In February 2004, facebook.com creator Mark Zuckerberg launched a mini-revolution from his Harvard dorm room. He couldn't have known then that his project would take on a life of its own. It has become our vehicle for virtual meet-and-greet; our universal dating aid; our favorite way to pass time; and even a verb unto itself.
For some, facebook is just another technological nuisance. After all, with text messages, e-mail messages, instant messages and now facebook messages, digital chatter has already become a steady roar.
Well over a billion text messages are sent worldwide every day. Close to 13.9 billion IMs are sent every 24 hours. By 2009, there will be over 1.2 billion IM accounts. facebook itself has close to three million members nationally.
All this begs the question: are we even talking face-to-face anymore?
In a recent column in The Chronicle, Duke freshman James Tager asks of his fellow facebook-crazed freshman: "I wonder if they even know all their friends by name, or even by sight." Out of the 1,700-plus members of the freshman class, 92 percent have joined facebook.
Digital communication has made it easy to proceed through a whole day without actually speaking to anyone. But conversation is the life of the University, part of its unstated mission. Speaking at the 1993 Founder's Day Convocation, Reynolds Price reminded us that conversation is at the "literal heart of a great university" and that it is the "direct product of the highest human skill."
It's possible, I guess, that our generation debates seriously but engages electronically. It's even possible that the steady stream of online communication fosters more frequent discussions. I imagine, though, that such wired debates are not nearly as inclusive, challenging or exhilarating as those done in the literal company of others.
History supports such a claim. In the salons of 17th- and 18th-century France, for example, the nobility of the ancien regime transformed conversation into an art form. In what many have been dubbed the "Age of Conversation," wit and elegance were ends in themselves, on topics both serious and frivolous, and participants invested great thought and care into each mention and phrase.
Closer to home, the tavern culture of colonial America hosted spirited debates over the chosen spirits of the day. A quick wit and steel-trap mind were held in high regard; after all, without a Google.com, you could only hold your own if you were well-read and kept up with the day's discussions. The ideas that fueled the Revolution were often proposed and perfected in the pub-perhaps the most democratic place to do so.
One result of having instant access to information is that, unlike times past, we no longer have a standard fare of literature or history that people ought to have read. In addition, Internet slang and emoticons have made us more tolerant of soggy prose. America has generally lost its once-famous love for the written and spoken word.
Skilled oratory has less purchase in politics and daily life. We trade the clever for the condensed, witty missives for pithy instant messages, talk for text.
While technology is partly to blame for our rhetorical regression, it isn't the only culprit.
As Stanford linguist John McWhorter points out in his book Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, the 1960s counter-culture cast out the formal conventions of times past, regarded as "repressed, boring, unreflective, and even suspect," in favor of plain-speaking discourse that seemed "genuine, healthy, engaged, and even urgent." Put more simply, in order to speak truth to power, you had to avoid sounding like the powerful.
But McWhorter points out that our lack of reverence for the spoken word threatens political life, academic communities and the nation's cultural health. Less concern for how we say things often results in less concern for what we are saying.
Technology can speed up that numbing effect. It can affect both how we acquire knowledge and how willing we are to open ourselves up to debate. It's time for us to log off, sign off, turn off and instead sound off on those issues which matter most to us.
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