by Mark English
Prompted by some recent discussions on this site and elsewhere about generational divisions, I thought I would put together a few observations, personal thoughts and speculations on the general topic of intergenerational communication.
It’s well known that someone who grows up in a non-literate society is ‘wired’ very differently from someone who grows up with the written and printed word. Even their spoken language will be to some extent structurally different from the spoken language of a typical literate community.[1] More general social factors also come into play. The scope and perceived importance of privacy, for example, is generally far greater in literate societies.
Though it’s obvious that the invention of writing and the spread of literacy changed human cultural history quite dramatically, our understanding of the underlying psychology of these changes is incomplete. Nonetheless, we can reasonably assume that growing up in radically different linguistic and communicational environments produces radically different patterns of neuronal connections, and that these patterns affect behavior and have implications for interpersonal communication.
We are now in the midst of another such epochal change. Marshall McLuhan made much of the pre-digital electronic media, foreseeing a return to something approximating to a pre-literate world, a global village in which the image and the spoken word would again dominate. The digital revolution has accelerated some of these trends, but has also created whole new ecologies within which the printed word has been able to flourish (or at least proliferate).
McLuhan was right, I think, that we are very much inclined to be too narrowly focused on language and ‘content’ while ignoring the communicational significance of the broader (physical and social) dimensions of language use. The fact, for example, that the printed word has lost its prestige, its aura of authority, is hugely significant for the culture at large. It affects not just whether we read or what we read, but how we see other people, who we respect, who we trust. These sorts of perceptions (of value and authority, for instance) shape the way individuals relate to others.
Though this is a somewhat peripheral issue, it’s worth noting that perceptions of the hand-written word and its importance have also changed. There was a very funny party scene in an episode of Mad About You in which a stunning and brainy and professionally successful woman was trying to be self-deprecating and say that she had her flaws like everybody else, but when pressed to specify her weak areas she could only come up with penmanship. The humor, I think, derived not only from the fact that the quality of one’s handwriting is a trivial matter, but also from the perception that valuing handwriting is a very old-fashioned thing to do. There was a quaintness about the comment. Handwriting is emblematic of an earlier time – and we have moved on.[2]
But what I am particularly interested in here is the cumulative effect of all these subtle and not so subtle changes on the potential for deep and meaningful (if I can use this slightly clunky phrase) communication and understanding between individuals. The potential for this kind of communication is influenced to a significant degree (or so I am speculating) by broader aspects of the cultural environment, and not least those relating to technologies of language and communication.
It may be, of course, that the cynics who smile at the phrase are right and ‘deep and meaningful’ communication is not deep and meaningful at all, but something of an illusion. Even so, we have from time to time the very pleasant sense that something significant is being communicated; or, at the very least, a sense of being on the same wavelength as one’s interlocutor (or perhaps a writer or a filmmaker).
I was recently talking to a friend who was raised (as I was) in an informational world dominated by print media and television (and in which, by the way, more or less everybody could still write standard cursive script). He was claiming that when people like us encounter someone saying something we disagree with, we tend to question them, in order to figure out where they are coming from and/or try to refute them, whereas younger people are more likely to be dismissive and not engage at all. The classic line is: “I can’t believe you said that!”
Is there some truth in this observation? I’m not sure, but there has certainly been a lot of publicity lately concerning certain moral and social sensitivities and indications that these may be associated with a certain intellectual brittleness.
Characterizing these new patterns of behavior is always going to be contentious, but changes there have been; and they have coincided with the advent of digital technologies.
Have these technologies played a role in shaping the changes? Of course. Digital technologies have been tremendously disruptive of traditional patterns of authority, learning and communication, not only creating new ways for individuals to share ideas, etc. but also enabling new forms of grouping, assembly and identification.
There is also the psychological aspect. As I suggested above, it goes without saying that someone who spends a lot of time interacting with computers in his or her early years is going to have very different neuronal configurations etc. from someone whose early experiences (beyond the interpersonal) were predominantly with print-based materials. With the omnipresence, now, of computers and the merging of the digital and social spheres, you’re inevitably going to get a situation where younger people, on the whole, are going not just to think different things but to think and interact in very different ways from older people.
The details are up for grabs at the moment, but there are facts of the matter and research in various sciences is slowly revealing them.
I am not going jump the gun and claim that this or that subjectively desirable or undesirable psychological phenomenon or cultural trend is directly attributable to this or that type of exposure to or use of digital devices. A certain amount is known already, but most of the writing on these topics for a general audience is unhelpfully tendentious. In the writings of Susan Greenfield, for example, the scientific and the subjectively personal are often entangled.[3]
Precisely how all these changes will eventually play out we can’t be sure. And, of course, whether we judge the changes as good or bad depends on our individual value-systems which in turn are influenced and constrained (but not determined) by generational factors.
