Antisocial media

We’ve heard it all, repeatedly: social media, ironically, is (are?) making us more antisocial. Technology (especially, again ironically, communications technology) is separating us rather than bringing us together. We have ‘relationships’ conducted entirely online. We stare at our mobile phones rather than make eye contact with the people in front of us. We text each other rather than engage in face-to-face conversations. Try doing a Web search of the word antisocial and any combination of media, technology, and phone, and you will find numerous opinions on the debate. And every time I come across yet another rant on any side of the issue, I am reminded of this classic passage from Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame (lines 644-660). The Eagle is lecturing the hapless Geoffrey:

British Library MS Lansdowne 851, fol. 2r (detail).

. . . thou hast no tydynges
Of Loves folk yf they be glade,
Ne of noght elles that God made;
And noght oonly fro fer contree
That ther no tydynge cometh to thee,
But of thy verray neyghebores,
That duellen almost at thy dores,
Thou herist neyther that ne this;
For when thy labour doon al ys,
And hast mad alle thy rekenynges,
In stede of reste and newe thynges
Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon,
And, also domb as any stoon,
Thou sittest at another book
Tyl fully daswed ys thy look;
And lyvest thus as an heremyte,
Although thyn abstynence ys lyte.

Models for Text

The paper I gave in New York recently, at an INKE conference, tentatively explored the idea that multiple models for text are desirable because humans use text in various ways. The four models for text I proposed, by way of example, are summarised in this table:

Punctuating Manuscripts

MS. Junius 11, pg. 5. Image: Oxford, Bodleian Library 

Have you ever considered what a text would look like without punctuation? In what way would an author ensure that they successfully conveyed the appropriate meaning to their audience and how would the audience identify meaningful units, or senses, within a text? Punctuation is, and always has been, a useful way of dividing text into smaller units of meaning, dispelling ambiguity and developing a specific meaning. In approaching text as a model of information it is important to consider not only how information was encoded but also how it was decoded – a process in which punctuation has been, and continues to be, a powerful tool.

Word by Word

Franks Casket, front panel. Image: British Museum.

Corpus Glossary, CCCC MS 144, fol. 58v (detail)

Vespasian Psalter, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian A.1, fol. 24r (detail). Image: British Library.

Cambridge University Library MS Kk. 5.16, fol. 128v (detail)

These four documents all include English text in some form, and all date from the eighth century. The first, the front panel of the Franks Casket, features an Old English riddle in runes. The second, the Corpus Glossary, provides meanings of Latin terms in Latin and sometimes in Old English. The third, the Vespasian Psalter, gives an interlinear Old English gloss on the Latin text of the Psalms. And the fourth, a copy of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, includes the Old English text of Cædmon’s Hymn as an annotation to the Latin text. All these documents provide graphic evidence of the way early English writers thought of their language as being divisible into word units.

Lost in Information

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
    - T. S. Eliot, Chorus I from The Rock

. . . literacy is still the only bulwark against the dissolution of language into ‘information systems.’
    - Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, Preface to ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind

The technology that emerged to meet those needs – writing – filled a prosaic but essential purpose: accounting. The impetus behind its invention was not a desire to faithfully record language, but to record trade transactions, crop yields, and taxes – to record and preserve information, not language.
    - Amalia E. Gnanadesikan, The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet