Interrogating the Internet, Part Four (and Conclusion): Networking

Let's get all the chips on the table.  Networking is the purpose of this series.  Or, more accurately, the distinction between networking and communication.  You see, in the early days of the web I feel like there was a rampant philosophical debate about the value of this new technology.  What would dominate the web, the question went, information or communication?  In one camp firmly sat Google and Yahoo, the early bastions of information search.  In the other camp sat AOL and, to a lesser degree, Microsoft (with MSN and Hotmail leading the charge), services that connected people through instant messaging and email.

In the years that have followed it has become clear that the Internet had room - perhaps infinite room - for both communication and information, along with the added and not-totally-unexpected third wheel of commerce.  In my last few posts, I've talked - in broad and inexpert strokes - about commerce and information.  Because we are increasingly natives of the digital landscape, I felt it was worthwhile to point out the obvious, to challenge us to remember aspects of the Internet that we now take for granted or ignore.  For example, information on the web is rarely unbiased, even when it strives to be, and is sometimes wildly inaccurate.  At the very least, search engines do little or nothing to filter results for reliability or accuracy, rather choosing to filter based on more arcane algorithmic criteria like "relevance" as determined by computational linguistics or, more simply, the criteria of the dollar.

That money underpins everything on the Internet, even free networking services like Facebook or Twitter, is another important reminder.  Increasingly we feel entitled, I suspect, to the long range (in time and space) contact that social networking has made possible.  That the services are "free" only increases our sense of entitlement.  But they are not free, no less than a phone, a radio, or a television is.  That does not, in itself, corrupt said services any less than charging for a book corrupts the book, but corruption is not the point.  The point is that we forget too easily that Facebook is not just a website, but a company trying to make a profit.  For day-to-day use, that may not impact us much, but it has implications for a philosophical discussion of the platform.

Before we venture too far down that road, however, let's return to communication and networking.  What do I mean by each of those words, and why have I gone to pains to distinguish between them?  I'll start with networking, since it's the easier of the two to capture.

By "networking," I mean making connections.  When two people network, they try to assess each other's position, and contribute resources - intellectual, physical, or otherwise - to each other in an effort to be of mutual use in the effort to meet emotional, psychological, physical, or professional needs.  Networking is, in short, a kind of poking at each other and shoving stuff (whether tangible or intangible) in each other's direction.  Building a network, then, is about creating a vast web of people to whom one can go for such assistance, and from whom one expects requests of a similar nature.

The beauty of the Internet - as opposed to previous incarnations of the same concept, all the way down to bartering at the local swap meet - is that it makes the whole thing both asynchronous and distributed.  Asynchrony is important because the exchange between one node on a network and another need not be simultaneous, so I might borrow emotional support from a friend or borrow a potentially useful business contact from a mentor without needing to engage in immediate payback.  Granted, this asynchrony of networked exchange is not unique to the Internet, as the phrase "I owe you one" indicates, but it is particularly strong on the web because no face-to-face meeting is even necessary.  "I owe you one" is built into the structure, rather than something that has to be said after an arrangement has been reached.

That networks are distributed on the Internet is by far the more revolutionary and vital of its differences with traditional networks.  What I mean by "distributed" is simply this: it is not important that the person who "owes you one" be the person who pays you (metaphorically) back.  In a sufficiently advanced network redundancies abound.  "You and Connor have 82 friends in common."  If you, then, help out Connor by connecting him with a potential employer, it is not fully necessary, in a world where networks are distributed, asynchronous, and - a third important piece that warrants mention, if not discussion - instantaneous, for Connor to provide a similar service to you.  It is taken as granted that he might, and maybe even will try to do so, but when you have needs that become paramount, you will not seek Connor on the basis of him owing you, but rather only if he is the member of your network most able to help you.

As a result, in a distributed network, there is ample commerce, but it is not always direct.  A cynic would point out that, in the long history of mankind (and especially in the last 300 years), almost every human interaction can be characterized according to political economy.  The debits and credits of that political economy are what made up the networks of the past.  That cynic, then, in order to understand the Internet and the kind of networking that the web has created, would have to decentralize the political economy, shifting it away from the exchange of capital (be it fiscal, emotional, spiritual, or whatever) from one person to another and towards a new model where exchange remains individualized, but the reserves, so to speak, are more communal.

Despite that shift from individual to community, however, the Internet is far from socialist or communist.  It is innately capitalist, innately concerned with individualism and personal gain.  Modern networking is in some sense the epitome of the capitalistic notion of the "invisible hand," where each person looking out for himself allows things to work out for the good of everyone, where the rising tide does, indeed, lift all boats.

Wither communication, in that picture?  Before I can answer that, I need to distinguish communication from networking.  Communication, as I imagine it, is an actual exchange of ideas, an effort not merely to assess the material or emotional needs of oneself and one's interlocutor, but to actually understand the spirit and mind of that person.  Communication is what happens when neither party in a conversation is looking out for his own advancement or the advancement of the other, but rather the shared effort of the two people is dialogue: a talking, thinking, and reasoning through difficult questions about meaning, purpose, and truth.  A modern cynic will say that such a conversation is not possible, because we're all too myopic and too self-absorbed to achieve the level of objectivity necessary for such a conversation to occur.  Moreover, said modernist (or, really, post-modernist) will argue that never in history have such conversation occurred; they have only seemed to do so because of the narrowness of the perspectives of those culturally hegemonic (or, at least, culturally isolated) societies in which conversations are said to have happened.