Those who were educated in a largely pen-and-paper and print-based world and as children were forced to sit quietly and concentrate for long periods in class or in church or school chapels, who read books and socialized largely in very small groups, within a context of school and family, are obviously going to have a different mindset from so-called digital natives.
The former were more deeply socialized into, and so dependent on, small, relatively stable and heterogeneous (certainly in terms of age) social networks than the latter, and so were forced to engage – more so than digital natives – with different age-groups in an ongoing person-to-person kind of way.
Children raised in pre-digital times were also more likely to feel a direct connection to traditional culture which, for all its faults, reserved a valuable space for the inner life: for stillness and patience and long consideration and (in the West at least) intellectual independence.
The cultural and intellectual tradition of the West – apart from the scientific revolution which it spawned – has played itself out. From my perspective at least, it’s finished. In a purely personal sense I continue to identify with it, and I love certain books and music and art-works and so on, but with fading conviction. What we are left with are scattered groups and individuals trying to connect as best they can. And, certainly, there is no longer any real sense of passing down a body of more or less culturally-specific lore to an indefinitely-extended future.
This is hardly a surprise if the lines of intergenerational communication have been disrupted. Not only does all cultural continuity depend on communication between the generations, the communication itself could be seen to be necessitated – and in a sense justified – by the imperative to transmit one’s culture into the future.
The logician and writer (as Lewis Carroll) of books for children, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, famously (and more or less innocently though I’m not so sure about the nude photographs, etc.) enjoyed the company of prepubescent girls, the daughters of his social circle. I certainly wouldn’t like his chances of organizing similar contacts today. The tragedy, however, is that opportunities for a whole range of perfectly ordinary (and proper) interactions between older and younger people are slowly but surely disappearing.
New technologies are playing a big role here. Apart from their influence on patterns of perception and cognition, etc., there is also the fact that digital media have produced a situation where information and entertainment is directly available and does not need to be sought so much from older people (parents, teachers, gentlemen logicians…). Everything you ever wanted to know about anything but were afraid to ask is now readily available, embarrassment-free, from documentary sources or from a hugely extended peer group; and we are drowning in entertainment options.
I’d like to think that the sort of deep intergenerational communication that used to be quite common will still be viable in the future, but I have serious doubts about this. It was a natural concomitant of certain informational dependencies and perceived cultural imperatives which arguably no longer apply.
Notes
- For example, the spoken language of a literate community will likely include subordinate clauses, whereas non-written languages often have coordination only.
- Handwriting compliments are often not compliments at all, as they constitute the faintest of faint praise. A journalist acquaintance of mine wrote a very fond (and revealing) obituary of her father in the course of which she referred to her mother once only – to praise her penmanship!
- Here is an account of her claims by a critical journalist (based on an interview with Greenfield).
Comments
60 responses to “The Decline of Intergenerational Communication”
Mark, this is amazing. I also find it very disturbing, as I think the capacities are being lost are crucial, not only to personal success, but to the maintaining of a civil society. I will have to think more, though, before I reply in any substantial way.
Kudos for an outstanding piece.
One of the best pieces the site has published, hands-down.
A person working on these questions is the sociologist Robert Putnam. He wrote a book for a general audience encapsulating his research called “Bowling Alone”.On my Christmas list.
I’m thinking of a young person whom I know: from reading his emails, I got the impression that he had no idea of what a complete sentences is nor of grammar rules nor of correct spelling. He started his own small company and wow, he writes business letters (or rather business emails) with perfect syntax and spelling and with a sense of legal and financial distinctions that a hundred-thousand-dollar-an-hour Wall Street lawyer would envy.
The point: smart people learn quickly when they need to learn. I wouldn’t be so pessimistic about the future myself.
Sorry. I don’t know how I got signed in as bspinoza. That just shows you how clumsy those of us from the pre-computer generation are.
The discussion of McLuhan puts me in mind of his most important student, Walter Ong, famous for his analysis of orality versus literacy and calling the new world of electronic communications “secondary orality.”
