The Early Bard Gets the Words- Texting

I was talking to my political science teacher the other day when we happened along a certain concept that describes the phenomenon that is enrapturing today’s world. It is the Hedonistic Degradation of society. Hedonistic degradation can be attributed to a very observable phenomenon- as society improves, the people of which it is composed seek more and more pleasures. This is not always bad thing, because many of the things they seek are great benefits for mankind. Things like better hospital care, better customer service, and better transportation methods are all things brought about by the development of society. However, there is a side effect that has always shown its face the more a society grows. 

As technological methods of communication are growing more and more advanced, there is an observable trend in the ways with which people interact. What applications like snapchat do is that they enable people to instantly convey a crude embodiment of what they feel to another person. They can make a face, or take a picture of a hand gesture, and send that to whomever they feel they would benefit from observing their emotion. The argument here is largely that this from of communicating is more organic, and that one can make facial expressions the same way one would were they with that physically with that person. While this is not a bad thing, it comes at a cost. The cost is that there is more and more no longer a much needed a filter between how a person expresses what they are feeling, and how they choose to portray that. Before, with letters, one had to think carefully about the words they chose to convey meaning. In that era, communication took the form of writing. Writing; not talking. In the modern age, texting and other forms of communication enable anyone to have a conversation with almost anyone they wish, despite distance. We text as we would talk, with colloquialisms interspersed throughout expressions of laughter and interjections of agreement or otherwise. Texting has also adopted the rather annoying habit of using symbols to create faces, or just sending the faces themselves.

I believe that this is nothing short of slovenly failure to understand the importance of communication and its elements. It irritates me to no end that teens especially and young people everywhere are so impatient to convey what they are feeling in a fleeting instant that they find it necessary to beam pictures of their face terribly long distances and share it. The result is that so little thought is placed into communicating that, well, so little thinking happens. Conversations become a tidal wave of emotions that have no intrinsic value to the person that possess them, let alone anyone else. I’m not here crusading for some fundamentalist revival campaign for writing as an art to overtake other forms of communication. No, what I fundamentally believe in is writing as a practicality. What many growing minds need most desperately in this day their age is to be able to sit down and think about their emotions in a more methodical and analytical sense. Failure to do this results in the infantile and unconvicted pseudo-adults of this day and age, unable to articulate with enough clarity to even understand the rationale or irrational of that they themselves are thinking. 

Anyone who has ever been in a riot or just a likewise crowd of people knows that the thing that happens to be the strongest in situations like those are emotions, but unless the emotion is channeled in such a way that it can bring about change, one might have not had it at all. Feeling angry doesn’t do anything. Feeling angry at a government institution is a little better. Feeling angry at a government institution because of what you believe to be the wrongful death of an unarmed minority is getting somewhere. Feeling angry at a government institution because of what you to be the wrongful death of an unarmed minority that is a demonstration of the innate prejudice that subverts basic human values of equality possessed by those who are sworn to serve and protect? Well that might actually do something. I may be wrong about a lot of things, but I am definitely certain that no matter how many angry faces are sent to the police department of Ferguson, that it will not make them change anything. To simplify what is going on in one’s head to simply an expression or an emoticon is tantamount to trying to use kindling as a chopstick.

The speed and ease which which we communicate is a great benefit to human kind as whole. It allows us to communicate with loved ones abroad or gives us a way to call for help at the moment of dire need. But through its many changes and development, the use of something has been lost to the vast majority of youth and teens, and that just so happens to be exactly what you’re reading now, words. 

Fundamental Solitude

Among the many pressures that people face these days, there lies one that seems evolutionarily unprecedented. I am talking about social pressures and fears. We've all felt the pressure to conform, ascribe, look a certain way, talk a certain way, and in short, be something seemingly for the sake of other people. 

I could write a ton about the benefits and drawbacks and debate near endlessly on whether they are good or bad, perhaps even propose a solution that society should work towards in order to retain the things we want and mitigate the things we don't. However, I don't want this post to be about that. 

I want to talk about solitude. Solitude is often seen as neutral quality, something that certain people possess. Solitude seems to transcend being alone, falling more in to stoicism and sometimes contentment. Of course, anyone who is alone is most often scorned by society, but that's no fault of society's. The social nature of society is obligated to look upon that which does not contribute to it as bad. But many great human beings have found something worthwhile in solitude, from Emerson and Thoreau to Odysseus. People perhaps think that it's because when you're in solitude, you have the freedom to focus on yourself, but I find this not really to be true. I prefer to think of it differently. When one performs a solo with an orchestra, that is a form of solitude. They are lot alone, but they are singular- no part doubling to hide behind, no one to help you count your rests. And when someone is performing a solo, it's rarely only to showcase how good a player they are. The focus of the soloist is not on themselves, but rather the music. This is the nature of solitude. It brings you out of the situation where other people may mandate that certain things be done a certain way and leaves the solidituous with the task itself of simple existence. 

Take, for example, the fanatic debate between those who place their toilet paper roll with the end falling towards or away from you. There's a startling amount of near fanatic passion especially on the internet. People rant on and on about why their way is best and how those that don't agree are tantamount to monsters. However, if you strip away what this debate has become. You are left with only the dilemma: which way should the roll go? Ultimately, it matters very little, and you can decide based on logic. Try it both ways and see which works for you. Or use both. No one but you cares, and you can pretty well decide for yourself what works. This is solitude. It's taking out all the hype, all the pressures, all the expectations, all the neon and noise from your life and focusing on one thing: living it.