I suppose, on some level, the capacity for real empathy and, thereby, true dialogue is an article of faith.  Once convinced that such a thing does not exist, it is impossible to be persuaded otherwise, because the opinion itself precludes any evidence to the contrary.  Nevertheless, I believe firmly that such communication can and does happen.  Indeed, while this blog is hardly dialogic, in that I write all of these posts by myself, at its heart is the belief in ideas and communication, despite my doubts that such is possible over the Internet.

Which leads me to the end point of this series of posts.  Twitter and Facebook are two of the most successful and revolutionary services on the Internet.  We might also lump in email, skype, Linkedin, or any of a number of other networking services.  Regardless, however, we will be talking about networking.  It is undoubtedly the case that there is no online service which actively promotes communication in the sense I've talked about it above.  My question is, is there any service that does not, actually, actively prevent communication, in favor of networking?  What's more, is it possibly the case that some networking services begin to trick us into believing that we are communicating when we are actually networking?

Those are questions to which I do not have answers, even if I pose them rhetorically (as if I do have answers).  Regardless, it is clear to me that communication - or, we might also say, learning (a connection that might require a whole post to itself) - have been largely ignored, harried, or even battled against by the political economy of the last 300 or so years.  That dialogue has held on - if only in a few places - is a testament to how important it is to actual human progress.  That it has not yet, to my knowledge, broken through in the digital world is a testament to how powerful the myopic impulse for networking (we might as well say, for personal gain) is.

I leave with an analogy.  Networking is not merely with people, but with ideas.  Increasingly, we are concerned with what ideas link to other ideas.  While there is evidence that learning happens largely through making connections, and that building networks of thoughts and definitions and concepts is an important part of thinking critically, I wonder when we synthesize.  Building a network - of people or ideas - does not seem innately good or bad, any less than a blueprint or a scaffold for a building is innately functional.  Rather, the question is what do we do with that network.  If we merely connect ideas (or people) to each other, but never bore into them, try to discern their meaning and import, try to improve ourselves and our world, what good is that network?  It is as if we have made a blueprint for a building but have never actually built it, instead going from room to imaginary room, thinking about how we might decorate them, instead of how we might live in them.

Follow-Up on Meaning and Truth

I was going to respond to Luc Duval's comment on my last post with a comment, but then I realized I'll probably be long-winded enough to turn the response into a post of its own.  Plus, this way there's a better chance you'll see the excellent points he makes.

Luc writes, in his comment to my last post:

You really dislike Twitter, eh?

That post was intriguing but overwhelming. I have some friendly criticisms and some questions.

1. Were you trying to expound on something you read by Hegel? Or...wait...Wittgenstein? Or Husserl? Though I'm familiar with most of these names, it would be helpful if you provided a more focused explanation of which of their ideas/statements you refer to, or, even better, some quotes.
2. I enjoyed reading what seemed to be buildup to conclusive statements of yours but sometimes felt left hanging. For example, your discussion of the tautology of meaning/truth or truth/meaning was valuable - I was really hoping for you to try to separate the two with something definitive, but I don't think you did.
3. You made a lot of comparisons to the past with great certainty but provide no examples, statistics, or metrics. (Maybe I'm looking for the wrong kind of truth.)

1. How did you get to "Well, certainly we have destroyed 'Capital T' truth," without first defining what you mean by such Truth?
2. Your discussion of media seems limited to online networks. Does your idea that, to paraphrase, "the search for meaning/truth has become homogenized via excessive individual 'shouting in a crowded room'" change at all when you give consideration to literature/drama/music/visual art? Furthermore, does that change your comparison to the past at all?
3. I got a little bit lost reading about "artificial and limiting" systems of expression. Spoken language seems limiting to me, but natural, whereas painting seems un-limiting, but artificial. Were you trying to say that "Truth" is less accessible because our systems of expression are limited? Is, then, "Truth" dependent upon expression?

To do justice to Luc's many excellent points, let's take them one-by-one.  First, the criticisms, all of which are valid.  I'll rephrase how I understand each one (and I'll probably be less tactful than Luc is), and then offer some brief thoughts.

1) Pretentious invoking of famous names does not help your point.  If you're not going to cite exactly what you mean when you mention Hegel, you could at least explain it a little bit.

This is very true, and it's a huge weakness of my first-draft style of blog writing.  Where, in an academic paper, I would never be so careless, I tend to write my blog posts with less care.  Which is ironic because the likelihood of my audience being able to follow the argument without further explanation is far greater if I were writing for a professor.

Anyway, the people in particular I mention in my previous post are people who I talk about regularly, especially with my friends who are fellow Johnnies.  The result is a shared understanding of what those names mean, but that's a shared understanding that does not go beyond the rather limited audience of, well, fellow Johnnies.  Even philosophy majors often don't actually read famous philosophers (though, of course, they are told what those philosophers say, in the opinion of their professors anyway).  It strikes me that I should probably do a post or two about the particular philosophers I cite or allude to most, not as be-all-end-all interpretations, but as helpful way-points for when I'm working on heavier posts, and I don't want to worry about spending extra paragraphs explaining the reference.

