The End of Language

The printing press signaled the end of the oral tradition of history.  Now there was a tangible, more or less permanent marker of the historical event.  A marker you could go back to at your own convenience, independent of a story tellers recount of the event.  In a way, it liberated us from the potential tyranny of the story teller--or at least replaced him or her the the tyranny of the author.

Now we see the internet of Snap-chat, Instagram, and to some extent Facebook replacing the written word.  Soon, to the extent we need to communicate without photos or catchy tag lines, we can do so by dictating into an AI without the need for tedious manual typing.  With this new evolution, ideas may be replaced by images.   Sentences and paragraphs may be replaced by emojis.

I'm not sure where this will lead.  The tyranny of the written word caused many problems.  The Bible, the Torah, and the Koran inspired the best and worst of humanity.  Not to mention Mein Kampf, the Communist Manifesto, and scores of others.  But I think what is happening goes even deeper, the deemphasis of ideas and critical thinking replaced by the immediacy and unquestioned acceptance of visual images.

What will it mean that photography becomes the new mode of communication? Well to start with, there are no language barriers with images.  People all over the globe can chat with images that translate into a universal tongue.   Maybe even text messages will disappear.  According  to the CTIA, the trade association for the wireless industry, the number of text messages world wide has been steadily declining, while multimedia messages, including photo and video have been booming.

I'm fascinated by the effect that this all will have on critical thinking.  Critical thinking has been unquestionably heralded as a virtue:  as a mode of thinking in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking  by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and restructuring thoughts as a guide to belief and action.  But therein lies the rub--critical thinking leads to a more refined elegant belief that perhaps can be vigorously defended because it is apparently based on a rigorous application of faith in the human intellect.  I guess what I'm getting act is the possibility that there will be fewer wars and instances of discrimination in a world of visual images devoid of language.  Words themselves are inherently discriminatory--separating us from the immediacy of the experience and replacing the experience with an idea reified as a word.

"In the beginning was the word," says John 1:1.   I say perhaps it wasn't.  It was not a word or an idea.  It was something else.  That something else might have been more elegantly captured with an image.


 This is not to say that I don't accept the notion that perhaps the highest form of critical thinking is itself critical of the critical thinking process itself, but that idea is usually frustrated by the rigid adherents of critical thinking in practice.  In any event, we will let that snake devour its tail on some other time--because my friend, its turtles all the way down.

In the meantime, its all good, right?