Comment by ap22213
11 years ago
I was just telling my wife the other day about how much I'd hoped that text went away in favor of better communication mediums.
I feel shy to admit it, especially here, but I dislike text. I dislike it because it's unnatural. I view it as a hack that was adopted to help communicate ideas through time and space. It's a cool hack, but still unnatural. It requires huge amounts of training to participate, and it has other issues.
I dislike it at a more fundamental level because it tends to leave ideas 'set in stone'. Text, like architecture, seems to have an unnatural tendency to remain unmodified through time and space. It creates dogma and worship and takes up the space where new structures could have potentially formed. It creates things like the bible and the constitution - things that morph from their original intent into an unbreakable form of reverence. Since it disconnects the 'bodies' of the reader and the author, the reader has a tendency to mistake the text as something different from the author and his ideas.
Text has a place - to store the facts of the world at a given time and place, certainly. To store ideas that can be accurately represented with discrete symbology. To transmit the ephemeral. But, I truly hope that we abandon text as a 'serious' medium for ideas in favor of video, audio, simulation, and virtual reality.
Many of us have a bias toward text because that has been how we have lived our lives, through its symbols. Text has altered our brains. But, imagine that you could relive your life without it, with other forms of communication, would you still want it?
Text is the only good form of asynchronous communication we have in our daily lives. Without it, we'd all be recording voicemail for one another constantly. Who the hell wants to do that? Not to mention the fact that making audio recordings is much harder to do discreetly and impossible to do in many noisy or strict environs.
And seriously, what is natural? How is human architecture any less natural than a beehive or a beaver dam?
Natural is adapting to change, understanding that the environmental context is always changing. Architecture is usually built to last forever, but it always has to be torn down, at great expense. Or, the expense is too great, and it remains, an archaic eye-sore.
I text message as much as anyone. But, I think we all know that text messages are ephemeral. I've edited (ironically) to make that more clear.
> Architecture is usually built to last forever, but it always has to be torn down, at great expense. Or, the expense is too great, and it remains, an archaic eye-sore.
Just like beehives, beaver dams and ant hills.
> But, I think we all know that text messages are ephemeral
Much less than sound or vision.
To make vision, sound, touch, etc. good as foundations for information exchange, you'd have to give more control to the receiving party. Make the medium skimmable and searchable.
Huh? I've always thought of architecture as ephemeral. Everything in a house has a limited warranty. We're constantly gutting, tearing down, rebuilding. How is that different from beaver dams again?
Are you familiar with Marshall Mcluhan and his "The Medium is the Message" ideas? They would interest you.