To answer Luc's question, then, in general if I'm responding to something I read elsewhere, I say so.  Rather, in this case I'm using "Hegel" as a stand in for a complicated, lengthy argument that I don't want to get into because I already "know" - or at least have a strong opinion about - the beginning and end points, as well as the process.  It's not, ultimately, vitally important to be familiar with the three philosophers in question to understand my last post, but I can see how their presence is confusing.  Luc is right to call me out on my name-dropping for exactly that reason.

2) The train of thought moves pretty well when it leaves the station, but where do these tracks go?

Now this, I would say, is a big part of the Nicht Diese Tone modus operandi.  Because I emphasize process so much over outcome, it is frequently the case that I avoid conclusive statements.  That's not fair, because I often make conclusive statements, but as a writer I generally treat them as a kind of dramatic flourish, and not at all necessary to my own satisfaction.  This, I think, is both a weakness and a strength.  It's also a symptom of my approach to writing: I'm rarely trying - especially in posts like the last one - to get somewhere.  Rather, I'm trying to explore things, and so often I end up with tangents that are more interesting than the main point.

Anyway, the weakness, here, is obvious.  My writing isn't always reader friendly, especially because it's not usually clear what the takeaway is.  And, frankly, if it is I feel like I haven't done my job.  I strive to be a complicator in a world of simplifiers, a person who makes understanding things hard (or, rather, who shows that understanding things is hard innately) in a time when we tend to believe that understanding things is easy.

I would concede, however, that my blog posts tend to get too far afield, which is principally, again, the result of them almost always being first drafts.  My usual writing style - when writing academically or professionally - is to draft, throw away, draft, throw away, and so on many times exactly because of how easily I'll get sidetracked.  Indeed, usually when I begin an academic paper, I'll write three paragraphs before I realize what I'm actually supposed to be writing about, and then I restart.

So, in short, I don't know where the tracks are going, either.  Sometimes I feel like that gets me to an interesting place.  Other times, I'm left as unsatisfied as Luc, with a profound sense of "and that happened."  But hey, at least the train is usually moving pretty well before it crashes.

3) Where's the beef/data?

This is actually a more interesting question than I can address in any reasonable amount of time here.  While I am certainly a proponent of good data and not making stuff up, I'm also extremely wary of the citation-over-idea culture that academia tends to cultivate.  I read too many articles and papers at Stanford that were, essentially, devoid of original thought (or even half-decent writing) that my own tendency is to over-emphasize ideas, to the point of not always doing the extensive background research I should be doing (and would be) were I publishing in a more formal setting.

Suffice to say, Luc is absolutely right to call me out for not supporting most of the assertions I make about the past versus the present, about modes of expression, and even about my interpretations of various philosophers.  Ironically, in the very post in question I talk about the modern explosion of "you have your facts, I have mine," and proceed to practice that very maxim.  Of course, the question becomes what the goal and audience of my writing is.  In general, my failure to provide data is a result of my taking for granted that my audience understands the situation to be very much as I suggest.  That is, I'm relying on "common knowledge," even of opinion.

Now that's hardly rigorous, but I dare say it's extremely common.  Sportswriters, generally, (at least in my experience) tend to take for granted a great many things that are alternately supported or denied by advanced statistical analysis.  Likewise, I suspect my previous post has a handful of assertions that intensive data collection would confirm, and a handful of assertions that intensive data collection would challenge.  I just don't know which is which, and - and here's the damnedest thing - in some cases I suspect the data does not exist, and would be nearly impossible to collect.

Let's not, for the moment, get into what is the most intellectually rigorous approach in such a circumstance.  Rather, sometimes, for the sake of argument, I'm liable to take a position that I don't actually believe - or, rather, that I don't actually have evidence for - because I would rather practice drawing actionable (or at least write-about-able) conclusions from limited data than trying to always be 100% certain about everything.  Indeed, that was largely the purpose of invoking Wittgenstein in my previous post.  His On Certainty is a work which tries and tries and tries to define certainty, and ends up talking itself in circles because, in the end, context matters so much to meaning that knowledge, in any fundamental sense, comes across as impossible to him.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.  Onward to Luc's questions.

1) What is this "Truth" of which you speak?  And who destroyed it?

This is a very good question, and as I re-read my post with Luc's comments in mind, I realized that I did a very poor job laying out my premises.  The distinction I wanted to make was this:

Truth, with a capital T, is to my mind an indication of some Platonic, universal, almost inhuman reality.  It is, in short, the idea that there is a single, unyielding, unchanging essential set of metaphysical (or, possibly, physical) things and ideas which are applicable to all beings.  In some sense, arguing for the Truth, with a capital T, is akin to arguing for a kind of abstraction of God.  That is, whether or not there is Truth or not is not the same as whether or not there is a God.  Rather, it's whether or not there is a single way in which God (or anything else, really) exists.  That's maybe an opaque distinction, so let me try to clarify.

