There’s nothing “real” about language. You can’t eat it or
wear it; you can’t pick it up and use it to keep off the rain. There are no stories to be found out there in
the “real” world. You can’t hunt poems in the forest or look at essays in the
zoo.
Beyond the vibration of vocal chords, language, the most
human of humanity's capacities, has no “reality” to it at all. Animals exist in
the real world; humans, to the extent that we are more than animals, live in a
reasoned world of language where the building blocks are metaphors and the
mortar is narrative. Beauty, values and moral judgements are all human
abstractions based in the real world but not to be found there. In an existential
moment, Shakespeare
made this same point: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes
it so.”
I make these observations because I have been thinking about
the issues raised by a number of my colleagues as they address the popular
perception of a dichotomy between the “real” world and the digital world. So
the argument goes: too much time on computers is taking people away from what
is real. Computers, the latest manifestation of an evolving information
technology which we might trace back through TV to telephone, novel through
newspaper and all the way back to fire-side stories and cave paintings, are
placed in opposition to a real world of face-to-face interactions.
My argument is that there is nothing inherently more real
about a face-to-face chat than there is about a twitter feed. Both exist in the
abstracted world of language where meaning must be negotiated and reason
evolved. What these two communication forms share is inherently more
significant than what separates them.
I value conversations - in whatever form – for their
capacity to expand my humanity and to build a just and reasoned world. There is
plenty on Twitter that is inane and pointless but I have had my share of
face-to-face conversations of this kind, too. What is important is not the form
of the conversation but its content.
It's important to add that I value reality. Some of the most precious moments
of my life have been whilst sitting quietly on a mountain or in a
semi-meditative state sailing in rough weather. But I also value my humanity
and, for me, being truly human is bound to my sense of myself in language as I
make meaning from the world and build a reasoned response to the complexities
of my cultural environment.
As Jürgen
Habermas’ theory of “Communicative
Action” suggests, becoming a reasonable person happens in all kinds of ways
in all kinds of interactions; digital interactions like this one that I am
having with you being no more or less valid than any other.
