Information, Please

A few days ago I received a link to a video showing a baby girl who might have been nine or ten months old. She was jabbering to a man who was probably her father, but not in the way we expect a baby to jabber. She was “talking” extremely rapidly and with an earnest expression on her face that meant she was very anxious to be understood. When the man couldn’t take it any more and broke up laughing, she seemed a little hurt, but kept on without a pause. It was hilarious.

Then I realized that the scene was a parable of our time. This is the information age, and the baby felt that she had a great deal of information she needed to communicate to the people around her. The problem was that she lacked the communications skills to get that information across. She had seen the adults around her constantly talking without her knowing what they were saying, and apparently felt that (shades of Marshall McLuhan) the medium was the message.

The point is, you see, to keep the flow of language going. The content is not important in an age in which there are no absolutes anyway. I often wonder just what people who drive by me yakking on their cell phones are really saying, and whether it is of any importance to them beyond just occupying them as they drive. Concentrating on one’s driving, you see, is boring, at least until you crash into the rear end of a car at a stoplight. Then you have to explain, “My foot slipped off the brake pedal.” I’ve concluded that it has a lot to do with “mirroring.” If a person isn’t perceived, in some sense, by others, that person’s existence is a bit chancy. Therefore, if someone at another cell phone is responding to me, no matter how vacuous our conversation, I must be real.

A minister friend of mine once told me that superior people talk about ideas, mediocre people talk about other people, and inferior people talk about things. As a generalization, that comes pretty close to the truth, I think.

Still, in a day when 55% of American adults can’t find their own country on an unmarked world map, most of the students in a Geography class at the University of Miami couldn’t find Miami on a map of the United States, most Americans, when quizzed on Independence Day, couldn’t say which country we became independent from (Canada? Mexico?) or in which century it happened, when a quiz show contestant doesn’t know whether an elephant or the moon is bigger, and so forth, it’s pretty ironic that so many millions of us are obsessed with talking incessantly sixteen hours a day, and it’s hypocritical to pretend we’re saying something significant.

It’s all the more serious when one considers that very few of us are capable of uttering two simple sentences in a row without making egregious errors in English. Nor are the Spanish speakers among us any better. It’s rare to find a public sign in Spanish that doesn’t have errors a first year high school student shouldn’t make. Forget the message; the medium is broken.

Madison Avenue is right on top of these issues, though. Have you noticed that the tendency is to dumb commercials down and show the same ones hundreds, maybe thousands, of times through the years? Apparently the thought is that, given the average American’s near-total lack of ability to pay attention, it takes years of exposure to even the simplest of commercials to get through. And yes, we must eliminate punctuation, we’re told, because it “slows down” people’s reading. And we need to shorten even our single-syllable words. Product A is “6X as effective” as its competitors. Anyway, it’s the image that counts. A commercial currently being shown implies that when you swallow a drug, the backed-up traffic in front of you disappears into thin air.

The truly terrifying thing about the communication-without-content trend in this country is that this is supposed to be a republic (broadly speaking, a democracy), and we are responsible for making “informed choices” of our representatives. How can a bunch of people who can’t even name the vice president, or for that matter, name the three branches of government, vote the right people into office? And the candidates are catching on to the fact that the voters can’t be reached with anything beyond monosyllables: “Change,” for example, or “Yes we can.”

But then, people who can’t handle content can be reached. They can be reached by something analogous to the old practice of whacking a donkey on the side of the head with a two-by-four to get its attention. A friend of mine who was with the Special Forces told me that Arab terrorists don’t understand English very well at all until they see a high-powered rifle pointed at their bellies. Then, he says, they understand really well.