It seems to me that God, as a word, undoubtedly means a thousand different things to a thousand different people.  We might say, then, that one of those thousand people is right, and the rest are wrong.  God means one thing and one thing only, and that is the Truth.  We might, on the other hand, say that there are a thousand different valid ways of understanding God.  While that doesn't mean that there isn't maybe a deeper Truth (still capital) that synthesizes all or some of the thousand of those disparate and maybe even mutually exclusive (to we humans, anyway) perspectives, what it does mean is that, as far as human experience goes, there is not really any Platonic, eternal, universal Truth worth striving for.  Rather, there's only truth in as much as it applies to a given context, in a given time, to a given society.

So Truth, as such, hasn't been destroyed, per se.  But I would argue that post-modernism, as a philosophical and social movement, has roundly rejected the idea of a single correct interpretation of the world, metaphysical or otherwise.  As a result - because post-modernism has become so ingrained in our society - we are a world easily able to say "let's agree to disagree," because "you have your truth and I have mine."  That doesn't mean it's right and, as I argue (kind of) in my post, that doesn't mean there isn't a Truth (only that we haven't sought for it hard enough).  What it does mean, however, is that society at large, and academia in particular, are a lot more interesting in discovering contexts and situations than Truths, because we don't really take Truths seriously anymore.  Or, perhaps more poignantly, we see Truth, as an idea, as tied into colonialism and racial and sexual oppression, thanks to the preponderance of rich white males among the historically prominent seekers of Truth.

2 and 3*) "Procedural homogeneity," who do you think you are?  People still write books, paint pictures, and play music.  Also, why the Twitter hate?  And what does any of this have to do with truth?

* Because my writing about the once bled into the other.  Also, I'm lumping in Luc's opening comment here, because it's related to his actual question.

I don't hate Twitter, actually.  I find it fascinating, and while I'm not in a rush to start an account, I do sometimes read a select handful of people's Tweets.  Like in many situations, there's a paradox at work here: constricted form limits expression, but it also liberates expression.  The sonnet is an extremely limiting formal construct, but it is precisely because of its limits that writers of sonnets are so creative.  Similarly Twitter, where the character limit may homogenize the creative process (just like the sonnet form does), but within those limits the possibilities for expression are actually quite large.

It is also the case, in our digital age, that people do engage in all of the same creative forms they always have.  And, on top of that, we've begun to synthesize forms in ways that previous generations could never have imagined.  A simple example, to demonstrate the point, would be modern video games, which increasingly blend principles of cinematography with dramatic writing, both two and three dimensional artistic rendering, and, of course, good audio design.  The creative process is certainly alive and well in our modern age, and - by virtue of our increasingly huge population alone, let alone greater access to technology - innovation is probably faster and more widespread now than ever.

The problem, then, is a subtle one, and I'm not sure my post did a good job explaining it.  Indeed, I know it didn't, partially because I'm not sure if I really can explain it.  What I'm getting at, more or less, is that there's a kind of complicity the writer of sonnets has with the sonnet form that I'm not sure the Twitter use has with Twitter.  That is, the writer of sonnets winks and nudges at his form, knowing that its limits are precisely what allow him to achieve such high artistic expression.

Now, compare that to a Tweet, which is generally not taken as a piece of art to begin with.  What does the user of Twitter consider to be his relationship with the medium of self-expression he is using?  Is he aware at all that he is limited?  Those are real questions that I don't have the answer to.  What I suspect, however, is that Twitter users take for granted their character limits, just like we take for granted the limitations of our native tongues (Luc's language example is a good one).

In that sense, there may be little difference between modern man and man of any time.  We have - as I say in the post - always been limited in our means of expression.  All art is limiting in form because it is principally through limitations of form that we are able to create anything at all.  What is more pernicious, then, is not limitation, but the widespread homogeneity in the type of limitation in which we, as a society, participate.  It's not just Facebook, Twitter, and text messages that I'm talking about, it's decreasing biodiversity, it's dying languages, it's fewer and fewer cultures.  Now - and this is a leap - those latter things might be related, at a procedural level, to the former ones.  It might just be... Or let me make it a question: is it the case that there is a technological imperialism going on?  Are the wonderful tools for self-expression and communication we have developed in our modern age choking out diversity of all kinds, not because of what they are, but because of how they work?

Again, I really don't know the answer to that question, but it's a question that I don't think is being asked nearly enough.

Wither truth (or Truth), in all of that?  Well, I'm of the opinion that not only more ideas, but more different ways of generating ideas will get us closer to whatever the Truth might be.  And, even if no such thing exists, at the very least it's a lot more interesting - and probably a lot healthier intellectually, spiritually, and physically - to deal with variety rather than homogeneity.  In the end, I'm not so concerned with truth, I guess, because I'm more concerned with the process of getting there.  Or, rather, it might very well be that the closest we can get to truth as a species is good process.  Not good thoughts, but good thinking.

With that in mind, thanks to Luc for forcing me to do better thinking.

The Status of Meaning and Truth in the 21st Century

Philosophers, poets, and lawyers throughout history have argued over what constitutes the truth.  Or the Truth.  Or the "Truth."  You see, it's one of those words that changes its meaning based upon whether or not the first letter is capitalized or not, and some people are liable to accompany the sound with air quotations whenever possible.  The reason?  Truth is a complicated concept, an ideal that, nevertheless, seems to have some bearing on the real world.  Truth is a thing most people think it is worth striving towards, and yet, it's also a thing that's incredibly difficult to actually find.

