What were the hottest new words of 2015? As the year slouches towards its wintry extinction, a seasonal question recurs: what are the hottest new words? Yes, it is the big dictionaries’ regular symposium of lexical additions and words-of-the-year lists – which, like any lists, are powerfully clickbaity provocation machines, efficiently generating widespread ridicule both for what they contain and for what they leave out. The claims that such lists tell us something profound about how we live now may be dubious, but they certainly provoke an amusing mixture of disgust at linguistic change and gurning acceptance of any shiny new nonsense.
Each dictionary takes a slightly different approach to its nominations. Collins, for example, goes for spikes in frequency of use. Its word of the year is “binge-watch”, which has been around for many years but has been three times as popular in 2015 as in 2014, since everyone has been slumped in front of Netflix since January. Among the runners-up are “Dadbod” (an insult, surely, to buff fathers) and “clean eating”, which means “following a diet that contains only natural foods, and is low in sugar, salt, and fat”. In other words, a diet that is low in food. By contrast, dictionary.com opens wide its maw to the snazziest recent coinages, having recently announced the addition of “yaaas” (a fun way to type “yes”), “feels” (feelings), and the splendid “fleek”, often used in the phrase “on fleek”, which means “flawlessly styled, groomed etc”. I want to start an etymological myth that “fleek” arose when someone mistook an old-fashioned long “s” for an “f” when poring over a Renaissance text and seeing the word “sleek”, but it probably won’t work. The reliably hype-hungry Oxford Dictionaries trumped all these pedantic verbals by nominating as their word of the year an emoji character, admirably untroubled by the fact that it is not a word. It is a picture, or at best a pictogram, and when translated it is, on Oxford’s account, five words: “face with tears of joy”. This controversial choice probably had nothing at all to do with the fact that Oxford had “partnered” in a study with SwiftKey, makers of an emoji-enabled smartphone keyboard app. At least the rest of Oxford’s words of the year were actually words, including “on fleek” again and also “lumbersexual”. (The two are presumably quite compatible if one’s beard and check shirt are excellent.) Oxford’s are usually the most thoughtful lists, considering political and cultural trends, and here its shortlist subtly makes a point by including “refugee” but not “migrant”, though refugee is the older noun by about a century. Oxford thus shows where it stands on the rhetorical divide between those who describe people moving from Syria into Europe as travellers who want something from us (“migrants”) and those who emphasise that they are fleeing something horrible (“refugees”).
One may hope for similar reasons that the current popularity of the word “mastermind” in news reports to describe the alleged coordinator of the Paris attacks will not last long enough to make it on to future lists. Since the 17th century, a “master-mind” was someone of extraordinary intellect. And even a criminal mastermind, like Moriarty or Blofeld, is someone we are expected to admire for his dastardly ingenuity. It is not very ingenious to shoot people in cafes. What’s more, as the eminent US commentator Jack Shafer points out, “by casting terrorists as masterminds, we overestimate them, and this overestimation boosts their reputations, inadvertently increasing their global status and recruiting power”. (Note to reporters: “ringleader” is not much better; this is not a circus.) Noting such nuances, of course, is the kind of service that good dictionaries can provide. And even their faintly silly rankings of the best new words can offer a diverting snapshot of irrepressible linguistic innovation. But what you think the word of the year is might in the end depend on personal experience. One individual’s life in 2015 might best be summed up by the word “lugubrious”, and another’s by “flange”. Or, in the spirit of Oxford Dictionaries’ masterful piece of trolling, we might sympathetically concede that someone’s year is most accurately described by the hauntingly eloquent emoji of a smiling turd.