We are indeed already seeing very clear evidence that new technology is altering communications, in particular the ability to interpret non-verbal cues:
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/in-our-digital-world-are-young-people-losing-the-ability-to-read-emotions
Psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkel of MIT just released a whole book demonstrating some of these negative effects:
http://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Conversation-Power-Talk-Digital-ebook/dp/B00SI0B6PC/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449167702&sr=1-1&keywords=9781101617397
The most powerful part of the essay for me was about the lack of cultural transmission and generational disconnect. One see this particularly with religious traditions, and, as Vincent Miller points out in his book Consuming Religion, it is unsurprising that these effects are (in part at least) related to the deeper dislocations of community and practice as a result of urbanization and industrialization (and later, suburbanization), as well as the ubiquity of advertising, consumption and a “therapeutic culture” which elevates narcissism as an ideal. Combine that with these newer developments coming from technology, and good luck passing anything on unless you’re in a tight-knit community that self-consciously resists these pressures (and even then it is difficult).
s. wallerstein:
Are you sure he’s writing them?
Mpboyle56,
It could be his girl friend, but she’s just like him in cultural terms.
Just as most of us have learned new languages as adults, be they foreign languages (with their different syntax and grammar rules) or technical languages (remember the first time someone talked to you about metaethics and how complicated it seemed? how about symbolic logic?), they learn what a paragraph is and how to organize one when the need arises. I bet if you had to, you could even learn a bit of Chinese.
When this generation is our age, they will have had lots of opportunities for character building, given the tendency for complexity to come apart in unpredictable ways, other than that it does happen. We have lived through one of the more stable and most technologically innovative periods in history. I suspect the actual hardware will plateau, while the coming changes will be more sociological. The current trickle up economy is unsustainable. Islam is in the midst of a cultural and military civil war. The financial paradigm of treating money as a commodity, rather than the economic contract/public utility/voucher system that it functions as, is about to implode, under the weight of enormous amounts of unsustainable notational value. Various western nations seem more likely to break apart in the next generation, than increased globalization, though there are strong movements in both directions, pulling on the current middle ground. Not to mention the possible environmental issues, that could reach breaking points.
This all might be a bit meta for the intent of this discussion, but our comfort level is not inscribed into the laws of nature. We just tend to take the status quo for granted.
Dan and Mike
Thanks for the kind words.
David
Seems like Robert Putnam is very socially and politically engaged. This from a review (by R. Sampson) of his recent book, Our Kids:
“The heart of the book is a comparison of the author’s memories of his childhood in the 1950s in Port Clinton, Ohio, and the reality faced by children living in the same town today. The difference is remarkable and disturbing. Putnam’s main point is that when he was young, Americans cared about other people’s kids. Now, people only really care about their own kids. It’s a damning but pretty accurate assessment of where we stand today. And he backs it up with both personal stories and objective data.”
The title reminds me of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (a great title, and a very good play). Putnam may have been thinking of this.
s. wallerstein
I may be pessimistic about traditional Western culture but am not pessimistic about what individuals can do or about humanity in general. And it’s possible that fragments of Western culture (even perhaps the writings of one B. Spinoza) will be somehow incorporated into whatever comes next.
mpboyle56
“… lack of cultural transmission and generational disconnect. One sees this particularly with religious traditions, and, as Vincent Miller points out in his book Consuming Religion, it is unsurprising that these effects are (in part at least) related to the deeper dislocations of community and practice as a result of urbanization and industrialization (and later, suburbanization), as well as the ubiquity of advertising, consumption and a “therapeutic culture” which elevates narcissism as an ideal…”
You can see religious traditions in various ways: sympathetically, or less sympathetically (being based on false ideas, etc.). But even if you take a negative view of religions as belief-systems, you can still see the traditions as having extrinsic or accidental value. Iris Murdoch (who was essentially a Platonist, I think) saw a traditional, mainstream Christian upbringing as giving people a sense of the cultural history of the West. And church-going (and the traditional classroom) at least taught children how to sit still in silence, thinking their own thoughts.
That UCLA link, on a study led by Patricia Greenfield, about the importance of direct person to person interaction for learning to read facial expressions seems to tie in with what Susan Greenfield has said about too much screen exposure aggravating autistic tendencies. Haven’t checked the other link yet.
Social media enables people to sort themselves into narrowly like-minded groups. Some of these groups include various flavors of jihadists, rightists sharing their fantasies about Planned Parenthood, the like of the Norwegian Breivik. And yes, the young are able to segregate themselves more thoroughly.
A woman around my age (baby boomer) went to work in a very young firm, and found it was considered very bad manners to just walk over to someones desk and start talking to them — without texting first.
Anyway, Mark thanks for a thoughtful article.
The notion of “media ecology” is growing, but I think it’s the wrong paradigm altogether. I think a good case can be made for economics of ideas – studying the circulation, feedback loops, and incentives and of course effects of changing technology on the churning, the creation and circulation of ideas (*very little* to do with ideas as entities in the money economy);feedback loops, and why certain kinds of ideas drive out others. Historians Elizabeth Eisenstein (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change), Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities), and David Waldstreicher (In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes — on feedback loops between newspapers and political/social events in the immediate post revolution years of the U.S. provide glimpses of what could be. Clay Shirky’s analysis of media-related events are, I think among the most promising for bringing such thinking to the present where it is badly needed. Eli Pariser’s 2012 The Filter Bubble seemed to have a lot to say about how we, through interacting with systems that scurry to present us with things we will “like” become more narrow.
Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris strikes me as a parable of what’s happening today. Some mysterious entity (a living planet) literally reifying our dreams leading us to disappear from the world, shutting ourselves up with the physical instantiations of our dreams.
Folks may have read Ted Chiang’s meditation on this topic, which I think is slightly more optimistic…
http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang
Mark English,
The younger generations will probably not listen much to Frank Sinatra nor even understand what the movie “Casablanca” is about, but Spinoza, Plato, Shakespeare, Bach, Beethoven, Kant, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Marx, Proust, Kafka, all that is best in Western culture (not meant to be an exhaustive list), have survived so many technological revolutions (didn’t Adorno imagine that the radio would destroy classical music?) that I think that we can be reasonably hopeful that they will be with us longer than we personally are with us.
Hi Mark,
I don’t know about that. Up until I was 11 our family would attend church regularly. Then we moved to Australia where nobody cared whether or not you went to church. Our parents said to us that we could still attend church if we wanted and we said “no thanks” and that was that, we never gave it another thought. Going to church for us was just conforming to expectation, not giving us a sense of cultural history.
Aggravating? Do you mind? I think “enhancing” is the word you are looking for 🙂
Actually, as someone who has never had the ability to read facial expressions or social cues, I can’t get too upset that people are losing this ability. Overrated really. Talk to each other and tell each other how you feel.
Actually, as someone who has never had the ability to read facial expressions or social cues, I can’t get too upset that people are losing this ability. Overrated really. Talk to each other and tell each other how you feel…
——————————-
What a bizarre thing to say. Non verbal communication is half of interpersonal communication and the inability to correctly interpret it and do it oneself carries a tremendous social cost.
How does the fact that *you* are not able to do something render it unimportant or insignificant?
http://www.skillsyouneed.com/ips/nonverbal-communication.html
http://psychology.about.com/od/nonverbalcommunication/a/nonverbaltypes.htm
http://www.andrews.edu/~tidwell/bsad560/NonVerbal.html
http://nonverbal.ucsc.edu/
http://ambadylab.stanford.edu/pubs/1998Ambady.pdf
Mark, I cannot disagree with almost anything you say here. Where I disagree mostly is at the level of tone — the sense of resignation that I get — a kind of inevitability. What you describe is disasterous and something to be fought, not resigned to.
There is an asymmetry to intergenerational relations, and especially now. The young have neither financial, social, nor political position and rely upon the older and the old, who do, to cultivate and usher them into the socio-cultural-political position that they eventually will occupy. So, it matters whether or not they are able to communicate with and learn from their elders and betters.
This is especially true today. A young generation has never seen poorer financial prospects than this one, since the Second World War. Unprecedented numbers of them are still almost completely dependent upon their parents, well into their twenties. When compared with the generations of the sixties through the eighties, they have almost zero cultural capital. The internet has broken youth culture up into a gazillion niches, rendering the national popular youth culture thin and empty in comparison with previous generations, going back, again, to the Second World War.
So, yes, it matters very much if young people are incapable of communicating with their elders. It matters very much that their handwriting and other public acts of communication come across like that of a handicapped toddler. It matters very much that their screen addiction and low attention span has rendered them incapable of following extended lines of argument. And it matters very much that they cannot competently interpret social gestures and non-verbal cues.
Oh, and by the way, this is *our* fault. Young people didn’t invent these technologies and they didn’t market them to themselves. We did it to them.
In my view, the way in which we have simply dumped this communications technology and social media into the culture is unbeliveably reckless. How could we not think that this would have catastrophic effects? And now that we are starting to see the effects, how can we not *do* something about it? This technology and its social-cultural effects need to be carefully studied, and especially their effects on children. Until then, they should be heavily regulated and perhaps outright banned — at least for the very young — until we understand their effects better.
Of course, this is not going to happen, and for this reason, I despair. The difference between my students of just 15 years ago and today is overwhelming, shocking, and depressing.
Dan: Given the smiley face and some of Robin’s history here and on SciSal, I wouldn’t have reacted so harshly.
