Everybody’s talking. The Internet’s a non-stop talk show. Live interviews! Unprettied faces framed by computers’ unforgiving camera. Talk, talk, talk. Much of it, no doubt, interesting – as talk. I wouldn’t know. I delete even my idols. Sorry, haven’t time.
Talk is an inefficient medium if you’re trying to be understood. If your objective is to be known, nothing matches talk’s capacity to transmit reams of information beyond your words. Gesture, expression, tension, eyes, smile, dress all contribute to who I “am.” Folks fall in love remotely, I hear, but I don’t get it. I love Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman avidly, but not that way.
A non-negligible portion of online talk is consumed with pleasantries, introductions, flattery. The interviewee is a guest, treated with due cordiality. If it’s just you on the screen, minutes are consumed with digressions and, at least in my case, corrections, clarifications, uhhs and ahhs. I loathe my Zoom face! I don’t want to be glib or slick – and my wish is amply fulfilled!
Not only is time wasted with live presentations (“live” no matter how dead), but meaning is blurred. How often is what exits your lips what you meant? And how often are your evanescent words correctly heard? I sometimes feel like muting myself altogether it’s so hard making myself understood. I mention a missive Jane hasn’t read yet. What’s it about, she asks. You’ll see, I reply. The moment I start explaining what I’ve written I’m marring it, for what I meant is what I wrote. Spoken words are mostly wasted – or offered as accompaniment to expressions or gestures. The little interjection, “Yeh, right” may convey a lot, for example, yet its slippery sense be tricky to decipher.
Time-consuming and inexact, online talk tends to be slovenly. No one cottons to a person who talks “like a book,” so why bother trying to say things just so? Amiable folks talk casually, off “the top of their heads.” If I love you – in that way – I’m curious what’s smoking from the top of your head, but if I value you as a communicator, not an intimate, I seek your input condensed, encapsulated, tidy. “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man,” wrote Sir Francis Bacon famously – and very concisely. “Conference” – his word for conversation – was self-defensive, as in the thrust and parry of swordplay; speaking with another you had to be ready for what might be aimed at you. Writing, by contrast, you had to get exactly right – right enough to be reread – and reread – and measured by – for centuries hence, in Sir Francis’ case.
No less irksome than its inexactness and inefficiency is the poverty of our conversational power. Because we’re more a visual than a literate culture, we’re mostly klutzy talkers. Granted, no epoch talks as vividly as in their prose or poems, but I’ve got to believe the educated classes of Shakespeare’s, Dr. Johnson’s, Jane Austen’s, Emerson’s, Henry James’ sociable hours talked more acutely and astutely than we do today. Jeez, we’ve got a President who blathers ungrammatically and can’t punctuate – and a crowd applauding his incessant barf. If this be success, mark me a failure BIG-TIME!
Journalism is about the transmission of information, the quicker and cleaner the better. Literature is about how things are said, not what. Readers of literature glimpse through words the soul on the other side of this encounter, with whom they might keep company. The joy of our sessions, I hope, whatever our matter, is a pleasant dance of spirits, a sort of minuet.