You could say the same things, pretty much, about "meaning," except that it rarely gets capitalized.  The search for truth and the search for meaning are in many ways related, though in our modern parlance the latter seems to have replaced the former, as we've come into contact with more and more disparate ideas about what truth might be.  As Truth (with a capital T) has lost its luster - as fewer and fewer people believe there is such a thing - more and more people are content to find meaning, knowing that truth - if it even exists - is probably not worth the effort.

In our modern age, what with Wikipedia, Twitter, email, and smart phones, it seems to me that the status of meaning and truth are changing in our society.  That is not to say that truth itself is changing - if, again, there is such a thing - or that meaning is becoming harder (or easier) to find.  No, what it means is that the status of those concepts and the way we use those words is changing in a way that is uncommon.  Hegel has it that human history is effectively a long series of reversals in the status of meaning and truth resulting in socio-political and spiritual transformations leading humanity towards a brighter and eventually perfect future.  I'm not sure I buy all of that, but part of it is fair: we, as a society (or a society of societies) are constantly redefining our purposes and goals.

That is not to say there's not a great deal of constancy in human pursuits.  It would be foolish to ignore, in spite of all the radical differences between modern computer-happy man and a hunter-gatherer, the many similarities.  Sure, our conflicts and desires are more sophisticated and/or fetishized than they once were, but they are still more or less the same.  We still want to eat food and drink water, we still want to sleep safely, and - perhaps most important - we still are subject to strong reproductive urges that a cynic might say dictate somewhere between 90 and 100 percent of our actions.  In some ways, things never change.

Ah, but what does change is understanding.  Understanding is not truth, of course, nor is it necessarily meaning.  Rather, understanding is a very human attempt to put construct something sensible around the chaotic mess that is the world we experience every day.  Hegel would argue that, just as an individual has understanding, so too does a society as a whole.  And even if Hegel wouldn't argue that, I will.  From an anthropological perspective, we might just call that social understanding a "culture."  That is, we establish expectations and shared experiences that are so ingrained into our world-view that generally we don't even believe that things could be any different.

Consider, as a simple (and classic) example, standard American elevator behavior.  We stand, facing the door, head and hands down, quietly.  Most of us engage in this socially expected behavior without even thinking about it.  There are, however, examples of more consequence as well.  Things like facial expressions, gestures, and intonation when we ask a question versus when we make a statement are vital to our conceptions of meaning, but yet go largely unexamined except by a select group of social scientists (who, it should be added, are mostly ridiculed).  Even more important are our shared assumptions about morality and practicality, assumptions which spill over into political and religious beliefs.  Indeed, perhaps the biggest reason why our political and religious disagreements tend to be so violent and irrational is because our beliefs in those areas are cultural and not rational; that is, they come from an understanding of the world that is vestigial, subtly inherited from the world we live in.

Despite those ingrained assumptions about everything from how to shake hands to how to argue about elections, it remains the case that things do change.  I am not persuaded that human beings are purely rational creatures, but it does seem to me that reason and assumption dance with each other in a complex tango, leading to refined and re-defined understandings, which in turn change the possibilities for how we understand things like meaning and truth.  An optimist, like Hegel, might call this process evolutionary, pushing humanity towards further refinement and perfection, while a pessimist might call it corruption.  But regardless, there is change.

So where do we stand, in the year 2011, with regards to meaning and truth?  Well, certainly we have destroyed "Capital T" truth.  Our social reality is such that it's impossible for any reasonable person to argue that anyone in particular has access to the Truth, and while that doesn't mean there isn't one, it does mean that determining what it is is impossible.  Faith still exists, of course, and a reasonable person might very well acknowledge that it is not intellectually inconsistent to have faith in a given system of truth - whether that be scientific, religious, political, or otherwise - but then again, while faith itself is not intellectually dishonest, faith without acknowledging the possibility that it is misguided probably is.  Indeed, I, for one, take a very cynical view of religious strife: it seems to me like the insecurity of a bully, who will say he believes in his strength, but who secretly understands that he is not, necessarily, the strongest guy there is.  So too the religious fanatic: the more fanatical, the less certain, fundamentally, he is about his faith.

"Truth," then, has become a kind of rallying call for the refusal to consider another person's perspective.  "You have your facts, and I have mine," is a refrain you have likely heard.  Ironically, while this means that the status of truth is undoubtedly in question, it does nothing to undermine the philosopher's ideal that Truth is worth trying to uncover.  That people refuse to converse with each other and consider alternative opinions is perhaps the best indication not that there is no truth, but rather that no one is particularly working hard enough to get to it.  A tutor of mine at St. John's was fond of saying that perhaps the Truth is very, very, very, very, very hard to get to, while even the most devoted lover of wisdom is only willing to work very, very hard to get there.  It seems to me that Truth, if there is such a thing, is something right now we're not even willing to work hard for.  If it's not on Wikipedia, it's not worth knowing.  Of course, that assumes that Truth is knowledge, when it might be that Truth is, in fact, a way of thinking or a way of being.

Now that we're getting Taoist about things, I think it's time to dive into the deeper linguistic issues that are at play here.  The biggest problem with Truth is not its distance or the difficulty of the search to find it, but rather its ambiguous metaphysical status.  What do we mean by truth?  This is why meaning is so important, and why Wittgenstein was such a crazy person.