To Robin: You’ve revealed indications, whether you’ve said as much or not, that you may be somewhere on the autism spectrum. Like Temple Grandin, you’ve overcome it, and it may be that many such people develop abilities that are in some way enhanced, either through overcompensation or the freeing up of raw brain power to do other things. But you’ve mentioned how besides having trouble recognizing facial expressions, you’ve had trouble projecting facial expressions that others can recognize, and people have read negative things into what they thought they saw. So it’s understandable you’re saying “Talk to each other and tell each other how you feel”. The fact is, though, that people frequently can’t name how they feel nearly as well as it shows up on their faces. Many people are pretty transparent that way but hardly any good at all at describing their feelings.
I think Dan isn’t just concerned with face reading per se, but that it is the tip of the iceberg, and means people are losing empathy altogether. You may not have automatic gut-level empathy – much of which comes from face reading, but are a good person and have worked and thought hard to get around that. Some people have no natural empathy and become sociopaths. I say “automatic” empathy but like language, it’s a facility for which we normally have the potential, but which doesn’t develop and will be stunted unless exercised.
I have my doubts that all the problems that you find in today’s youth in the United States are due to communications technology and social media. I don’t doubt that the problems are there, but I live in Chile, where young people use the same social media and were raised with the same Play Station games; and the generation of Chileans now in the university are the most socially aware, the most critical, the most politically concerned, the most questioning generation since the 1980’s. There are political and social reasons for that, so I assume that there are political and social reasons, not just the effect of social media and communications technology, which have formed the current generation of youth in the U.S.
Hal, there was nothing “harsh” about my comment. Unless one is looking for offense. And nothing I said had anything to do with people on the autism spectrum.
Dan, I think that’s a pretty shallow response, and IMO you’re clueless when you’re giving offense, based on several readings.
Perhaps. IMO you are hyper-sensitive. Based on several readings.
You don’t offend me, you just make me wonder what the hell is wrong with this younger generation.
Brodix
“I suspect the actual hardware will plateau, while the coming changes will be more sociological.”
Even if the hardware does plateau, you’re going to have more ‘intelligent’ and flexible systems, able to cope more effectively with natural language and reasoning and so on and this is going to have a big impact, surely.
davidlduffy
“Folks may have read Ted Chiang’s meditation on this topic, which I think is slightly more optimistic…”
And rather more – speculative?
Hal Morris
You’ve clearly done a lot of thinking and reading on this general topic. My reading patterns are a bit different (haven’t even got around to Lem).
I was checking Wikipedia on Clay Shirky… “One pitfall of the “mass amateurs” creating their own groups is that not all niches that are filled will be positive ones; Shirky presents pro-ana [anorexia nervosa] groups as an example. Shirky closes by stating that the migration from institutions to self-organizing, collaborative groups will be incomplete and will not end in a utopian society. Rather, chaos will follow as was created by the advent of the printing press before it, and that this period of transition will last roughly fifty years.”
This sounds a bit silly. (And, since he is on the Wikimedia Foundation’s Advisory Board, I am assuming the entry is not misrepresenting his claims.)
I’m with him on the chaos – or at least I commend his non-utopianism. It’s just that “roughly fifty years” prediction that gets me.
Hi Robin
“Going to church for us was just conforming to expectation, not giving us a sense of cultural history.”
Well I think there is some truth in Murdoch’s observation, but she was probably thinking of a deeper and slightly longer exposure than you appear to have had.
On the other issue you raised (which seems to have stirred up a bit of controversy) I will hold my peace – for now at any rate.
If you are calling me the “younger generation,” thank you. I’m almost 50. =)
Mark – To predict how long anything it going to take that will take in the ballpark of “roughly fifty years” seems to me extremely silly. It’s bad enough trying to predict the duration of something your gut tells you will take something like 5 years. And yet people do it all the time. I don’t think Shirky has a great feel for the future beyond a couple of years, but when he analyzes curious thing that have happened, he sheds a good bit of light; e.g. pro-anorexia groups, and the time when a boy band fan group of 13 year old Korean girls spontaneously and successfully pressured the government not to import American beef (thought to be still tainted with Mad Cow disease).
Dan – Right, I’ll be 63 in January. You’re the “younger generation” was referring to.
You and I represent the classic clash between Baby Boomers and Generation X. I don’t think we’ll ever quite understand each other — or appreciate each others’ distinctive “affect”.
Which, as far as I’m concerned, is exactly the sort of thing that makes life interesting!
Daniel Kaufman
“Where I disagree mostly is at the level of tone — the sense of resignation that I get — a kind of inevitability. What you describe is disastrous and something to be fought, not resigned to.”
And yet you yourself say that an effective fightback is just not going to happen.
That’s why I’m resigned to it. Not one for fighting losing battles.
Of course, it’s not quite as simple as this, is it? Some things do matter…
I see that sense of resignation more as a reflection of my personality than anything else. I’m not a natural activist, and it’s just how I respond. Call it a coping mechanism if you like.
