Thousands of years ago, in a fertile plain somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the descendants of an ark builder looked into each other’s eyes and then up towards the heavens. With every tongue unified by a single language and every heart bonded by a common goal, they produced bitumen to serve as mortar and began to stack slimy brick upon brick, with each twisting higher and higher into the sky. This was the pinnacle of human communication. And then, in a divine instant, there was only confusion and noise. Construction was brought to an abrupt halt as the confounded builders sought in vain to translate one another’s newly developed form of alien speech. Fed up, the workers went their separate ways, scattering across the earth, leaving behind communication, tools, and an unfinished tower to erode in the Babylonian dust.

In a figurative sense, we’ve reclaimed the tools and rebuilt The Tower of Babel. But our tower is technological––one whose height is measured by the distance of our furthest satellites––and our tools are the latent frequencies that send our tweets, texts, and emails to any computer or cell phone in the world. We all contribute to the exponential growth of technological communication and we all speak its language. In this manner, we’ve surpassed the builders of Babel with our innovation, but have done so at the cost of real communication. We applaud ourselves at the notion that we can be “connected” with anyone in the world thanks to “instant communication,” but what are we really communicating?

To be fair, the inventors of some our greatest advancements in communication probably never set out to obliterate human interaction. Even if you went all the way back to July 1, 1863, when a postal employee named Joseph William Briggs inaugurated the first free city mail delivery in US history, it is doubtful that his intentions were to keep people sequestered in their homes, relying solely on the Postal Service as their means of communication with the outside world. Rather, the relatively unknown “father of free city mail delivery” made it possible for wives, mothers, sweethearts, and sisters to receive hand-written letters from their husbands, fathers, beloveds, and brothers off fighting in the Civil War. And Alexander Graham Bell, who on March 10, 1876 spoke those immortal first words into the telephone that he developed––“Mr. Watson––come here––I want to see you”––probably never imagined that his invention would be an everyday necessity in households around the globe. And Dr. Martin Cooper, the man responsible for producing the world’s first cellular phone, never could have foreseen the day when cell phones perform every sort of operation just short of telling you your blood type. Even with MIT grad Ray Tomlinson and his invention of the email or all of the different companies who claim to have sent the first text message, nobody could have predicted the overwhelming scope of technology and its ability to reach an infinite amount of people. But somewhere in all of this progress––from letters, to phone calls, to emails and texts––the meaning behind our language got lost in midst of our building.

Although most people probably don’t stop to think about it, on a daily basis, the vast majority of us communicate via ones and zeros more frequently than we do with another individual face-to-face. We have no problem staring at the screens of our Blackberries and iPhones for hours on end, but can’t bring ourselves to lift our heads for a second to say “hi” to the person passing us by on the street. We don’t bother interacting with individuals outside of cyberspace because social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook allow us to manipulate who we really are and to communicate only when it’s convenient for us. Technology allows us to borrow voices, giving us the comfort of hiding behind a veil of space and transmitted frequencies where our distance between the being on the other end is so great that we can betray all honesty and authenticity for the sake of “instant communication.” Even with letter writing––which, unfortunately has become a lost art––there is at least a definable characteristic in a person’s penmanship to authenticate their writing. And there is some sense of directness in the voice of an individual on the other end of a phone call. But with emails and texts there is only copious, unidentifiable code transmitted into generic word messages. According to a study done by CNET Networks, for the second quarter of 2008, U.S. mobile subscribers sent and received on average 357 text messages per month. Research done by Radicati Group from August 2008 estimate the number of emails sent per day to be around 210 billion. This is the newest trend in communicating, but it completely removes the human element. Furthermore, not only does it hinder our ability to truly communicate, it both cheapens and weakens our language as well. If George Orwell was correct in believing that insincerity was the great enemy of clear of language, then in our fast-paced world of pseudo-communication, sincerity and articulation have taken a back seat to the quickness and ease of emailing and texting.

“Is it impossible to say just what I mean!” declares the distraught speaker in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” His simple rhetorical question is emblematic of the complexity of communication. Even if two individuals speak the same language, come from the same background, share an intimate history, and can both articulate their thoughts with some dexterity, there is a chance that when both are looking into each other’s eyes, after one finishes all that they have to say, the other may simply respond: “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” Because the truth of the matter is that the complexities of face-to-face communication far outweigh our greatest technological advancements. But even in the face of complexity, there is a form honesty and authenticity in the spoken word that technology cannot convey. The design of our technological devices was meant to bring us closer together, not move us farther apart. But maybe if we try coming down from our tower, back down to eye level where the only signals to be transmitted are through our physical senses, maybe then we can connect once again.

>Written by d/visible contributor Ben Millikan.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 11:59 am and is filed under Technology, Culture, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.