Meaning, generally, refers to the desire we have for our lives not to be a miserable waste of time.  But beyond the personal meaning we also use meaning to denote, well, what things mean.  You see, the problem with talking about meaning is that it tends to be a circular conversation.  Meaning is the truth of a thing, truth is the meaning of a thing, and so on.  In the end, a lot of words spew out, but we don't get anywhere.  Again, read Wittgenstein and you'll see what I'm talking about.

So, rather than trying to define meaning, let's talk about the status of meaning in 2011.  Meaning is, in short, becoming more and more individualized, whilst simultaneously becoming more and more standardized.  That is, modern technology is making a kind of paradox that even Husserl in his worst nightmares could never have imagined.  Increasingly, we are encouraged to define and express our own meaning; we live in a knowledge producing, and not knowledge consuming culture (I am as guilty as this as anyone, seeing as I write a blog with very few readers, but read very few blogs myself).  We are all shouting in a crowded room with our Twitter accounts and Facebook status updates.  We, in short, are given a lot of leeway to define and understand what meaning means to us.

That's hardly a bad thing; indeed, more opinions and ideas is probably more likely to lead us to, if not truth, at least somewhere interesting than fewer opinions and ideas.  No, the troubling part is that the variety of opinions and ideas - the individuality - we honor so much is essentially an illusion.  We like, in our culture, to believe that the message and the medium are different, that the content and the form of a thing are only incidentally related.  I think that's foolish.  While we all have the freedom to individually express ourselves, that our media are so constricted means that the possibilities for our opinions are similarly constricted.  Twitter may allow for a huge range of expressions of meaning, for example, but how huge, really?  Is there not a limit to what you can say in fewer than 200 characters?

Similarly the blog, which allows for imbedding videos or songs or pictures, and thus can do things that writing alone could never do.  Nevertheless, it's still limited, it's still restricting in ways that I can't express or imagine.  Of course, you might argue that this has always been true, and you'd be right to do so.  Humanity has never - or rarely, anyway - been able to imagine expressing meaning in ways that reach beyond the restrictions of whatever the contemporary media may be.  But the danger we get into, now, that we haven't in the past, is the assumption that things are supposed to be the way they are, that modern structures are inherently good because they are modern.

Take one of my favorite examples: politics.  While major parties have always been more powerful than minor ones (hence, major parties), it used to be that people found it possible to believe that neither of the two major parties were adequate expressions of their understanding of the meaning of a democratic nation.  In such cases, significant - sometimes in the 20 percent range - swatches of the population voted for third parties.  Now, however, we have narrowed the spectrum so far that we refuse to believe that something outside of that spectrum could possibly make sense.  Voting for a third party is practically a mark of insanity, which only goes to show how dangerous constricting the form (the parties) and not the content (actual issues) can really be.

We might do this with political systems, as well.  Regardless of political affiliation, it's generally considered nonsensical to believe in any kind of government but a Democratic Republic, if you live in the USA.  Indeed, you have to support not just a Democratic Republic, but specifically the archaic American Constitution.  It's not that we can't argue for other systems; it's that we can't even conceive of those systems.

If such is the case in something as simple as politics, imagine how much more pernicious the result of this artificial constriction of meaning is in spirituality, or music, or philosophy, or emotion.  Now I'm not arguing that there should be no systems at all, or that it would be better if we had completely unchecked emotional expression (because, hey, hello murders everywhere).  No, the point is that we have artificially limiting systems that people don't realize are artificial and limiting.  That, again, has always been true, but never at the scale - and thus with the homogeneity - that we have now.  The process of defining meaning (though not meaning itself), principally because anyone can share theirs with anyone else, is in danger of becoming homogenized.  And anytime processes become homogeneous, it seems to me, you see stagnation.

Ironically - paradoxically even - we live in a time where meaning is exploding, but where the processes behind meaning are atrophied.  This is a crisis much more poignant than Husserl's fear that science would destroy meaning altogether.  Rather than the broad, soul-crushing forces of an Orwellian totalitarian world, we're trending towards a Brave New World in which we share a wonderful illusion of freedom, meaning, truth, and beauty.  What Huxley missed, however, was that you need not restrict access to ideas or thoughts or even processes: you need only provide systems that are sufficiently limiting in form, but boundless in content.  Given the proper impetus, people will restrict themselves willingly.

The status of meaning and truth in the 21st Century?  Perilous, but expansive.  Paradoxically healthier and sicker than ever.  But that should come as no surprise.  The truth of the matter is, complexity and paradox have always been present in human experience, its just that we avoid acknowledging it.  Now we live in a time where refusal to acknowledge paradox is much more dangerous than it ever has been, whilst the opportunity to benefit from acknowledging paradox is larger than ever.  Color me pessimistic, of course, but hopeful.

The Return of More Interesting than it Seems: William Faulkner on Books, Blogs, and Tweets

How's that for a long blog post title?

There's a William Faulkner quotation that I want to lead off this post with.  It goes like this: "I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing."

Something tells me that Dan Brown, for example, isn't really a failed poet.  Or maybe he is, but he took up writing (bad) novels for an entirely different reason than Faulkner did.  There's really not very much money in poetry these days, while there's still plenty in trashy suspense stories that can be made into movies starring Tom Hanks.  There's little question in my mind that Carson Cistulli is a more talented artist - and probably far more sarcastic - than Dan Brown.  Hell, the title of his book of poetry, Some Common Weaknesses Illustrated, is way better than the uninspired dribble that most modern novels are adorned with.  Of course, it's unfair to call modern novels "novels" in any real sense.  They're more like extended sound-bytes, pre-fabricated and totally predictable explorations of human action tailored to what sells, and not what is interesting or revealing of human nature or profound.

Now that I've demonstrated my snobbishness, I want to consider the place of books - novels in particular - in the modern literary world.  Despite my cynicism, there are still authors who write real books, novels like The Alchemist or the Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay* which count as real novels written for artistic reasons, and not merely to sell.  Of course, they may do both, and any publisher worth his or her salt will not take a book written without the potential to sell (which is why Dune, for example, was turned down by so many publishers; ditto Stranger in a Strange Land).  But some books retain artistic merit, are built around fundamental questions about human existence and experience, and, perhaps above all, actually make the reader think.

* I must shamefully admit that I haven't read either of these books yet.  They are, however, on my ever-ballooning reading list, and I'll get to them just as soon as I finish the other bazillion books I also intend to read.

Books, however, are a dying media.  Oh, there are still more than plenty of books being written - indeed, probably more now than ever - but a smaller and smaller portion of the daily reading of even the staunchest book defender (like myself) is happening on the page.  To be clear, I'm not talking about eReaders, which perform the same function as a book.  I'm talking about blogs, tweets, forums, and, perhaps most important and most overlooked of all, comments.

The blog is an obvious stand-in for the newspaper, and likely owes to the slow death of papers around the country.  Why pay to have a honking, advertisement-ridden jumble of information about topics ranging from who died to who won the hockey game to who murdered who when all you care about is the political editorials?  Why recycle 50 pages of unread paper every day when all you want is that fold-out photojournalism special?  The blog world provides an opportunity to read just that one section - and probably in more depth, detail, and sophistication thanks to the specialization of most blogs - without having to wade through the rest, without having to pay, without having to recycle, and so on.

The danger here, of course, is self-selection.  If all you read are blogs written by fervent Democrats or Republicans, you're liable to take an already biased perspective and subtly tweak it further and further until you can't even recognize the potential for reason in any perspective that differs from your own.  Whereas the newspaper may have had subtle biases, but largely strove to be objective, RepublicansSuck.com or TheLeftCanEatIt.com are not likely to present the facts of a story without adjusting them to fit their politic desires.  Indeed, they're not likely to present the same stories at all.

Which only means that there's more onus on the reader to be objective and critical, to know when there is a real debate going on, to know when to take the other side seriously, and to know when red herrings are being served to each other's straw men.  Unfortunately, most readers seem incapable of doing this - or, worse, are unwilling to try - and so most of our blogly conversations are like attracting like.  The conversational power of the Internet turns, not to an integrating or dialogic force, but rather a divisive one.

Which brings me back to Mr. Faulkner, who wrote charged books that are extremely difficult for even a well-read, intelligent person to understand.  He intentionally confuses, complicates, draws complex images and connections, and uses symbolism that is self-developed (rather than cultural stock).  He is, indeed, a kind of poet writing novels.  Or, as he has it, a failed poet.  His quotation - with which this post began - is fascinating to me not just because Faulkner is regarded as one of the finest novelists in American history, but because of all novelists his novels are some of the most poetic.

If we draw Faulkner's line from poem to story to novel, I wonder where we put our modern forms of composition.  Where does the email go?  Where the blog post?  Where the tweet?  Perhaps Faulkner's continuum has nothing to do with what we're writing these days, because so much of our writing and so much of our reading have become communicative instead of artistic.  Are people on Twitter trying to say something about anything other than themselves?  Then again, are writers of novels and poems any different, except in that they take more time to do it?  Good writing is both impersonal - applicable and interesting to a wide audience - and intensely personal.  Without the latter, there's no impulse, no passion for the subject matter.  Without passion, there's no writing at all.

It seems to me that there is passion in the blog world.  After all, no one pays the vast majority of bloggers to write their missives, and while a great many of those posts are not particularly interesting, a great many - more than any one person can read, in fact - are extremely well-written, engaging, and often profound.  The same could be said, I suspect, of Twitter.  Most tweets may be little more than glorified status updates or text messages, but the occasional 160 character (or whatever) salvo might be just as profound as a well-written haiku.  Indeed, I understand there's a whole set of people devoted to writing Twitter haikus.

What separates Faulkner, then, is not the medium, like you might suppose, but rather his self-awareness.  It seems to me that the map of Faulkner's continuum need not be overly complicated: tweets are - or can be - poems, blog posts can be short stories, emails can be either - and, occasionally, novels in their own right.  It's just that, most of the time, they aren't, and have no desire to be.  There are, however, those who do desire to write well, to even be great writers in one sense or another, but what we lack in our myopic times are not avenues to be great, but an audience that recognizes the difference between great, good, ok, and boring.  Most of all, what we lack is the self-awareness that says "I am a failed poet," and uses that to become a great novelist.  Instead we all keep hammering out at the poetry, reading and writing and digesting a sentence at a time, forgetting that sometimes it is easier and better to try to express or understand the soul of another human being in sentences, paragraphs, and chapters.