What Kids Wish Their Teachers Knew By DONNA DE LA CRUZAUG. 31, 2016 420 When Kyle Schwartz started teaching third grade at Doull Elementary School in Denver, she wanted to get to know her students better. She asked them to finish the sentence “I wish my teacher knew.” Photo
The responses were eye-opening for Ms. Schwartz. Some children were struggling with poverty (“I wish my teacher knew I don’t have pencils at home to do my homework”); an absent parent (“I wish my teacher knew that sometimes my reading log is not signed because my mom isn’t around a lot”); and a parent taken away (“I wish my teacher knew how much I miss my dad because he got deported to Mexico when I was 3 years old and I haven’t seen him in six years”). Photo
The lesson spurred Ms. Schwartz, now entering her fifth teaching year, to really understand what her students were facing outside the classroom to help them succeed at school. When she shared the lesson last year with others, it became a sensation, with the Twitter hashtag “#iwishmyteacherknew” going viral. Other teachers tried the exercise and had similar insights. Many sent her their students’ responses. Photo
In her recently published book, “I Wish My Teacher Knew: How One Question Can Change Everything For Our Kids,” Ms. Schwartz details how essential it is for teachers and families to be partners. Photo
“I really want families to know how intentional teachers are about creating a sense of community and creating relationships with kids,” Ms. Schwartz said. “Kids don’t learn when they don’t feel safe or valued.” Photo
Continue reading the main story Melody Molinoff of Washington, D.C., who has two sons, ages 9 and 11, in the public school system, agreed. Photo
“Parents see the teacher as their partner in bringing up their child, and that’s a huge responsibility that we are putting on our teachers and our schools,” Ms. Molinoff said. “I always want my sons’ teachers to know what their challenges are, what they like, just more about them.” Photo
Mary Clayman, a fourth-grade teacher in the Washington public schools, said she has noticed the same thing from the other side of the desk. Photo
“I’ve taught over 500 kids so far in my career and parents in every grade want to know how their child is doing socially and emotionally, often times more so than whether they can multiply or divide quite yet,” Mrs. Clayman said. Photo
In her book, Ms. Schwartz writes about mistakes that might have been prevented if she had known her students better. She had a student named Chris who was obsessed with science. Ms. Schwartz thought she had done Chris a huge favor by securing a spot for him in a science-focused summer camp. But she was unaware of the family’s financial struggles and it turned out that his parents could not afford to take time off from work to get Chris to camp. Ms. Schwartz said classrooms can become a supportive environment for students coping with grief. She suggests that schools have “grief and loss” inventories for students who have gone through a crisis, with input from families so that the child’s future teachers know what that student is dealing with. “As teachers, we know parents are the first and best teachers for their children and we want them to work with us,” she said.
Why we need to invent new words Don't let the dictionary define what you say. Make up your own words. Here are rules you need to follow Do not be afraid to make up your own words. English teachers, dictionary publishers and that uptight guy two cubicles over who always complains about the microwave being dirty, they will all tell you that you can't. They will bring out the dictionary and show you that the word isn't there – therefore it doesn't exist. Don't fall for this. The people who love dictionaries like to present these massive tomes as an unquestionable authority, just slightly less than holy. But they're not. A dictionary is just a book, a product, no different from Fifty Shades of Grey and only slightly better written. But you must be careful. Every new word must be crafted. It has to have a purpose, a need. A new word cannot be created with a fisted bash to a keyboard. Like every other word in the language, your new word should be a mashup of pre-existing words. You can steal bits from Latin and German, like everybody else did. Or you can use contemporary English in a new way. But you must capture something that already exists, which for whatever reason has been linguistically mismanaged. Here is an example:
