Scene: Internet Chat Line, Private Conversation

Man Writes: “But what I’m saying to you is that I love you.”

Woman Replies: “You don’t understand.”

Man Answers: “I understand that I love you.”

Woman Retorts: “You never listen.”

Man Answers: “I can hear every word you’re saying.”

Woman Replies: “You’re doing it again.”

Man (Thinking): “No one ever understands me.”

Comment: What are We to Make of This?

Modern communication is solipsistic. Which is akin to saying monkeys like bananas. Or dolphins like water. It’s not that human beings have become solipsistic, which is a truism of human nature, rather it’s that human communication has changed. Communication is now, and more so than at any other time in human history, egocentric and exists and focuses on the needs and desires of the communicator without respect (or need for) communication with other human beings. A brief historical look at how this came to be is therefore in order.

A (Very) Brief History of Communication

Language, the primary means of communication for most human beings, is a social affair. The great miracle of language is that it allows human beings to live in communities. Through language we are able to communicate sophisticated ideas, such as how to start a fire in the rain (something, after years of Boy Scout training I am still unable to do) or how to make a bivouac out of pine boughs. Through language, humans pass on their collective experience, their knowledge, to the next generation in order to perpetuate its survival. Human societies have existed solely with language from time immemorial. They managed to create sophisticated societies that traded with other people groups, governed the affairs of their communities, and provided sustenance for their people all through talk.

I am a Canadian. Canada is my community. In Canadian society language is one of the great sources of our distinctive identity as a human community. You see, in Canada, we literally speak different languages. The history of Canada involves the usurpation of native tongues by the languages of two of the world’s greatest (and most brutal) conquering nations: France and England. A great part of the Canadian identity involves the battle between these two languages for dominance of the nation’s political culture. A decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, commenting upon a political battle in the Province of Manitoba between French and English groups over which language the laws of the province would be published in, had the following to say about the role of language in a society:

“The importance of language rights is grounded in the essential role that language plays in human existence, development and dignity. It is through language that we are able to form concepts; to structure and order the world around us. Language bridges the gap between isolation and community, allowing humans to delineate the rights and duties they hold in respect of one another, and thus to live in society.” Reference Re Manitoba Language Rights Act, 1870 (1985), 19 D.L.R. (4th) 1

Around 1455 the first great technological innovation involving language since the development of phonetic alphabets was discovered in Mainz, Germany. Johann Gutenburg, Johann Fust, and Peter Schoffer through their combined efforts and experimentation, gave to the world moveable type (through a process of improving the ancient Chinese process of block-type). Moveable type allowed, through its cousin the printing press, for the first time in human history the ability for human communities to widely disseminate their ideas through text, the written or symbolic form of language. Solipsistic communication, the ability to sit and read alone, thus entered the world in the following centuries, on a wide-scale. It was the beginning of our present age of communication.

The development of science and technology in the 17th and 18th centuries is an historical development that can be directly traced from the invention of moveable type and the printing press. Developments in the science of communication, especially physics, and technological inventions that have resulted from these discoveries in the past two centuries, have dramatically changed the nature of communication in our modern societies. The most significant of these changes is that we no longer need to talk in order to communicate directly with another person. Most of this change has come in the past century.

This year, the Canadian Coast Guard officially gave up Morse Code as a means of ship to ship, and ship to shore communication. Old Samuel Morse was beaten out by GPS and satellite phone. Morse Code, and the means of communication it spawned, especially the telegraph, could and still can, breach vast expanses of geography. It allowed people to live far away from one another, yet still be able to talk about the weather, crime, and politics (what we cumulatively call the news). As the means of communication changed, so did our collective manner of communication. It wasn’t just how we communicated that changed; it was what we began to communicate. Suddenly, affairs in exotic places became much more important. This communication brought people together over vast expanses of geography, and created a common feeling of identity.

A country like Canada which has a geography that covers almost 5% of the world’s land surface (and contains .5% of its population) created an incredibly homogenous culture in both of its official languages (given the size of the geography) via the telegraph, railroads, and radio. It is interesting philological trivia, that the English Canadian accent contains almost no regional variation from Ontario to British Columbia (an area larger than Europe). One of the conditions for the Province of British Columbia to enter the Canadian Federation in 1871, was for the Canadian government of the day to build a telegraph line from Ontario, to British Columbia. Today the same Morse Code, which helped in part to create my human community, has become obsolete.

Solipsistic Communication: A Consequence of History; The Source of Unease

Though modern communication can and does, create unity or commonalty between people, it also creates tension. Think of the potential fodder for playwrites that exists as the result of e-mail relationships. Miscommunication, without actually communicating. Jane Austen was able to move the dramatic narrative of Sense & Sensibility through the exchange of letters. In The Matrix (with my apologies to Ms. Austen), the movie revolves around communication through e-mail, and cellular phones. One of the central protagonists remains unseen for a third of the movie, as the character Neo, attempts literally, to get a hold of him. Modern technology has created forms of communication that are essentially self-sufficient. And that’s the rub. Language has since its earliest existence been a social experience that transmits the self-understanding of one human being to another.

Modern communication is autoerotic. It exists of and for itself. We no longer need other people when we communicate. We listen to recordings (re-creations) of music and poetry via machines. We watch television and films, which recreate human experiences, even historical human events, in light and sound. The effect is so real; we become convinced about that the images on the screen are authentic. The people who recreate the images, the persons on the screen, become “idols” and “stars.” Religious totems. Through the magic of the Internet, we communicate via chat rooms, and people even have sexual experiences (that most social of human activities) vicariously through the images on the computer screens (pornography being the largest saleable commodity on the Internet).

Our language has changed along with our means of communication. We’ve humanized our machines, as we assign anthropomorphic qualities to them in order for them to communicate as our proxies. We say that our computers have “viruses.” Our televisions “talk” to us. We “feed” our radios and Discmans batteries in order to keep them playing. At the same time, the terms we assign to describe the functions of our technology are now used to describe similar human behaviour. Like computers, people now “network” and “interface.” As we change the nature, the how, of our communication, we begin to change the who, or what, we are as human beings. By changing communication we change humanness.

This change is ominous in some respects. Electronic consciousness is the idea that our understanding of humanness, or our conscious understanding of self, has been so profoundly affected by the developments of science and technology, especially as they relate to the means of communication, that our collective as well as our individual understanding of humanness has changed. The result of the electronic age is that we are different people now.

Traditionally, when the guy in the village started talking to himself, the other villagers took notice. When his communication with other villagers ceased in favour of communication with himself, he was considered “insane” from the Latin insanus or unhealthy. In English, we describe those who cannot speak as “dumb,” which we also use a pejorative term for a person without much in the way of intellect. Yet, today we communicate alone. This is by way of the nature of communication, a logical fallacy. Yet, it exists happily in a society that has more means of communication than at any period in time, and yet maintains a startling degree of ignorance about most happenings in their broader society, and a higher degree of mental illness than at any other period in recorded history.

In communicating alone, we become conscious of our loneliness. And it is this loneliness, that is at the root of much of our present social unease.

Copyright © 1999 Robert F. Delamar

Robert Delamar is the Managing Editor of *spark-online. He tries to eat breakfast with his wife, face to face, every morning. He also sends her e-mail from time to time.