Our technology has knelled the death of communication.
And ironic that so much of it has been devoted exclusively to facilitate communication. The internet, the cell phone, the television.
Yet even as these new languages arise, communication, real communication, is becoming extinct.
There is a box of letters, maybe in your grandfather's attics, written from his wife, his lover, his children. Some of the letters are scented, some contain postcards, photographs, some pressed flowers. Postage stamps, postmarks, thumb printed and tear-stained envelopes and pages. There will be no box in the attics of your children, no CD's or flash drives with the memories of your life, the medium is changing. Always changing.
Email, for example. Email, which exists only in the terabyte storage of offshore servers, streamed down wires in 1's and 0's, traveling hundreds of miles to arrive down the street and be read once and deleted. If not deleted, left on a computer that ends up discarded. Or burned to a CD that will in short time scratch and blister, the patent obsolescence making your memories irretrievable. Were, for some rare reason, it printed and read, the ink, cheap, the paper, rubbish, the generic fonts and backgrounds, there is nothing there to ensure it's survival. Of the countless billions of emails sent every day, the trillions of virtual miles traveled, how many will survive even a week? A month? Yet we entrust to them, to our digital cameras and blogs and online accounts and profiles our lives.
And there is the Jargon. The changing language of the technocrati, with communication so easy and abundant, so continual and constant, we develop shorthands to communicate, to sum up ourselves, and we devolve to become our language.
Formats change. Media becomes obsolete, bytes are erased, written over, destroyed.
We are forgetting ourselves. There are no anchors here, and we are carried forever forward on currents of "New and Improved", having lost all sight of shore....
These are songs to this age. Some as ephemeral as the language, the medium, others, I hope, less so.
To the new tower of Babel.