions of empire nor any words to express them. Everything must be translated into their language. Lewis, of course, writes both passages in English, but he writes the translation as if it had been back-translated from the aliens' language. And this literary trick exposes the fundamental absurdity of empire. In the same way, try to dig into the origin of any new or newly redefined word that is written on signs carried by both sides. If that word did not exist, what would each side be saying instead? Try saying that, and see how the picture changes.
And read. Snyder offers three reading lists. One is novels that help readers to "think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others." The second is a sampler of what Snyder himself has read in order to write his twenty lessons. The third is Bible passages for Christians to think on. I won't repeat those lists here for the sake of space. The Internet is infested with booklists these days, mostly generated by machinery, but I have discovered one neat trick: Search on the tĪ¹tle of a book you have read and want to use as a starting point, then click on a result from Goodreads. You can in this way circumvent the requirement to get an account, and find your way to lists compiled by individuals.
Read slowly; libraries typically allow two weeks per book. Choose one book at a time. Make notes as you read--or copy entire passages if you wish. Think about it, and talk about it. Find venues like this one, that don't barrage you with things to click and glance at as you try to concentrate, and go there.
Knowledge is power. Doomscrolling is useless.
"Lesson 9: Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing that you think everyone else is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books."
At first glance this appears to be partly a grumble about the young people of today and their darned social media.
However.
Has anybody ever told you that they can tell where you mostly hang out online by how you talk or write? And have they been right? And what does that say about where you get most of the information you think about?
There is a danger in online life, because it is often one's main or only friends hangout, of falling into the trap of focusing on one another's words instead of what inspired them; similarly, because of the sheer speed at which social media sites may update, there is a danger of reading the source, but only the quote and not the surrounding passage that was not quoted.
The speed of updates points to another problem. I, an old gray Internet user, remember the days before the megacorps took over online social spaces. I could rant. Here I will say only that there are significant differences between a neighborhood park and a megamall, even if the megamall provides something like a park among its offerings. One of those differences is the sheer speed of life. The influx never stops on a megacorp site. There is always something new to look at and tap on, and all of it is packaged in small portions. This is part of the underlying design; it is intended ultimately to maximize profit for the megacorp at the expense of your ability to stop and think.
Snyder is of a generation that did not grow up online, so it is natural to him to analyze this kind of media in terms of television. "Everything happens fast," he says, "but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is 'breaking' until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean."
I think that the developers of social media algorithms noticed how people watched cable news channels, and aimed for that.
Snyder goes on: "The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it."
And, I add, each channel, whether on TV or on the corporate Web, presents an increasingly limited selection of visual stimuli to entrance us by. You can also tell which stations someone watches most often by how they talk or write. And those stations are increasingly watched online, where, like anything else on the corporate Web, they are also venues for monitoring user activity, interests, and connections. People used to call surveillance software spyware. Now they call it by brand names, such as Chrome. And the data from that spyware is used to further refine the algorithm that keeps you staring.
Snyder mentions two novels, Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, that predict the effects of monitors (in both senses) everywhere you look. To these I add Brave New World, which includes chilling illustrations of a character's remark, "Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetĪ¹tions make one truth." The World State in that novel has seized on the real-world observation that if you hear something over and over, even if you stopped listening to it, even if you disagree with it, it is going to stick in your mind below the level of conscious thought. (Do you work in a store that has a music loop that you hate? And do you nevertheless find yourself singing those songs off the clock?) If someone combines that tendency of the human brain with algorithms designed to keep you fixated, and never gives you time to think, and furthermore removes the tools of reason from your field of attention--well, then you get modern social media.
Returning to the first part of Lesson 9, Snyder urges caution with use of politically charged words that are new or that are being used in new ways. It has long been known that high-demand groups that try to separate you from your daily life teach you an entire dialect that is opaque to the unchosen, and get you to think in it. If you argue against the group but use the dialect of the group, you are playing by their rules. Don't.
In Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis writes of an orator of manifest imperial destiny who attempts to impress a group of listening aliens, who do not have the underlying assumptions of empire nor any words to express them. Everything must be translated into their language. Lewis, of course, writes both passages in English, but he writes the translation as if it had been back-translated from the aliens' language. And this literary trick exposes the fundamental absurdity of empire. In the same way, try to dig into the origin of any new or newly redefined word that is written on signs carried by both sides. If that word did not exist, what would each side be saying instead? Try saying that, and see how the picture changes.
And read. Snyder offers three reading lists. One is novels that help readers to "think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others." The second is a sampler of what Snyder himself has read in order to write his twenty lessons. The third is Bible passages for Christians to think on. I won't repeat those lists here for the sake of space. The Internet is infested with booklists these days, mostly generated by machinery, but I have discovered one neat trick: Search on the tĪ¹tle of a book you have read and want to use as a starting point, then click on a result from Goodreads. You can in this way circumvent the requirement to get an account, and find your way to lists compiled by individuals.
Read slowly; libraries typically allow two weeks per book. Choose one book at a time. Make notes as you read--or copy entire passages if you wish. Think about it, and talk about it. Find venues like this one, that don't barrage you with things to click and glance at as you try to concentrate, and go there.
Knowledge is power. Doomscrolling is useless.
