Pop 89: In Praise of Taking Care in the World of the Quick and the Sloppy
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
It’s hot and there’s no rain in sight, and yet my dedicated writing students sit and write all day, and listen to me say, over and over, “we need to choose our words carefully. If we want to get our point across or describe a scene, we need to slow down and take care and not be afraid to wait for the just-right phrase to form itself in our brains.”
But what do you tell students when, even if they do speak considerately, accurately and from the heart, via their poetic brains, they still get harassed, harangued, threatened, bullied, teased and abused by anonymous internet trolls? When so much of what gets posted online seems to indicate that hitting below the belt in order to serve an agenda, sell a product or become an influencer appears to be the function of language, how do you successfully champion a dignified and mature quest for clarity, engagement, and connection?
It’s convenient to blame recent world leaders for leading the charge on the desecration of language, but the truth is, ever since we went online, we’ve lazily and repeatedly been replacing action with reaction. Whether we are woke or broke, a bleeding heart liberal or a right-wing fundamentalist, a conspiracy theorist or a tik-tok junkie, online communication comes most often in the form of “mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies,” as Jaron Lanier, the author of “You Are Not a Gadget” puts it.
Every summer I teach writing to a group of teens. I love them and I love the work, even though I fall into bed around 7pm every night, exhausted from an intense day of creativity, feedback and dramatic content. (They’re teens, they’re misunderstood - nobody has been through what they are going through, so murder and mayhem and intergalactic escape abounds. And frankly, who can blame them?)
I hope they learn a thing or two about words. How, when you get down to it, great writing is just one beautiful word after another, which means of course, finding the precise word for the specific situation. I hope, most of all, that when they call someone a “friend” they “met” online and “share” their work with that “friend”, that they embody friendship. I hope they wholly understand that friendship means more than clicking a “like” or “unlike” button, that sharing takes time, listening, tolerating and compassion even if understanding is harder to come by. Humans share themselves, not just cute memes, emojis, opinions and insults. And meeting people involves being in the same room with them, involves all the senses, including integrating the various scents of espresso, a recent rainfall, an unshowered body, even the occasional fart.
Lanier opens his book with a dedication to the person reading it because, today, words are “minced into automatized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote and secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happened to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers” into anonymous comment sections, text messages and twitter streams. But words and books, he reminds us, are written for people. “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.”
I recall my university days when Marshall McLuhan prophesized that technology would connect us all and hence transform the planet into a Global Village. I wrote and performed a retort to McLuhan, calling the piece “Global City.” I wrote it out of a familiar panic that arose in my body every time a gifted speaker spouted something extremely clever and seductive, yet dangerously askew. Even then I knew that McLuhan was trying to give a highly impersonal technology a warm and fuzzy feel.
“A village is a physical place, in space and time, NOT a facsimile, NOT a nice idea,” I wrote, not knowing that one day I would live in a village and experience the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual reality of my own words.
Today I’d add: a village is a feet-in-dust, horses-in-the-field, tumbleweed-tumbling-by reality. A village is a group of people who know each other, each other’s kids, and each other’s vehicles. Villagers attend each other’s grads, weddings, baby showers and funerals. They dance at Christmas dances and eat pancakes at charity breakfasts and volunteer for everything from the fire brigade to the bar at the bonspiel. They know everyone’s birthday and anniversary because it’s on the local calendar and the phonebook is a 14x11 handout you can pick up every January at the grocery.
Twenty years later I was working as a reporter, interviewing Derrick de Kerckhove, McLuhan’s heir apparent and author of “The Skin of Culture; Investigating the New Electronic Reality.” A “big reversal between the conscious and unconscious realms is happening right now,” he said. The computer is smarter than us and way, way faster. “It will be interesting to see how technology will outperform humans and how it will take care of things like the environment and poverty and genetic engineering,” he mused, not seeming as disturbed as I was by his words. But don’t worry, he added. “We’re not there yet.”
We’re there now.
Today Lanier tries to explain how quickly “computers have gotten a million times more powerful” since he became the father of virtual reality, not so long ago: “It’s as if you kneel to plant a seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole village before you can even rise to your feet.”
But no logarithm can replenish a soul like walking under a prairie sunset. No virtual reality can swallow a flesh-and-blood village, nor “cloud facility” contain its heartaches and joys. The only clouds we care about here are the ones we stand under as we watch and waiting upon them for rain. Thankfully, even in a world ruled by “the quick and the sloppy,” we still know how to wait.