Communicate! (Laphma's Quarterly 05-2, Means of Communication)

     LQ 05-2 Means of Communication (2012) A nice compilation of what people have

thought, understood, or thought they understood, about human communication. It’s a mixed bag. To me, this compilation is marked more by what it leaves out than what it includes. Its focus is on what is communicated rather than how.
     There is inevitably an over-dependence on writing. Writing is a technology, and like any technology, it changes both perception and expression. What’s interesting to me is how writing changes how people construct their language. Writing fosters a preference not only for speaking in complete sentences, but also for argumentative and expository speech – such as I’m engaging in now. Narrative becomes a mode retained mostly for entertainment and art.
     The collection has no selections by Marshall McLuhan and George Steiner (except in memic quotes inserted at random in the text). It is I think somewhat less than complete.
     OK, you can see where my biases lie. I’ve come to realise that we communicate both consciously and unconsciously via more means than language. “Body language” (a term that betrays a bias) is as powerful as spoken language, and sometimes more so. Observation shows that gesture is an unavoidable concomitant of speech. Cultures differ in how much gesturing they accept and expect, but all human beings gesture when they speak, and not only with their hands. Some gestures are learned, hence of arbitrary significance, which causes problems when people from different cultures use gestures deliberately as an alternative to speech.
     The bias towards literacy has also caused a scant selection of pieces that attempt to understand how media have changed what we communicate. Print was the first mass medium, expanding the audience of any given book ten- and a hundredfold compared to manuscripts, but also splintering that audience into mutually uncomprehending groups. It also created a sharp division between literal and symbolic understanding of sacred texts, a division hardly ever recognised in orality. The problem of idolatry differs for people who have no written record of their ancestor’s thoughts about their gods, and so have no need to figure out exactly what they meant. A hymn is a performance, not a text to be analysed.
     Newspapers, cheap enough to throw away after reading, completed the transition from selective to mass media. Radio enabled large-scale exploitation of the audience. TV did the same, while shifting from the explicit politics of the radio personality to the implicit politics of the huckster. Now the internet has created both the largest audience for remote communication ever, but has also shattered that audience into more and smaller enclaves than any other. Control has shifted from the creator and broadcaster to the consumer: we choose the terms of engagement on the web. Every post has a potential audience of billions, but almost none reach more than a few hundred, with a select few reaching more, often amplified by the legacy media. A moderately successful influencer commands the attention of several thousand followers, the size of a small town. Some have followers in the hundreds of thousands, a handful in the millions. There are now many famous people that almost no one has heard of.
     I’d have liked to read seem comments on fashion. Clothes communicate everything from social status to mood, therefore clothing is regulated both by custom and law, and by personal preferences within what limits custom and law prescribe. Fashion now goes well beyond clothes. When goods become cheap enough to discard, they become expressions of passing fancies and tastes.
     Overall, the collection tells us more about what people thought worth communicating than how they did it. But within these limits, it is as good as any Lapham and his team have produced. I enjoyed reading it, especially the ancient, pre-electronic excerpts. ****