We all have our coping mechanisms. Think of Henry de Montherlant dealing with the decline of France between the two world wars; or Fellini satirizing the hollowed-out, crazy world of post-World War 2 Italy.
Hi Dan K,
Yes, I get that a lot.
Tell me about it.
And now you want me to bemoan the decline in the very characteristics which have caused most people to socially ostracised me for most of my life.
Could you even try to see why I might have a problem with that?
Take a look at one of your links :
But it doesn’t. Liars,cheats and conmen also have the eye contact down pat. But they rely on the non verbal cue short circuiting your conscious faculties.
You really have to think about whether it is necessarily a good thing that so much of our communication is involuntary and unconscious.
Non verbal communication is often used to exclude, to impose hierarchies, su, to punish the deviant and the non conformist. It is culturally specific and class specific.
That might be good for the winners in those transactions, but don’t assume it is an inherent good.
Maybe we should all become a little more autistic.
How does the fact that *you* are not able to do something render it unimportant or insignificant?
BUZZ: Enthymeme
Missing premises
1) When Robin said “overrated” he reallly meant “unimportant or insignificant”
2) When he said “overrated”, reallly meaning “unimportant or insignificant”, his sole basis for that was that he has trouble judging facial expressions.
You make it sound like some sort of conspiracy, when in fact, it is simply nature.
I don’t see what autism has to do with it.
Merriam Webster:
“Overrate” to rate, value, or praise (someone or something) too highly.
So, now, I am at fault for interpreting ordinary English words in terms of their common usage?
You are a hard person to satisfy.
The “Filter Bubble” which can sort you to ever more like-minded circles provides a very comforting tribal feeling because we were designed to dwell in small groups, always constructing a rough and ready consensus about the nature of the environment and how to function in it, and our respective places.
When the bubble is torn away, we are a million very narrow groups and wake up to find we happen to be in violent disagreement with our nearest neighbor.
The best of modernity is about living in a big community of many conflicting voices always fighting, trying to thrash out a big community understanding that does its best to cover the whole world (with traveler guide books to be consulted ad needed).
The little bubble communities, like pre-Columbian native American tribes lack immunity to the things that come from a big crowded world.
Mark: Fair enough. The only thing that I can say is that despair has never been enough reason for me not to fight something that I thought was bad.
Here’s a piece of rhetoric to analyze (src: http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2015/12/1/cultural-fact-polarization-trumps-cultural-value-polarizatio.html?lastPage=true&postSubmitted=true)
Thanks for the link, Gaythia. (to http://insideclimatenews.org/content/Exxon-The-Road-Not-Taken)
So as I understand it, Exxon recognised early on that the scientific community had concerns over CO2’s effect on climate, they funded and carried out their own research in climate science, and then from a position of understanding they pointed out that the evidence was lacking and the uncertainties had been systematically underplayed by the climate science community. All of which is true, and would be obvious to any scientist who looked into the underpinnings of the climate claims.
I don’t see how I could fault that. Still, just as well to make sure. Thanks.
There is so much of such shit out there and we’re fiddling with our little critical thinking tools.
It makes me want to spoil for a fight, Dan.
Hi Dan K,
Who said it wasn’t nature?
Everything I said was true. If it sounds like a conspiracy to you then that is entirely an artifact of your reading.
Being autistic I don’t have those characteristics that you seem to think are vitally important for us to have, or at least I don’t have them to the degree that they are useful in forming social ties or being able to work people out.
I disagree that they are so vitally important and in many ways I think that they are problematic. If people have these characteristics to a lesser degree then it means they are more like me and like many people I love. I don’t see that as a problem.
Hi Hal,
Yes, I am autistic. Temple Grandin and I have high functioning autism, so what we are mostly overcoming are the obstacles of living in a society not set up for people like us. Grandin has also been successful in leveraging some of the many advantages of being autistic. John Elder Robison, in his book “Look Me in the Eyes” has they pay off that, no, he won’t look people in the eyes, because that is not him and it is up to other people to accept him as he is. And that, of course, stands for all the rest of the social mechanisms that he lacks.
To a certain extent I am with him, although I do make the effort, for example, to look people in the eyes.
There is an old joke that goes something like “Sincerity is the most important thing – once you can fake that, you have got it made”. Being autistic means that you have to fake sincerity even when you are sincere.
Incidentally, I do think that too much screen time is problem, for a number of reasons. Just not that reason.
I had no way of knowing you were autistic, which is why I wasn’t talking about it. As for non-verbal communication, it is pretty universally agreed among communications experts and linguists that it is central to human communication. I don’t see how the fact that some people lack this ability or have it in some diminished capacity changes that fact.
