Philosophical Reflections on the Age of Ephemera
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two people talking face to face must be having a trivial conversation. If
anything, the brevity of the tweet more closely resembles human speech,
especially in its contrapuntal nature: I said something, now you tell me that
you’re still listening. Douglas could not speak for three hours on Twitter—not,
at least, as he had prepared to speak. Someone would get him off topic. He
would have to pause constantly and address objections. He would have to
reiterate and reformulate for those who could not follow his point. What
Postman appreciates in typographic culture—the structure, the elaborate
constructions—is lost, certainly, but then there are also those who rankled at the
supposed authority of the elaborate typographic construction, who saw it as a
kind of tyranny of the written word. We have to think especially of Habermas
here, though a bias in favor of interactive dialogue can be traced back to Plato
and the myth of Theuth.26 There is an illusory authority to the word in print, as
though it simply is a thing in the world, and is not a prior linguistic act by
another human being. Undergraduates often sense this authority and are helpless
before it—using the wonders of digital technology, they are content to cut and
paste, and nothing is lost in the transcription. We do not want our
undergraduates to copy, we say: we want them to engage, to defend actively
their positions. We want them to take their own stance, to speak for themselves,
and thereby speak themselves. We want them to blossom into full personhood,
and we think that making them speak is the way to do this.
On the Internet our words are frequently misunderstood, and so we are
misunderstood—our self-making fails. It would be better, we think, to be
speaking face to face. Derrida tells us, however, that the primacy of speaking—
of being able to go “back and forth,” being able to “clarify” or “expound” or
“reiterate” and thereby ensure that our words carry our true intentions—is just as
illusory as Postman’s primacy of the written word.27 Words are signs, which,
once they have tripped from our lips or spilled off our keyboards onto the page,
are equally out of our control. No amount of additional speaking/writing can
contain them or bend them to our exact intention because these additional words
are equally engaged in an active system of signs external to our intentions,
outside our control. We try to speak ourselves authentically in speech and
writing, but these acts are strangely impotent. They must be repeated over and
over again, and we never finish elaborating ourselves—unless, perhaps, given an
infinite amount of time at the podium, though of course we have much less. It
seems that we have always been ephemera ourselves.
I do not mean to suggest that ephemera are somehow more
authentically human, but the old technologies may have given us a false sense of
completion. The “feed” scrolls away into the past with each successive post or
blog or tweet; we must constantly reinvent our cleverness, our earnest political
stances, or our tastes in music. We clamber to remain at the top of the page, to
remain connected. This is the anxiety of connectedness: that being connected to
so many resembles constantly wondering if anyone is paying attention, which is
to say, it resembles loneliness. Ultimately, this may be the unintended message