Blursingnoun When an event, gift, or circumstance presents qualities and consequences that are simultaneously positive and negative: Jenny was made partner but it was a blursing because her hours were so long that her husband left her. Why not just say "curse and blessing"? Well, for one thing that is cumbersome. But more importantly, something that is both a curse and a blessing is different from a blursing. With a blursing the two qualities are indivisibly linked, and cannot be separated. There is no chance to dodge the curse and receive only the blessing. Tell me you haven't received a blursing. It is a situation we have all experienced, but for whatever reason have never had a word to properly describe it. Same with the next two words: Cidiotnoun Someone who has spent so long in a city they have lost the ability to perform tasks the rural population sees as outrageous common sense: First, he didn't slow down when it started to snow, then he turned away from the skid, not into it, and I had to tow him out of the ditch – what a cidiot! Oprahcideverb To acquiesce to the theories of an expert, instead of trusting your own thoughts, opinions and personal experience: Billy is two, so I wasn't worried that he can't read until I read this article and oprahcided to send him to a specialist three times a week. I oprahcide all the time. Don't you? I would say that since the mid-90s, oprahciding is how most of us make our decisions. There are numerous new experiences and behaviours that have come into our culture and need words to describe them. Think about computers. Skyping, googling, sexting: these are things we do every day. But even as I type this there is a red line underneath each of those words, telling me they don't exist. That red line is there because these words have been classified as slang. As far as I'm concerned, calling a word slang is the linguistic equivalent of using a racial slur. It is derogative, comes preloaded with assumptions and stereotypes, and prevents us from believing we have the authority to make up our own words. But who can argue that the words below don't describe something we've all experienced? Digippearverb To use computer technology as a technique to avoid unwanted or feared issues and conversations: I tried to talk to him about his taxes but he digippeared into Facebook. Overchillverb To use modern air-conditioning systems to excess, especially in offices: Yes, I know it's August and I'm wearing a cardigan, but they really overchill my cubicle. Bironicaladjective The ability or compulsion to appreciate something simultaneously on both a sincere and ironic level: David's appreciation of Tom Baker-era Doctor Who is very bironical. Inventing new words is one of the most rebellious things you can do. We all live under a set of prescribed social assumptions, which are embedded into our words. If you want to think outside your social conditioning, you will need a new word to do it. Every word is a suitcase, into which we pack an idea, and then hand it to someone else. No suitcase: no handoff. Our society is changing, fast, and we need new words to describe it, such as: Breadsinnernoun A man experiencing guilt and shame because he stays home to raise the kids while his wife provides economically: We won't get Bill to come to Vegas with us because he's become a breadsinner. Schadengayfreudenoun Delight in the misfortune of gay couples who, once wed, experience the same trials as straight married couples. I know it's schadengayfreude, but it was kinda refreshing to see that Laura and Jane started bickering all the time after they got married. It is easy to forget there was a time before dictionaries, when everything was less defined and words had a little more wiggle room. This kept the English language alive. Dictionaries turned the language from a house that we are all free to renovate, into a museum we are only allowed to look at. So go ahead, step over that velvet rope, make up your own words. Remember that somebody, a long time ago, made up every single word in this sentence. What are your suggestions for useful new words?
The 10 best words the internet has given English From hashtags to LOLs to Cupertinos and Scunthorpe problems, Tom Chatfield picks the most interesting neologisms drawn from the digital world Tom Chatfield My book Netymology: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World is about the stories behind new words. I've been an etymology addict since I was a teenager, and especially love unpicking technological words. It's a great reminder of how messily human the stories behind even our sleekest creations are – not to mention delightful curiosities in their own right. 1. Avatars This word for our digital incarnations has a marvellously mystical origin, beginning with the Sanskrit term avatara, describing the descent of a god from the heavens into earthly form. Arriving in English in the late 18th century, via Hindi, the term largely preserved its mystical meaning until Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash first popularised it in a technological sense. Fusing notions of virtual world-building and incarnation, it's the perfect emblem of computers as a portal to a new species of experience. 2. Hashtags In 1920s America, the # sign served as a shorthand for weight in pounds (and they still call it the pound sign). It was first brought to a wider public thanks to its adoption by telephone engineers at Bell Labs in the 1960s as the generic function symbol on their new touch-tone phones – and if you're looking to sound clever, you could call it an "octothorpe", the tongue-in-cheek term coined at Bell to describe it. It's on Twitter, though, that hashtags have really come into their own, serving as a kind of function code for social interaction #ifyoulikethatkindofthing. 3. Scunthorpe problems
