Claire’s photo taken today around 8am on Sunday 13th October - from the bedroom of our house in Tobermory, looking out to the Sound of Mull.
View from the house into the Sound of Mull.
It’s Sunday, scrubbed and showered and up early. Dark outside in a quiet Lochgilphead. I’m thinking about people after picking the phone up and drifting through LinkedIn and Facebook.
People are funny things. I post on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter predominately, with a smattering of AV on YouTube or TikTok. I try to share useful or thoughtful posts on these platforms, interspersed with Letters to the Viz Editor for amusement.
For me the phone and Social Media are to be avoided nowadays.
But it has made me think of people, and of how the pen is mightier than the sword.
The specific wording that "the pen is mightier than the sword" was first used by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839.
An illustration of Cardinal Richelieu holding a sword, by H. A. Ogden, 1892, from The Works of Edward Bulwer Lytton.
I bemoan the addiction to digital and the loss of reading books or writing letters that seems to have encompassed Society at present. For f**ks sake I wish people would pick up books and read and discuss them in coffee shops across one of those circular tables. Actually talking to each other.
People think writing and discussion is to post on Social Media. That sound bites represent conversation.
It is clear from research that we are lowering our attention and concentration spans due to technology and this is disastrous!
We must be the most connected we have ever been as a species, yet the most unconnected.
On trawling through LinkedIn all I could see was ego, vanity, and trite posts about how well we/I are doing. Also writing such posts does not involve regurgitating what someone else has written. And it is certainly not being original in thought. And this new found inability to question the veracity of a post, to fact check what is written, crucially undermines the gift of the Web. It as though we are children given a magical toy on Christmas Day only to be bored with it and breaking it by New Year’s Eve, almost like having a puppy for Christmas whilst forgetting it is a living and breathing entity. In one sense The Web is a living and breathing cyber entity that we strangle with voluminous amounts of trite content and commentary.
Here’s something to note. Pay attention please.
The 55/38/7 Formula
The 90% figure wasn’t plucked out of thin air. It was Albert Mehrabian, a researcher of body language, who first broke down the components of a face-to-face conversation. He found that communication is 55% nonverbal, 38% vocal, and 7% words only.
So we as a species are not actually communicating via the Web. In fact we are shouting into a wildness. After all, do people really read the posts on Facebook or LinkedIn?
Are you in fact wasting your precious time?
In fact is anyone reading this? Am I not being hypocritical, paradoxically criticising the use of the Web, when harnessing it now?!?!
I suppose the Web can be welcomed as a means of communication BUT not to the extent we are relying on it.
Like the child with the toy at Christmas we are gorging on our new found fun to the exclusion of life and all about us, mere white noise. But I suppose in time this will change as the Web beds in, people become fed up with it, and life with mankind typically goes full circle, which if history is anything to go by will happen, ie boredom of and sensible Web usage. Getting outdoors for a walk and chat for example.
55% of communication is NON-VERBAL
Please make note of this. I have.
This is what I’m doing.
I actively now call people on the phone each day.
Ideally I sit down with another person and engage in conversation. This grounds me.
Conversation attacks loneliness. Or even worse living in one’s head with my thoughts.
I make time for Claire my wife. I love her. She’s all I really have.
I avoid iPhone usage.
I avoid Social Medua usage.
I’ve come to the conclusion that most Social Media posts are a) not worthy of reading, b) driven by ego and narcissism, c) are possibly written by people I would run a mile from.
I’ve had a Facebook cull. Who in life are my friends, my buddies, those I share my life with?
I’ll soon have a LinkedIn cull.
A lot of posts that are written are complete shite and not written for the greater good. More about self and allowing people to indulge in and encourages voyerism, with writer and reader not looking at self.
We now see a detachment from self and from others. Painful content or thought provoking content is reduced to the banal. This cannot be right. How can we grow as a species if we cannot differentiate between serious and non-serious, important, non-important, tragic, beautiful.
All of this reminds me of one of my favourite quotes, which are the words of Sylvia Plath.
I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
Are you being limited by technology? Is it blocking you from all the shades, colours, emotions, feelings you could ever want to experience and share one to one with other human beings?
Are alive or trapped in a cycle of awake-phone-work-home-phone-bed-repeat?
It’s frightening isn’t it?
Woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up. —Ecclesiastes
If we are stepping through this life, indifferent to those around us and thus separate from our fellow human beings, it is by conscious choice. It may be hard to reach out to someone close, but there will always be a willing hand to receive our own. Each of us has been created to offer others our unique gifts. When we choose a posture of indifference, we are denying to the universe what we have to give.
There is magic in the realization that our acquaintances, our co-workers and neighbors, are presented to us by design. We are here to learn lessons and we play teacher to each other. When we have stepped away from the circle of people calling to us, we are denying them the opportunities for growth they may need and preventing it in ourselves as well. We need one another, and being helped by someone else fulfills more needs than our own.
We are in one another’s world by design. I will enjoy the magic of that meaning, today.
October 11th - The Promise of a New Day - Hazelden