- Valson Thampu
Ours is the age of social media. That doesn’t mean we understand it: the how, the why, and the wherefore of it. We need to. Being submerged in what we do not understand risks our being swamped by it.
I too am a trespasser into social media. I resorted to it for my own purpose which antedates social media. So, I am on social media, but not of it. I exist in tension with its dogmas, compulsions, and proprieties. As a rule, when you work in a medium you are expected to conform to the norms and expectations germane to it. But that exacts a cost; especially, in the present instance, if you have a trans-social-media purpose. It could frustrate the purpose that made you embrace it.
As of today, the written word is at risk, nearly, of being overwhelmed by the voluminous output of social media. I was, for a quarter century, a wordsmith of sorts. Then it struck me that the readership was evaporating. I began to feel like an artist who was performing for an audience that had departed the day before. The written word was losing out to the spoken, or recorded, word in the social media sphere. I was presented with an outreach-crisis.
I found myself shifting, grudgingly, from the familiar world of the printed word to the exotic world of social media; in particular, of YouTube.
The euphoria was short-lived. The pressures and compulsions, the unwritten rules of social media began to bite.
“As of today, the written word is at risk, nearly, of being overwhelmed by the voluminous output of social media. I was, for a quarter century, a wordsmith of sorts. Then it struck me that the readership was evaporating. I began to feel like an artist who was performing for an audience that had departed the day before. The written word was losing out to the spoken, or recorded, word in the social media sphere. I was presented with an outreach-crisis. I found myself shifting, grudgingly, from the familiar world of the printed word to the exotic world of social media; in particular, of YouTube.”
It struck me with particular force that in what I thought I was going forward I was actually going backwards. In history, the written word was a late comer. The spoken word had preceded it by far. None of the early epics was meant to be published. They were recited from memory to audiences nurtured in oral traditions. The spoken word was the norm; the written word, the exception.
The arrival of the printing press changed all that. The printed word could make demands on the readers that the spoken word could not. Style became more formal and less spontaneous; and structures more elaborate and intricate. The reader needed training, skill and mental stamina to hold a series of connected material together in his mind and to decipher the meaning of the whole. Academic philosophy of the sort that Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche developed, could not have arisen before the days of the printing press.
What has the advent of social media done except taking me back, many a millennium, to the days of the spoken word; except for one significant difference?
That difference is patience, which is a function of mental stamina. The listener of the spoken word in the dim, distant past was hugely patient; even if he was not conscious of his being so. He had the capacity to get engrossed in what he listened to, and forget himself in it. Patience was the oxygen of the oral tradition.
Social media marks the resurrection of the oral tradition, sans the stamina of the mind, on the part of the listener-viewer. It is a medium of legitimized impatience. The low threshold of endurance on the part of the viewer, and not the merit of the content, often decides the fate of social media offerings. The average viewing span of a YouTube video is about 5-7 minutes; except when the contents are sufficiently prurient. What you offer must be like the cream in a glass of milk: immediately accessible. You could irritate your viewers, barring a few, and lose them permanently, if you tax them intellectually.
In effect, what seemed to be a progressive step has proved to be a backward step a different direction; reminiscent of Dante’s words: ‘Their going up is their coming down.’
This atrophy of our inner stamina, which makes brevity a self-defeating concession to the mental feebleness of the consumer merits attention. It characterizes the spirit of the age. Everything about, and around, us is getting stronger, bigger, bolder. But we are getting weaker. The world around us seethes with activity, while we relapse into passivity and inertia.
Why did I stray into social media? Surely, to share the fruits of my life, its thinking and seeking, with my fellow human beings. To me the purpose is all. That purpose can be served only if I develop an argument to some extent and depth. It takes time. Demands space. The argument may have to be spaced out, with due pauses, illustrations and interconnectivities so that what is offered may stand a chance of connecting in depth with the viewer.
This leisurely pace is felt as callous, if not cruel, by the viewer. You are assumed to be taxing him beyond the normative remit of attention span. This is not because the viewer has a better use of the time thus saved. It is impatience for the sake of impatience; or, impatience as the disease of our age.
This precipitates a Hamlet-like dilemma: to be, or not to be! Should I stay on, or should I quit? In order to survive in this medium, should I conform to its dogmas and norms? If I do, what happens to the purpose of my being there?
This is an aspect of the general dilemma we face at present. Today, every organized activity of any significance can exist and thrive only if it compromises its originating purpose. Ironically, this happens even to Christian missions; the Christian mission in education, for example. If anyone sticks stoutly to fulfilling the originating purpose of an enterprise, he is apt to be seen as a square peg in a round hole; one who lacks not only tact and common sense, but even common courtesies: a stagnant stone, as W. B. Yeates would have said, amidst the running stream.