Computing can be as much combat as collaboration between people and machines, and the Scunthorpe problem is a perfect example. Entirely innocent words can fall victim to machine filth-filters thanks to unfortunate sequences of letters within them – and, in Scunthrope's case, it's the second to fifth letters that create the difficulty. The effect was labelled in honour of the town in 1996, when AOL temporarily prevented any Scunthorpe residents from creating user accounts; but those who live in Penistone, South Yorkshire – or people with surnames like Cockburn – may be equally familiar with algorithms' censorious tendencies. 4. Trolling Although the archetypical emblem of an online troll is of a grinning bogeyman, the word can be traced back to the Old French verb troller, meaning to wander around while hunting. "Trolling" entered English around 1600 as a description of fishing by trailing bait around a body of water, and it was this idea of baiting the unwitting that led to the idea of online "trolling", where experienced net users would simulate naivety in order ensnare the naive. The noun "troll", meanwhile, does refer to a wide class of monstrous Nordic creatures: a sense that has dovetailed neatly with the increasingly viciously art of trolling. 5. Memes Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as a shortening of the Ancient Greek term mimeme ("an imitated thing"). He designed his new word to sound like "gene", signifying a unit of cultural transmission. Little did he know that his term would become one of the most iconic of online phenomena, embodying the capacity of the internet to itself act as a kind of gene-pool for thoughts and beliefs – and for infectious, endlessly ingenious slices of time-wasting. 6. Spam Advertisement The most enduring gift of British comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus may prove to be a digital one: the term "spam". The key episode, first broadcast in 1970, featured a sketch called "SPAM": the brand name used since 1937 by the Hormel Foods Corporation as a contraction of the phrase spiced ham. Set in a cafe where almost every single item on the menu featured spam, the sketch culminated in a chorus of Viking warriors drowning everyone else's voices out by chanting the word "spam". A satirical indictment of British culinary monotony, it took on a second life during the early 1980s, when those who wished to derail early online discussions copied out the same words repeatedly in order to clog up a debate. Inspired by Python, the word spam proved a popular way of doing this. "Spamming" came to describe any process of drowning out "real" content – and the rest is repetitive history. 7. LOLs If you type "LOL" or "lol", you're not literally "laughing out loud". You're offering a kind of stage direction: dramatizing the process of typing. It sounds simple, but this is part of a radical change in language. For the first time in history, we're conducting conversations through written words (or, more precisely, through typing onto screens). And in the process we're expending immense effort on making words and symbols express the emotional range of face-to-face interactions. Yet it's all, also, performance; a careful crafting of appearances that can bear little resemblance to reality. 8. Meh There's a special place in my heart for the supremely useful three letters of "meh", which express an almost infinitely flexible contemporary species of indifference. In its basic exclamatory form, it suggests something along the lines of "OK, whatever". As an adjective, it takes on a more ineffable flavour: "it was all very meh". You can even use it as a noun: "I stand by my meh." Apparently first recorded in a 1995 episode of The Simpsons, some theories trace meh back to the disdainful Yiddish term mnyeh. Its ascent towards canonical status, though, embodies a thoroughly digital breed of boredom. 9. Cupertinos Also known as "auto-correct errors", a Cupertino error occurs when your computer thinks it knows what you're trying to say better than you do. The name comes from an early spell checker program, which knew the word Cupertino - the Californian city where Apple has its headquarters - but not the word "cooperation". All the cooperations in a document might thus be automatically "corrected" into Cupertinos. Courtesy of smartphones, Cupertinos today are a richer field than ever – a personal favourite being my last phone's determination to transform "Facebook" into "ravenous". 10. Geeks "Geek" arrived in English from Low German, in which a geck denoted a crazy person; in travelling circuses, the geek show traditionally involved a performer biting off the heads of live chickens. By 1952, the sense of a freakishly adept technology enthusiast had appeared in science fiction maestro Robert Heinlein's short story "The Year of the Jackpot" ("the poor geek!" being the phrase) – and by the 1980s it had become a common label for socially awkward children obsessed with new technological devices. As this generation of tech-savvy youngsters provided the first generation of internet millionaires, and then billionaires, the unthinkable happened: geeks became cool (not to mention chic) – and ready to inherit the earth.
