The meaning and use of communication is a question that may have been of interest to philosophers in the past, but was hardly a topic of interest to everyday people. If two farmers from neighboring towns met on a road, their communication would be obvious. First, there would be some issues of status- whether or not they are friendly, how any differences in economic strata might play in. Assuming they were friendly, they might share information about the weather and about the markets. Perhaps some social news. Via this discussion, each would walk away with a wider view than when he had entered the conversation. Communication was thus a means of gathering information, just like touch or smell or any other means of interacting with the wider world.
Urbanism brings a new importance to filtering communication. One is at risk of being swamping by useless information and means of avoiding communication are as important as means of accessing communication. An etiquette develops of who you do and do not communicate with. Tribalism, by occupation, by social class, and by family or religion or ethnicity intensifies. An introverted friend commented that if he'd been born in urban India he would have suffered acutely. And indeed it is India where the idea of finding truth by avoiding communication has been perfected- the hermit seeking enlightenment, Gandhi taking one day a week to not speak. Communication filtered out.
In American popular culture, we still have the frontiersman's belief in communication. The Supreme Court has reinterpreted freedom of speech to also mean freedom to hear. We believe that communication-- even advertising, even outright falsehood-- has value and tells us something about the world. When filtering is done, it is done by the individual and it is done in terms of meaning. The difference between American and European views of communication are best expressed by the fact that when Americans want to give an example of dangerous communication they reference shouting fire in a crowded theater; when Europeans want to give an example of dangerous communication they reference the killing of six million Jews in the Holocaust. Europeans, therefore, put more emphasis on social/legal filtering of communication and of filtering by facts.
An individual today faces a paradox: on the one hand, there are the global, constant, present, networks of communication opportunities; on the other hand, communication has gotten very small. Moments of talk on a cell phone between errands, a couple of sentences on a message board or via email, or just a couple of letters and numbers on a text message. In 2007, two brothers who grew frustrated with their limited texting made a pact to video email each other every other day- one brother doing a video one day and other replying back the next day. Video email could only be considered "big" communication in juxtaposition to texting.
Human communication never was only about widening a world view and getting information. Communication has always had a touch of the divine. "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." (Matthew 18:20) There is the sense that in true community, we touch something not just wider than our own immediate experience, but something more expansive than our own experience of existence. If all went well, those two farmers meeting on the road walked away with that expansiveness in their hearts as well as information in their heads.
In this world of small communication, it is now possible to experience communication which does not widen the experience of the world and which bypasses expansiveness. Tribalism can be tightened down to the tribe of one. It is more possible than ever to live a life of solipsism, channeling in only communication that echos your own thoughts. The "flame wars" on today's internet are an expression of the outrage of solipsism disturbed. "Smallness" communication is now considered polite. The individual determines the meaning of the response before you've ever responded. Consequently, if someone writes on a chat board that they "told someone off" (telling people off being exactly the ethic of the era, never mind any larger communication), the only acceptable response is "Ya! You tell 'em!!"
And yet, community exists. It exists more frequently than I think it does- I am always surprised (pleasantly) when someone on the internet engages me rather than pre-determines my meaning as just a piece of (misbehaving) scenery in their world. Because of my expectation, my internet communication tends to be mainly a letter by me to myself. In behaving this way, I've failed on all of Sartre's commitments- I'm not writing to anyone. Or, even worse, I'm writing to a muse, a prime reader, that will someday appear and proclaim that he understands me (interested muses please apply via match.com), that he is willing to be my scenery before we've even met.
For all the hand-wringing over small communication, there is one thing that is worse: no communication. Plenty about the inhumane mechanics of modern life press toward a zombified existence of non-communication. The flame wars are fanned most furiously by a crowd of young people who have been cut off from the advantages of adult communication. Something started slipping with my own cohort (I'm in my early 30's) and seems to continue to have gone further and further awry. Gertrude Carter, a college councilor, and co-writer Jeffrey Wiseman discuss this issue in their article, "The Illusion of Certainty: Do Advances in Psychopharmacology Suggest That Students' Inner Livers Are Irrelevant?" They write:
These fractured interactions with caregivers [psychotherapists who previously prescribed medications to the students with little interaction] seem to mirror the student's past inconsistent interactions with caretakers. Their need to restore and strengthen interpersonal relationships is not recognized in the effort to control symptoms with medication.
These young people have been failed by the real world and for a stunning number their meaning as humans has been reduced to brain biochemistry with no concern for the fundamental human connection that is missing from their lives. And yet they show up online. The enormity of the communications infrastructures means that we all still want to try. Community, real community, intense community, can be built out of this small communication. Real relationships and real meaning require stepping up out of the small before we can reach the expansive, but there is nothing about small communication that says that a person has to be trapped there all of the time.
My life was saved by a bunch of women on a Weight Watcher's chatboard. Using small communication, people who were probably mainly lecturing themselves changed my world. Based on the connections formed in that environment, I've then been able to have more meaningful communication and relationships with the same people in the real world. And in the real world, I've been set free from the very real limitations of obesity. That's access to the wider world, and expansiveness, all out of small communication. Perhaps we should be done with the hand-wringing.
P.S.
Aside from considering my interactions with my Weight Watcher's group and reading the Lévy book and the pharma books before that (the manipulations of tribalism are discussed in Generation Rx and the reference for the Supreme Court case is given, the hearer's right to hear is what permitted Direct-to-Consumer pharmaceutical advertising, also the book was where I first read a reference to the writing of Carter & Wiseman), an article by News & Observer writer Peder Zane, "We're Servants of our Overload" and subsequent email conversation with David at Breakfast with Pandora (who has been doing quite a few posts of his own about communication, media, the internet, etc.) set off this particular word explosion.