On Facebook

I don't have a Facebook account.

I know, that's impossible, right?  I'm a technology-savvy, blog-friendly, twenty-something in 2010 (almost 2011) who doesn't use the biggest social networking site in the world?  And not just that, Facebook is the second most visited site on the entire Internet, behind only Google.  How is it possible that yours truly doesn't even have an account?

In some ways my refusal to join Facebook is merely stubbornness.  I didn't get one before, and I haven't had one yet, and I don't see any need to create one now.  In other words, it's just an irrational computation of habit, a perception that the barriers to entry - while undeniably low - are still too high to be worth the investment.  That is, I don't want to spend the half-hour or whatever to set the thing up.

That, however, is not the real reason.  Stubbornness is sufficient to prevent me from even raising the question most of the time, but it is not enough to really keep me away.  No, the real reason I don't have a Facebook account is because I don't believe that I would benefit from Facebook.  Far from it, I feel as though Facebook lowers, rather than raises, quality of life.  Now don't get me wrong.  I don't mean to insinuate the same is true for you or your 1,000 Facebook friends.  I mean that I, personally, would benefit very little from having a Facebook account.

It is true that I have few close friends, and that I don't tend to make many vague, Christmas Card acquaintances either.  I'm a natural introvert, and while I don't dislike people by any stretch, I don't have this burning need to stay in touch with everyone I meet.  Facebook, I believe, is designed to satisfy that very burning need, to excuse you for forgetting and ignoring people - which you would do anyway - simply because you are their "friend," and therefore you have "stayed in touch."  For my part - and I don't think I'm alone here - I don't see any benefit from having a network of 1,000 emigos (as Joe Posnanski calls them) that I am reminded of constantly, without any meaningful change in my actual relationships with those people.  It just sounds like extra work and stress.

Of course, there's more to Facebook than accumulating lists of friends.  There's the whole status update and wall posting.  That part is so successful that Twitter abstracted it, made it into its own service, and is now the 11th most visited site on the Internet.

This communication-focused part of Facebook I find more entertaining, but ultimately empty.  While there are many witty tweets, Facebook statuses, comments on pictures, and so on in the Facebook world, there are also plenty of the same in real conversations.  I don't feel as though I'm missing out on a vast trove of humor or wisdom by not following people on Twitter, or being linked in to their Facebook pages.  And, what's more, by the nature of the services, most Twitter users or Facebook users are intensely personal without even a hint of trying to bridge the paradox that makes good writing worth reading: being personal while still being impersonal and, perhaps, universal.

Is that too much to ask from a Tweet or from a Facebook wall post?  That it be a piece of good writing?  I think so.  It is probably impossible, in 140 characters (or, in the case of Facebook, in a few sentences of indeterminate length), to say much of anything really worth saying.  Oh, sure, you can be witty, and you can maybe even be profound, but what makes the great quotations of, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson so great is not the quotations themselves, but the process of getting to them, the explanations and context that go with them.

Writing that does not explain itself leaves so much up to the reader that it encourages a kind of bland myopia.  Either we get it, and agree, or don't, and disagree and disregard.  Conversations die when there's no nuance in the exchange, no subtlety, no persuasion or explanation.  Facebook lets us retreat away from people we don't like so we can surround ourselves with groups of similar-thinking compatriots.  It lets us speak in sound bytes, in malformed or unformed thoughts that are reinforced by the agreement of the vast networks of friends we collect.

The result is conversation without purpose, without direction, without empathy.  Over the Internet, the kind of networking Facebook does may be practical, but it is not, it seems to me, human.  There is no substitute for sitting with your interlocutor and having a real conversation, because you have to acknowledge, when you speak in person, the other speaker's humanity.  You have to take them seriously, because they aren't just a vague collection of images and statuses.  You have to strive to understand, to agree.  Or, at least, you should do all of those things.  One of the problems with the cheapening of conversation that the Internet allows is that it might also cheapen our real-life interactions.

Don't get me wrong, though.  I love the Internet.  I believe that modern technology can improve quality of life immensely.  I just don't think that Facebook and Twitter really unlock the potential of a networked world.  Rather, they are just the same kind of stuff we've always engaged in as a society - backbiting, refusing to think critically, paying lip service to our "friends," general myopia - streamlined and made more efficient and widespread.  I believe, however, that there are also things the Internet can do that actually do connect people, that allow for real conversations where there never have been real conversations before, that encourage critical thinking and information sharing and so on.

It might very well be that Facebook and Twitter and social networks in general can be a gateway to that kind of thinking.  It might be that Joe South gets exposed to Mike Northwest via Facebook and they hash our their cultural differences.  But I don't think that happens very often.  Nevertheless, the model is not impossible, the question is how can the Internet really connect people, instead of just superficially connecting people?  I suspect the answer has something to do with understanding technology as an aide and not as life itself.

Which is why, above all, I don't use Facebook.  I've seen too many people let Facebook friendship stand in for real friendship, let a digital world replace a real world.  That's not what makes technology great, that's what makes it dangerous, and few people can resist the allure.  I don't use Facebook not because of the flaws in Facebook, but because of my own flaws, because I believe that I would lose touch with reality.  I only wish more people made the same decision.