The loss of memory

British science historian James Burke has a way of packing a lot of meaning into a small space.

I still recall the first time I watched his amazing series The Day the Universe Changed, in which he looked at moments in history that radically altered the direction of human progress.  The final installment, titled "Worlds Without End," had several jaw-hanging-open scenes, but one that stuck with me was near the beginning, where he's recapping some of the inventions that had led to our current scientific outlook and high-tech world.  "In the fifteenth century," Burke said, "the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg took our memories away."

Being someone who has always loved the written word, it had honestly never occurred to me that writing -- and, even more, mass printing -- had a downside; the fact that we no longer have to commit information to memory, but can rely on what amount to external memory storage devices.  Burke, of course, is hardly the first person to make this observation.  Back in around 370 B.C.E., Socrates (as recorded by his disciple Plato in the dialogue Phaedrus) comments that the invention of writing is as much a curse as a blessing, a viewpoint he frames as a discussion between the Egyptian gods Thamus and Thoth, the latter of whom is credited with the creation of Egyptian hieroglyphics:

"This invention, O king," said Thoth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered."  But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Thoth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.  Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.  You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

Socrates also points out that once written, a text is open to anyone's interpretation; it can't say, "Hey, wait, that's not what I meant:"

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.  And the same may be said of speeches.  You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.  And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

And certainly he has a point.  A writer can write down nonsense just as easily as universal truth, and (as I've found out with my own writing!) two people reading the same passage can come to completely different conclusions about what it means.  Even the most careful and skillful writing can't avoid all ambiguity.

I'm not clear that we're on any surer footing with the oral tradition, though.  Not only do we have the inevitable "mutations" in lineages passed down orally (a phenomenon that was used to brilliant effect by sociolinguist Jamshid Tehrani in his delightful research into the phylogeny of "Little Red Riding Hood"), there's the problem that suppression of cultures from invasion, colonization, or conquest often wipes out (or at least drastically alters) the cultural memory.

How much of our history, mythology, and knowledge has been erased simply because the last person who had the information died without ever passing it on?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Planemad, Chart of world writing systems, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau seems to side with Socrates, though.  In his Essay on the Origin of Languages, he writes:

Writing, which would seem to crystallize language, is precisely what alters it.  It changes not the words but the spirit, substituting exactitude for expressiveness.  Feelings are expressed in speaking, ideas in writing.  In writing, one is forced to use all the words according to their conventional meaning.  But in speaking, one varies the meanings by varying one’s tone of voice, determining them as one pleases.  Being less constrained to clarity, one can be more forceful.  And it is not possible for a language that is written to retain its vitality as long as one that is only spoken.

I wonder about that last bit.  Chinese has been a written language for over eight millennia, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to defend the opinion that it has "lost its vitality."  Seems to me that like most arguments of this ilk, the situation is complex.  Writing down our ideas may mean losing nuance and increasing the dependence on interpretation, but the gain in (semi-) permanence is pretty damn important.

And of course, this has bearing on our own century's old-school pearl-clutching; people decrying the shift toward electronic (rather than print) media, and in English, the fact that cursive isn't being taught in many elementary schools.  My guess is that like the loss of memory Socrates predicted, and Rousseau's concerns over the "crystallization" of language into something flat and dispassionate, the human mind -- and our ability to communicate meaningfully -- will survive this latest onslaught.

So I'm still in favor of the written word.  Obviously.  My own situation is a little like the exchange between the Chinese philosophers Lao Tsu and Zhuang Zhou.  Lao Tsu, in his book Tao Te Ching, famously commented, "Those who say don't know, and those who know don't say."  To which Zhuang Zhou wryly responded, "If 'those who say don't know and those who know don't say,' why is Lao Tsu's book so long?"

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Self-revelation through social media

There's a sense of being anonymous, or at least one step removed, on electronic media.  We post statuses, comments, and "tweets," and it feels very much like talking in an empty room -- that the likelihood of anyone hearing what we're saying, or that if they did hear, that they'd pay attention, or (especially) that we'd reveal something we didn't intend to, is slim.

Two recently released studies have shown that we are as transparent to others while online as we are in person -- perhaps more.

The first, done by H. Andrew Schwartz et al. of the University of Pennsylvania, is called "Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach."  In it, the researchers used computer software to analyze 700,000 words from the Facebook status updates of 75,000 volunteers, who also agreed to take a battery of personality tests.  The software then calculated word frequencies for all of the words in the statuses, and then matched up word frequencies with personality markers.  Here's a piece of what they concluded:

Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.g., subjects living in high elevations talk about the mountains), tie in with other research (e.g., neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase ‘sick of’ and the word ‘depressed’), suggest new hypotheses (e.g., an active life implies emotional stability), and give detailed insights (males use the possessive ‘my’ when mentioning their ‘wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ more often than females use ‘my’ with ‘husband’ or 'boyfriend’).

