The Death of the Addressee

[This post was originally published on my Hebrew blog. Like many of my other posts, I was considering offering a English version of it for the readers of Mostly on Israel. There are high chances that as many times before, I would be too lazy to translate it. Encouragement to do so came from Janelle – thanks!]

Much has been said of the gradual shift of humanity from a textually-based communication to a visual one (of course, the verbal aspect prevails, although increasingly mediated through visual and / or audio-visual means rather than textual ones).

Personal interactions in social networks is still primarily textual (comments, responses, messages, blogs, etc.), but I sense a depreciation of the written word against the transaction itself. This is partly due to media which are not ‘text-friendly,’ or which render it less significant. Twitter limits every tweet to 140 characters, and thus generates a new mindset for formulating one’s thoughts, in which we conceive of our messages quantitively (and with a substantial limit imposed on this quantity) rather than focus on their content. Even prior to Twitter there were text-messaging and the various IM software, who jointly pushed towards a creation of a new orthography, one that was light-hearted and playful, but mostly functional and superficial. A real Newspeak, indeed, with a limited vocabulary as possible, written in the least letters possible.

The various ways to convey short messages, along the development of social networks contribute to establish a reality in which relationships are accessible and possible in growing numbers than what would have been possible using old media, and at the same time generate the limited time-resources required to maintain them (since every relationship of this kind demands less time).

This is the final death of a soldier from another century, writing one more page to his loved-one to the light of a fading candle. This is the end of the girl who asked Mr. Postman to wait, since she’s “been standin’ here so patiently for just a card, or just a letter.” While girls may still have the fate of having days pass by to no avail, the waiting will be less patient. Instead of a card or a letter, they will now be expecting a text-message or a ‘like’ on Facebook.

Unlike the ‘like,’ however, the letter required content, and the content demanded some mastery of language, a vocabulary rich with synonyms, an ability to structure a paragraph and a whole letter, including the salutations and the opening, the anecdote, and the concluding greetings. Letters piled up and were collected in various anthologies and albums, commemorating fallen soldiers, artists, thinkers and public figures, allowing another peephole to their soul. About two years ago, on the occasion of Israel’s adjunct Memorial and Independence days, Shay Hazkani prepared a televisual report on letters of soldiers which were read and documented by the military censorship (the link leads to the report, in Hebrew). What struck me was the eloquence of these soldiers, who at least some of them were quite evidently no great authors by any standard, but rather simple people, who nevertheless were much better articulated than the average Israeli today. Of course, by saying this I am thinking of verbal and textual articulation, since contemporary soldiers communicate in various ways that were non-existent in the first dozen years of the State of Israel.

In the late 1990s I recall reading in the newspaper of a young man who died under some tragic circumstances, and his family erected a tombstone shaped like a mobile phone. They said, “this was what he liked to do” – talking on his mobile. At the time, I thought this tombstone encapsulated the beginning of a new era. I now realize it merely marked a transition period, a period in which someone who used his cellphone regularly was a curiosity standing out, and therefore this tendency became characteristic of him. I think that nowadays the odd one out is the one who doesn’t own a mobile, not the one who uses it regularly, and I doubt anyone would consider erecting such a tombstone, just as in the 1990s no one erected a tombstone of people who talked a lot on a dial phone, or who wrote letters.

The change of methods of communication affects and will continue to impact much deeper elements of human communication. I recall an outstanding example of the effects of time from a post a friend of mine, Yair, wrote on the differences between the pre-oil heating period, and after. The post is in Hebrew, but I can sum up that Yair described how time-consuming pre-modern heating by wood was, and concluded that in a society that needs to spend so much time and resources on basic living conditions, very few have leisure for philosophy and arts. Yair himself admitted that this was rather simplistic, but I believe it is nonetheless a worthy point, even if in an academic-historiographical context it would need to be more substantiated (this blog never claims to bear such a nature. It is the idle-musings of an academic, not his scholarly produce).

I then read something on the ‘attention economy’ of the internet (alas, in Hebrew again). Actually, the association of attention and economics can be tracked to Eric Berne’s splendid book, Games People Play¸ where he describes all our attention-interactions with acquaintances, friends and family as transactions. The difference being, of course, that Berne’s currency for attention is attention itself, such as in the case where I haven’t met someone in a long time and we are both in a deficit of attention from each other, which we will have to compensate for in our next meeting, until we balance it out (I think this example occurs in one of the first pages of the book, if I recall correctly). In the age of internet, on the other hand, the attention economy is not merely a psychological trade of transactions of attention, but a concrete economy, in which attention is quantified by value and worth (the time of attention, its origin, number of viewers, etc.), and has become a commodity which can be traded for hard currency. To the ideas I draw from Yair, Margolis and Berne, I add inspirational insights I read in Prof. Todd Rakoff’s book, A Time for Every Purpose, on the way the internet is changing our attitude to and conceptualization of time.

The time and skill dedicated to a single letter, limited the number of people that could be the addressees of such a composition. The addressee was carefully selected, a special person deserving to be the addressee of such an effort, who would be likely to reply and aptly respond to the points raised in the letter. Berne’s transactions, replaced today by ‘like’s, ‘retweet’s, and comments on a blog, and especially when considering the transactions are no longer taking place solely in a psychological market of attention, but also in actual financial markets of advertising and commercializing, bring down the bar for selection. I am tempted, and I suppose this is apparent at this point, to lament the loss of distinctiveness that accompanied the stature of an addressee. But truthfully, there is no way of predicting how this new culture will develop, and what is the value and merit of the content constituted by visual communication. We may indeed observe that it renders aspects of textual communication superfluous. I admit this is only to a partial degree. But the fact that these are the consequences in itself raises severe doubts as to the propriety of a eulogy. If there is such a wide embrace of the new media, it is evidently responding to actual needs, which are finding new paths and trails previously paved by letters.

In the meanwhile, a novel of letters that I have not yet completed, is becoming more and more anachronistic. A poem I wrote in 1995, could perhaps not be written today:

-

I gave you

A poem I wrote

In eight separate pages

Folded in two

So no one could

See the words.

-

You returned them to

Me, folded in

Four

-

I did not ask

You to add

Another fold.