No bones or excuses have been or are made about this blog being a sandbox, wherein ideas are explored from a contemporary anthropological perspective. However, its reasons for engaging in that exploration are as much borne of frustration as they are of celebratory enthusiasm for the ethnological.
They are rooted in predilections derived from neurodivergence and shared with many others. Frustration arises from an enabling need for long form, written communication in an era where it appears to be in terminal decline, led by neurotypical manufactured consent.
I don’t write here just so I can monologue incessantly about my particular ‘special interests’ though I acknowledge fully your experience of reading past posts here may beg to differ. And therein lies the rub…
…I’ve promised previously to post on my academic interest in cognitive load management as enabling practice for neurological disability. As with other posts here, it sits right at the nexus of my personal, socio-political, anthropological and more generally academic pursuits. Just as with those other posts, to do the subject justice, I couldn’t write about it without exploring where all of those avenues and the connections between them are contingent upon and congruent to it. It would inevitably evolve into a long, explorative post.
To make it more digestible, comprehensible to any generally interested reader, without my difference or predilections, I would inevitably feel compelled to break it down into ‘bite-size’ chunks, albeit ones with a bit more ‘meat on the bones’ than is generally inferred when that term is deployed. As the small plate, tapas of it all meandered around the Lazy Susan of this blog, as is its wont, I’d probably call it a series.
It would probably also wind up being much longer overall than if I’d blogged the originally intended long form version in one post. In lieu of that post on CLM, how do you determine what is intrinsic, germane or extraneous to your schemas of learning, without being given enough information to manage the cognitive load it represents?
So, what happens when readerly cognitive function becomes so disrupted almost everything is TLDR?
Despite evolving from an origin which saw it boast the only internet or social media-based acronym perfectly deploying a semi-colon (ah, remember semi-colons; will they survive degradation, as entropic ‘smart’ technologies move faster and break more things, break our fundamental means of communication, dragging our hacked cognitions with them, leaving it only as a seemingly distant memory of early text speak, one half of a winking face?), there can be no more appropriate symbol, a harbinger of the ill fortune, derived from deferred agency (accept the terms and conditions, even if they are TLDR, right?), to befall, befalling us, as social animals in the age of data capitalism.
Language constantly evolves, has constantly evolved, to reflect changing lives, experiences and cultures, often as a means of expressing new ideas, inventions or technologies. Both words and how we use them shift to accommodate the new and changing.
As cultures interact and people migrate, mix and trade, language changes. Loanwords are borrowed between languages and technological or technical terms are re-purposed, appropriated, mainstreamed. New words and phrases are invented to describe things which didn’t exist before. Old words acquire new meanings and usages.
But how does the language you use influence the way you think?
Wittgenstien, on the face of things, from some current perspectives, may seem to have overstated the case when declaring ‘the limits of my language stand for the limits of my world’. The ostensible purpose of language is to transmit thoughts from one mind to another. Language represents thought, but does it also determine it?
Well, in as direct a manner as the word determine seems to indicate, it most certainly does not. But it definitely interacts with our perceptions, which, over time, do.
Our brains seek patterns and create categories to help understand them. Language supports and even enhances our cognitive ability and capacity to do that.
Every field of human endeavour evolves, has always evolved, its own specialised jargon or lexicography. These develop as integral aspects of the important and unavoidable relationship between language and thought.
We deploy and often change language to define or refine our thinking on any given subject. Language often serves as the cognitive scaffolding we use to help us arrive at more developed, subtle, nuanced or syncretic thought.
Much of the particularity of language is ‘extra-lexical’. That is, it is so built into its syntax and grammar as to be all but invisible to its speakers. This makes language full of inherent assumption and prejudice.
When describing events, English language tends toward emphasis on the agent, agents or agency acting in them. Faucey et al (2010; ‘Constructing Agency: The Role of Language’) found that, as a result, English speakers are more likely than speakers of other languages to remember agents in events. This leads on to a perceptual shift in which they also attach blame.
Unconscious, extra-lexical processing like this happens when the acronym TLDR is used. The reader (or, more accurately, ‘non-reader’) attaches blame to the writer, for writing on too long. In doing so, they absolve themselves of agency, responsibility or liability, sine qua non.
The writer’s implied a priori exercise of agency, applied to how long they wrote for, is the essential action or condition which determined the potential reader not reading it. At least in how the language used describes the action taken, the event.
Language, how words are deployed, as well as how grammar is used to service that deployment, perpetuates bias. It may change as attitudes change.
Sometimes politicians, pressure groups and other societal actors attempt changing language in order to influence, to change attitudes. By and large though, language, or at least particularly grammar, serves to maintain the status quo, to crystallise and perpetuate the order and culture which gave rise to it.
Language may not wholly or directly determine thought, but it absolutely focusses perception and attention on particular aspects of consensus reality. It structures and influences cognitive processing, what we perceive and how we process that perception.
To a significant extent, language also regulates social relationships due to how integral to them our perceptions are. It reflects and at the same time shapes our thoughts and, ultimately, culture, which in turn shapes our thoughts and language. The three determining strands of language, thought and culture are so closely interwoven they simply cannot be looked at in separation.
There is an implicit irony to how rapid technological advance has influenced not only how we use language but also how it continues to influence literacy generally. Advancement of digital technology has made the written word more accessible than it has ever been. But it has also accelerated us into an era now increasingly being described as post-literate.
Whilst the omnipresence of social media, with all of its attendant dissemination of cognitively delimiting and biased language, grammar, perceptions and actions, lends a sense of urgency to these considerations, the anxieties in which they are rooted could not be described as new.
In the post Second World War period of the 1950s and 1960s, television, radio and cameras ‘invaded’ our homes. They began to insidiously reshape the way we interacted with the world around us.