Which thus far is interesting but not particularly alarming.  What I found more curious, and perhaps troubling, came up when I saw how many times word frequency could be related to other factors -- age, gender, degree of extroversion, and so on.   The age breakdown, I thought, was particularly interesting.  The 13 to 18 crowd unsurprisingly had "school," "homework," and "tomorrow" as their most common words; the clear winner from 19 to 22 were the various tenses and forms of the word "fuck;" by 23 to 28, there was a shift to "work," "office," "wedding," and "beer."  (The absence of swear words in this age bracket is likely to reflect an awareness of how public Facebook is, and not wanting to get fired for posting something inadvisable online.)

Males of all ages have a great many macho words in their statuses, involving video games, movies, and sports.  Unsurprisingly, "fuck" makes a reappearance in the male statuses.  Women's statuses were almost stereotypically girly -- "shopping," "boyfriend," "love," "yummy," and "my hair" being some of the most common words.

While none of these were particularly surprising, I think this raises two questions -- one of them more serious than the other.  The less serious one is whether our online presence is more revealing who we'd like to be seen as than who we actually are -- after all, we create these statuses, so the macho masculine statuses and girly feminine ones are just projections, ghosts of real people that we've built and then put on public display.

A more serious concern is how this sort of thing could be turned against us.  Now, please don't think that I've suddenly turned conspiracy theorist; I'm not particularly worried that the government is going to start data mining my Facebook looking for some reason to lock me away.  But think of the usefulness of this to marketing firms, who are always looking for ways to hook into demographic information so that they can focus their ads better.

If we reveal who we are even by the word choice in our status updates, that certainly is going to be something that advertisers are going to use.

The second study used Twitter, and the author, Burr Settles, came up with an algorithm (again based on word use) to sort out "geek" tweets from "nerd" tweets.  As settles sees it:

In my mind, “geek” and “nerd” are related, but capture different dimensions of an intense dedication to a subject:

• geek - An enthusiast of a particular topic or field. Geeks are “collection” oriented, gathering facts and mementos related to their subject of interest. They are obsessed with the newest, coolest, trendiest things that their subject has to offer.
• nerd - A studious intellectual, although again of a particular topic or field. Nerds are “achievement” oriented, and focus their efforts on acquiring knowledge and skill over trivia and memorabilia.

Similar to the study by Schwartz et al., Settles tried to group words together that seemed to indicate something about the demographic that produced them -- resulting in a graph (you can take a look at it on the link posted above) that sorts our tweets out by character.

I see this one as a bit more lighthearted than the first study, but still, it says something very interesting; that we reveal ourselves online every time we post anything, whether we want to or not.

Of course, all of this made me go back and check my own status updates and tweets, just to see what I'd inadvertently told the world about myself.  Ignoring what most of my social media activity is about -- posting links to cool stuff -- I found, in the last couple of weeks, a status mourning the death of my 16-year-old cat, Puck; a status that described my elation at finding out that my high school creative writing teacher (who, amazingly, hasn't retired yet!) is teaching one of my novels in her English class this year;  and a status about how much I enjoyed getting to see Laurie Anderson in concert.  As far as tweets, I had to go a lot further back to hit one that wasn't just posting a link to something, but I did find one expressing frustration about the teacher evaluation scheme in New York State, and another one about the last day of school that used up a good many of the 140 character limit with the word "YIPPEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!"

My guess is that this trend of figuring out our demographic information from our electronic presence is only going to get more sophisticated.  Should we be worried?  My sense is probably not; just as with the conspiracy theorist's concern that the government is monitoring his whereabouts (and text messages and phone conversations), if they were doing this for everyone it would be such a mammoth amount of data that it would be impossible to manage.  At least for now, I think this sort of thing will only be of interest to marketing firms.

And it's not like they haven't already been doing this for years, starting out with targeting advertisements to particular demographics on television (compare the ads on daytime soap operas and the Syfy channel, if you want a particularly good example).  If you have a Facebook, check the ads along the sidebar -- no surprise that mine frequently have to do with travel, scuba diving, wine, and pets, is it?

So as long as we think before we post (which we should already be doing), this sort of thing may not make much difference, except in what sorts of things we're encouraged to purchase.  At least I hope so.  Last thing I want is the government keeping track of what concerts I go to.