Well, we talk about what we can. We can’t all save the world every minute of the day.
I’d like to second some of things that Robin Herbert says. I’m not autistic, but I’m very very introverted and I never look people in the eyes. My father used to get furious at me because of that, but I never learned, not even to look him or my mother in the eyes, much less strangers. Like Robin, I developed other mechanisms for understanding what people are up to. Mostly I depend on voice cues: I pay attention to subtle changes in tone, to vocal hesitations, to what is emphasized or over emphasized (the lady doth protest too much), to stutters, etc. I have no idea what color the eyes of my own children are. But to say that those who don’t make eye contact are not trustworthy is just plain wrong.
SW: I”m sure getting furious with you wasn’t helpful. How old are you (as we’re comparing ages)?
Robin: I would be interested in hearing your reasons for being concerned about excessive screen time.
S Wallerstein: It sounds like you have come up with some proxies for understanding those aspects of communication that are not explicitly stated. This, however, is in the same family as what is commonly meant by “non verbal communication.” In short, you are still interpreting people, via performances that do not involve making explicit statements.
Well Mark, you’ve set up quite a minefield for some of us here. While Daniel Tippens has previously made it clear that he’s quite able to implicate his own kind, it will be interesting to see what our generally young stable of contributions have to say. For any dissenters, abstaining is surely the safest route, but what fun is that? I would hope for you to nevertheless make your views known, though diplomatically. I’ll do my best as well, but if I do fail, perhaps you will be able to learn from my mistakes.
This essay has inferred that there are problems with the young given their technology, though I’ve struggled to see evidence of this, nor reasonable logic which implies such a problem. Perhaps I simply missed this, or perhaps it’s still to come.
What I do know however, is that there’s every reason to believe that older generations do naturally disparage those that follow. Children will obviously grow up with newer tools at their disposal (and probably better ones) and so older critics will have the opportunity to claim “Back in my day…” to various themes. Furthermore we must not discount how influential the old can be. To this day mathematical calculators are admonished in our schools, which I think severely restricts this language’s penetration among the normal. If it weren’t for automatic spelling software, I personally would look like a fool every time I commented here (given that English syntax is a bastardized product of other languages that doesn’t quite fit into my head). Fortunately my dyslexic son is grudgingly permitted such software, though I think it’s to the detriment of all children that the old find it so difficult to accept the new.
Let me thus submit with all due respect, that I do side with the young, and hope that they will end up being far more transformational than my own generation (mid 40s) ended up being.
Given that the young neither invented the technology nor marketed it and sold it to themselves, I don’t see how the observations involve blaming them for anything.
Also, I am very proud of being a member of Generation X (the same generation to which you belong). I think we had a clarity and an anti-utopianism that both the boomers and the millennials lack (and could learn a lot from). In that sense, we are a lot like the Silent Generation. Joan Didion actually wrote quite a bit on this — I am thinking, in particular, of her essay, “On the Morning after the Sixties,” from her incredible collection, “The White Album.” It is part of the reason why Didion resonated so much with X-er writers like Bret Easton Ellis. I actually plan on doing an essay on this connection between X-er literature and Didion sometime soon. (Am currently working on an essay on Philip K. Dick’s, “A Scanner Darkly.”)
Dan: You are a hard person to satisfy.
Thanks, I prefer that to “hypersensitive”.
Hal Morris,
I’m 69, almost 70.
You’re right: getting angry with me was not the best therapy and it just increased the father-Franz Kafka relationship as well as my discomfort with social interaction.
Mark,
Agree with others, a very well-written article.
“The cultural and intellectual tradition of the West – apart from the scientific revolution which it spawned – has played itself out.”
I came to the same conclusion by the late ’90s. First, it was obvious that, not only was public discussion of the tradition fading, but that what was left of the discussion was having pretty much no effect on any sphere of public life – not politics, not the arts, not even education.
Secondly, it was also obvious that young people no longer had any interest in the tradition, what it could teach or what it could mean. Indeed an interest in anything historical (i.e., before they were born), was virtually non-existent. I discovered this teaching the Gettysburg Address as example of strong rhetoric in Composition courses. The initial difficulty the students had with the text was that – they didn’t know who Abraham Lincoln was! Part of the problem, obviously, was that the secondary schools were squeezing out students without proper preparation. But as the ’90s unfolded, it also became clear that young people were becoming culturally insular – ie., they wrapped themselves up in narrow cultural groups with well-defined practices that left them utterly unconnected to any larger or historically informed community.