Taking account of how far this had progressed, in the 1970s, literary critic Susan Sontag wrote despairingly of newly emergent visual culture in ‘On Photography’. In her view, language and its influence on, or place in, the ‘fine arts’ was being supplanted by photographs.
Contemporaneous proponents of photojournalism and of photography, as an increasingly dominant new art form, proclaimed it as presenting an objective view of inherently subjective reality, in a way that drops of ink, or splotches of paint, could never do. Sontag railled against this prevailing narrative, believing an image saturated world to be a politically insipid one:
‘The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge…The very muteness of what is, hypothetically, comprehensible in photographs is what constitutes their attractiveness and provocativeness. The omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.’
Sontag sounded loud and resonant warnings of an increasingly visual world becoming a post literate one but was not the only show in town.
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan explained, in 1962, that before the advent of twentieth century technology, literate people in the Western world thought sequentially. Political treatises, newspapers, novels, all followed the same, clear, sequential structure of beginning, middle and end. This contributed inexorably to a wider, perceptual sense of progress, macro and micro, personal and collective.
Technology, argued McLuhan, has swept all of that away. Cuenco draws upon McLuhan’s foundational arguments that:
‘A society becomes post-literate when electronic media compresses its experience of literacy to such an extreme degree that the simultaneity of the oral replaces the sequentialism of the typographic as the dominant pattern of thought and sense making’
McLuhan, who predicted the advent of the internet decades in advance, believed literate culture had already been supplanted long before his death in 1980. Through radio and television, a new oral culture, not a visual one, had become dominant. Cuenco argues this is still the case:
‘Though staring at a screen is technically a visual experience and there is reading involved – be it of a tweet, a…post, or a…news scroll – the fundamentally dynamic, ever-fleeting and disjointed character of the content on screen delivers indigestible volumes of information all at once, without much sequence or structure.’
Moreover, visual culture, argues Cuenco, ‘operates on the principle of focus or linear sequence’ in much the same way that the written word does. While you may read a tweet, post or TikTok/video caption, the experience is so radically different to reading a book, the two perceptual and cognitive experiences are so fundamentally different, mentally and neurologically, as not to be comparable.
One locks you into a dopamine re-uptake, front brain led and dominant, endless scroll, with little room or need for access to the schemas required for genuine processing of information. The other has a definitive start and endpoint aimed exactly at facilitating that access. Apples. Oranges.
If McLuhan is right, a post-literate oral culture will lose, has lost, the ability to create sustained socio-political change through sequential planning. The here and now immediacy of how digital technology creates and has created this new type of oral culture ultimately poses the same dangers Sontag saw in visual culture.
Sontag and McLuhan provided compelling critiques of technological advancement. Its almost inevitable psychological and socio-political trajectories gave them pause to sound alarm bells, death knells for literacy.
The increasing ubiquity of embracing a post-literacy seemingly inherent to the internet age becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. We may still be in societal and individual transition, neither entirely literate nor entirely oral or visual, but we are, have been for some uncomfortably long time, at a critical juncture.
Without an acceptance and assertion of complicity and genuine agency, the seeming convenience and inevitability of digital technological advance, encroaching into every aspect of our lives, sold, over and over again, to us by its neo-feudal data overlords, decouples us from fundamental aspects of ourselves.
New language and grammar may help us maintain, barely surviving, in or alongside mirror worlds defined and provided by them, which they supply and manufacture our demand for. But without drastic educational intervention and reform, they are destined to become our mumbling soundtrack, rattling along, prejudiced and biased but unable to understand how, as we sleepwalk into increasingly inevitable collapse of cognitive function and ability.
In just a few short years ‘tl;dr’ has increasingly become just ‘TLDR’, the perfectly placed and utilised semi-colon dispensed with, its grammatical function surplus to perceived requirements. Its original formation appeared during the pioneering and hopeful days of emergent internet culture, in the early 2000s, now long in the rear-view.
Tl;dr could once also be understood as the main points of a long piece of writing – what might otherwise be called a summary. The acronym could flag the takeaway, so someone pressed for time could easily decide if the whole thing seemed worth reading.
Its evolution is far more assertive and dismissive. Unable to process the sheer volume of contradictory information, constantly demanding attention, consent for which has also been manufactured, doom-scrolling has replaced reading and almost anything beyond a summary is TLDR.
For me, as it is for many neurodivergent people, summaries disconnected from their wider contexts, within which they clearly exist, not only means they become a source of meaning-and-genuine-content-free frustrations, but they also increasingly constitute disabling circumstance. So, in the hope of carrying as many neurotypical readers with me, on the exploration of ideas which is the raison d'être of this blog, as I can, I will try to summarise more, post shorter articles more often.
But, of absolute necessity, it will have to be done whilst remaining cognisant of and responsive to how high a percentage of neurodivergent people are enabled by long form, sequential written language. Your mutilated attention span is no concern of mine, pander to it a little as this blog might, nor is the conditon its condition is in wholly your own fault.
Perhaps, reflecting on dimished attentionspans and dopamine dependent, failing cognitive function, as post literacy, it is worth coining a new acronym, summarising the restriction of Access and inclusion the predominance of short form visual and oral internet cultural tendencies engender. Something like ‘tb;du’ – too brief, didn’t understand – or, ‘ts;cc’, too short, couldn’t comprehend.
Now, switch off (or, at the very least lay aside, on silent) the device you read this on and pick up a feckin book; the future of your cognitive function, everyone else’s too, depends on it!
(This blog will be taking a short break, when posting, unpredicatble as it may be generally, we can defintiely predict, will definitely not be in the offing; we will be on travels, between 15th March and 12th April. No posts will appear during those dates but some of the reasons for the break will constitute additional research for the next forthcoming post beyond them, 'Hame' - see ya then!)