Ten of the best collective nouns From a murder of crows to a misbelief of painters, Chloe Rhodes investigates the intriguing origins of her favourite collective nouns A damning of jurors This collective noun provides a window on to British history. Before the 13th century the old feudal system of justice prevailed, under which anyone accused of a crime could be charged, tried and sentenced by the lord of the manor. When King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215, he enshrined in law the right to a trial by jury. A "damning" verdict was one that found the plaintiff guilty of the crimes they were charged with. The word comes from the old French word dampner, from the Latin damnāre, meaning to injure or condemn, and in the middle ages it implied that your crimes made you worthy of eternal damnation. An incredulity of cuckolds
Photograph: Remo Savisaar/Alamy Like most collective nouns, this one is 15th century in origin and shows how much of a game the invention of such terms had become by the mid-1400s. The word "cuckold" comes from the habit of the female cuckoo bird putting her eggs into other birds' nests, and can be applied to any male unwittingly raising a rival's offspring. The term sheds light on attitudes towards female sexuality and morality. This group of husbands is incredulous to discover that their wives have been unfaithful to them. It's not a "fury of cuckolds", or "a weeping" or "a shamefulness", they're not in despair – they're either in denial or they're in the dark. A murder of crows While most terms for groups of birds are linked to their song or habitat, this one has its roots in medieval folklore. With their dark feathers and jet-black eyes, crows were regarded by 15th-century peasants as messengers of the devil or witches in disguise. They were suspected of having prophetic powers, and the appearance of a crow on the roof of a house was taken as an omen that someone inside would soon die. There are also accounts of the birds living up to their murderous name by enacting something known as a crow parliament (kråkriksdag in Swedish), during which up to 500 birds are said to gather together before suddenly setting on one of their number and tearing it to pieces. A misbelief of painters We're talking artists here, rather than decorators, and, in particular, painters of portraits. One aim of medieval portraiture was to present the sitter as they hoped to be remembered after their death. Artists, like poets, were dependent on wealthy patrons for their living, so portrait painters had to strike a balance between truth and flattery. Shoulders could be broadened, eyes brightened, paunches flattened and foreheads heightened. Misbelief meant an erroneous belief, rather than an inability or refusal to believe, so the painter's job was to conjure misbelief in those who viewed his work; to create the illusion of beauty even where he found none. A parliament of owls
Photograph: Getty Images This group name has its origins in the 1950s children's classic The Chronicles of Narniaby CS Lewis and is a reference to Chaucer's allegorical poem "The Parliament of Fowls", in which all the birds of the Earth gather together to find a mate. Lewis adapts the title of Chaucer's poem to describe a council of owls who meet at night to discuss the affairs of Narnia. The huge international success of Lewis's books – they've sold more 100m copies in 47 languages – means that the term has become far more widely known than most of the traditional collective nouns and is now recognised by dictionary compliers as the "correct" term for a group of owls. A promise of tapsters "Tapster" is now obsolete but can be translated as barman or barmaid – whoever is in charge of the "tap". The tapster's "promise" is something we're all familiar with: that slight inclination of the chin, subtle nod or lift of the eyebrow that says: "You're next". But can it be trusted? There's never been a better embodiment of a false promise than the tapster's. In As You Like It, Celia and Rosalind make the point perfectly in their discussion about the promises of love with the damning line: "… the oath of a lover is no stronger than the word of a tapster." A superfluity of nuns