In the ’60s, American culture reverberated with certain themes played out by the majority. The best known of these – Civil rights, the Vietnam War, the Great Society – were also the most controversial. But there were also themes that united us and that fostered the illusion that we were, or could be, one nation; even “a people.”
One such theme was the dignity, power, and collective unity of industrial labor. By 1970, this theme had become so institutionalized and glorified politically, that we all just took it for granted.
But by the late ’70s, the corporations and their political cohorts determined that an industrial economy limited potential profits. By the end of the ’80s, the Reagan regime had deconstructed that economy, replacing it with a economy based on service and investment. The theme of industrial labor, once an inclusive cultural unifier, played its last notes on the margins, derided as divisive hold-over from the failed social experiment of the New Deal.
But the Reagan Revolution failed to produce any positive collectively shared themes replace those it dismantled. Indeed, in order to foster profitable competition, Reaganites preferred generating themes fragmenting and isolating groups and individuals – greed and personal success, ethnic profiling and mutual distrust, mobile investment and disinvestment strategies, distrust of government, belittling of education. By the early ’90s, all the ‘national’ cultural themes had been redefined along these lines, or simply, like that of industrial labor, squelched. The only ‘national’ culture, the only American culture we share, is what we see on television; it is television itself.
I sympathize with DanK’s desire to fight against the social conditions this history has left us with; but it is easier to break apart than pull together
Eric
“This essay has inferred that there are problems with the young given their technology, though I’ve struggled to see evidence of this, nor reasonable logic which implies such a problem. Perhaps I simply missed this, or perhaps it’s still to come.”
People like Susan Greenfield are certainly making the sorts of claims you allude to. They may be right. I criticized her for mixing science and subjective opinion and deliberately took a more cautious approach.
“What I do know however, is that there’s every reason to believe that older generations do naturally disparage those that follow. Children will obviously grow up with newer tools at their disposal (and probably better ones) and so older critics will have the opportunity to claim “Back in my day…” to various themes.”
Give me a break! I am not disparaging anybody and, given that I am talking about epochal change, I don’t think it’s fair to compare what I am saying to grandpappy’s “Back in my day…” !!
Much of what I’m saying is – I hope – reasonably objective analysis of the situation. I am claiming there is this widening gulf, and I am speculating about the causes (and the future).
Sure, there is a subjective element too. Cultural elements (and not just those from the relatively recent past) are being forgotten. Some of these I value.
But my focus is not on specific cultural content so much as on certain social practices (as the title makes clear).
ejwinner
Thanks. We agree about some things but not others.
I was more or less with you until you said: “… by the late ’70s, the corporations and their political cohorts determined that an industrial economy limited potential profits. By the end of the ’80s, the Reagan regime had deconstructed that economy, replacing it with a economy based on service and investment.”
And this: “… in order to foster profitable competition, Reaganites preferred generating themes fragmenting and isolating groups and individuals – greed and personal success, ethnic profiling and mutual distrust, mobile investment and disinvestment strategies, distrust of government, belittling of education.”
Partly it’s the demonizing, and partly it’s the idea that these changes were consciously and effectively driven by the aforementioned demons (as in the typical conspiracy theory).
No doubt there were people (whom you characterize rather vaguely as Reaganites) pushing some of these themes, based on who-knows-what motives. But who were these people exactly? How many of them were there? Were they really running things, or just reacting to circumstances? And what about those deep social, cultural, political, economic and technological forces grinding away beneath the surface?
America was not so long ago a very prosperous and powerful and socially cohesive nation. It now appears to be in a period of (at least relative) economic decline. There are signs also of social fragmentation etc. But the thing is, there are any number of supposedly explanatory stories we could tell which might be seen to fit the facts.
Mark English,
I plead guilty of rhetorical flourish at the end of my comment.
A full defense would require greater research (for I feel confidant that the facts will bear out my reflections on experience). Here i can provide. as well-acknowledged evidence, the history of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp shenanigans and political chicanery.
As ‘character witness,’ I also submit this article by Robert Reich: http://billmoyers.com/2014/01/10/why-conservatives-old-divide-and-conquer-strategy-%E2%80%94-setting-working-class-against-the-poor-%E2%80%94-is-backfiring/
(Arguably, the strategy actually dates back to Nixon’s development of a ‘Southern strategy,’ which is well known.
ej: I sent an email to your “jonno” address.
Coincidentally, a post in OpEdNews today begins like this:
“The real scourge of modern society is the effect of programming and algorithms on the structure of thought. To reduce reasoning to zeros and ones, yes or no, and black and white is to encourage perpetual ignorance and unforgiving idealism that has no compassion nor capability of distinguishing nuances that the real world encompasses.”
http://bit.ly/1m5GSjw