The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

The keynote speaker at the conference talked about Shakespeare, and how in his time, speaking was everything. You didn’t see a play, you heard a play. He went on this tangent about how now, we are focused on seeing, as opposed to telling. Seeing is everything (we need to be shown to believe, we need agreements in the visual medium of writing, we need to tits or GTFO, etc) in our society, and we’re constantly, more and more, dependent on the visual.

That got me thinking.

At least half, and probably a lot more of my communication happens via text in some fashion. All my leisure time is spent talking with people via various messengers, exchanging text over the internet. Maybe I’m writing on here, or posting on a message board. Hell, now that I have an unlimited texting plan, my mom just texts me from downstairs instead of talking with me. So, so much of my communication is visual.
Frankly, I can’t see it being any other way, and frankly, it’s only going to get more and more that way was time goes on. As the internet gets everywhere, people are just going to exchange e-mails and messages almost all the time, just passively, and more and more I’m betting times when you talk to your friends is going to be very rare. They’re going to be far away, connected to you via the internet, or just busy, and it’s less hassle to respond with text when convenient.

The good doctor who was doing the keynote seemed to be very depressed that the verbal was getting forgotten in performances, that we were leaving that behind. Maybe we are. I certainly think such skills are going to become more and more rare as effective writing communication becomes more and more important. Maybe it will eventually become a completely lost skill. Conversation will be awkward, start stop, and only when necessary. Maybe, just conjecture.
But it really, really made me think about the nature of communication. Though I think about such things all the time when writing and teaching people how to write, I never considered the fact that the very nature of how we communicate, what’s important and what isn’t, has changed over time. It’s kind of a simple, “duh” idea now that it’s in my head, but it was really kind of shocking. The sort of way communication works has always been something I’ve played with, used, abused, and counted on. It’s my lifeblood and an essential part of who I am. When I lose my words, I feel completely and utterly helpless. It’s just kind of mindblowing to think about the fact that I couldn’t communicate worth shit if I were to travel back in time (if we’re in a normal time travel movie and just forget about things like dialects and stuff) and that the things I’ve learned about effective verbal communication, even, wouldn’t be as effective, since a lot of it is based on visual gestures.

I don’t know. It’s a huge, huge thing. At least to me. Maybe it seems stupid to you. I suppose, if nothing else, I got that idea to ponder out of the whole trip.
It’s just scary to find out that my natural kind of “feel” for how language and communication works, which has always been right for me, even if I didn’t have words for it… it’s scary to find out that might not be something that works always.
I don’t know.