Photograph: Michael Brennan/Corbis This 15th-century term can be interpreted in two ways, the first is as simple fact: there were around 138 nunneries in England between 1270 and 1536, many of which were severely overcrowded. The convent was seen as a natural step for the daughters of the nobility who had passed marriageable age, and lords often put pressure on prioresses to accept their daughters even if they were already full. Alternatively, the term could have been a reference to the emerging view among agitators for church reform that the days of the monastery and convent were over. Fifty years after this term was recorded in print, Henry VIII had ordered their closure and the Protestant reformation was in full swing. A bloat of hippopotamuses This is a comparatively recent addition to the collective noun canon, appearing for the first time in print in CE Hare's 1939 hunting and fishing manual The Language of Field Sports. An average male hippo weighs just under 3,600kg (8,000lb) and their bodies are covered in a layer of subcutaneous fat that helps them to float well. It is likely that they genuinely do spend much of their time with bloated stomachs since their diet is almost exclusively grass, and they can store what they have ingested for up to three weeks. A lying of pardoners
Photograph: Manuel Harlan Medieval society was dominated by the church, and the ticket to heaven was an unsullied soul. In pursuit of spiritual purity, but largely unable to resist the occasional temptation, the desperate populace turned to "pardoners" to cleanse them of their sins. Pardoners were usually friars or priests who claimed to be in close contact with the pope, whom they said gave them the power to grant absolution. For a fee, naturally. Not surprisingly, the profession attracted a large number of fraudsters armed with fake papal pardons and bogus relics. Records held by the Corporation of the City of London dating back to the 15th century reveal several cases of "lying pardoners" being put in the stocks. A shrewdness of apes
At first glance, it's hard to believe that this collective noun was in use a full 500 years ago. Nowadays, shrewdness means intelligence and, more precisely, astuteness. And though recent studies into the behaviour and brains of apes have revealed startling cognitive abilities, these findings would have shocked medieval naturalists. Instead, our forefathers noted in apes a kind of playful mischievousness, and in their day shrewdness meant wickedness. In a wonderful stroke of luck, the evolution of our language has mirrored the evolution of our scientific understanding, so that a term that made perfect sense in 1486 also makes perfect sense to us.
Come on now, sports fans, show some cop on and put phone away Divide between players and public will deepen as long as all those cameras are around about 3 hours ago Malachy Clerkin 1
Paul O’Connell on Second Captains: “The way we connect with supporters now has really, really changed.” Photograph: Tom Jenkins/Getty Images
Put the phone away. Turn off the camera app and slide it back into your pocket. Nobody is impressed that you were at the Aviva on Saturday and you got Keith Earls to stand in for a selfie at the prawn sandwich belly-tickle you went to afterwards. You are a grown adult. Be one. Seriously, put the phone away. You are there. You are present. You went to the trouble of getting a ticket, organising your weekend, divesting yourself of life’s quotidian duties and heading off. Did you honestly do all of that just so you could click some distant, wonky footage of Katie Taylor’s ring-walk from a bad angle that will sit on your phone unloved until you get a message a few months from now telling you that you’re out of storage and have to delete it? You’d want to have a word with yourself. Put. The. Phone. Away. You’re not a good photographer. Half your pictures have thumbs in them. Those two dozen you snapped when you got those seats down by the corner at Old Trafford all look like your three-year-old got hold of the phone at bathtime. You were too busy grilling the Liverpool corner-takers on their bedroom proclivities to notice what a tool you were being. Enough. Enough with the phones. The world does not need another Facebook update from the top of the Hogan Stand. Michael D is not a man of height at the best of times – why further reduce him to the quarter of a pixel you’ll be able to make out of the back of his head as he goes down the line shaking hands? You are not creating memories. You are doing the opposite. You are sheep-dogging a camera-roll of random snapshots into a pen marked with today’s date, an instant narrative that will bear scant relation to how you spent your afternoon. A year from now, you won’t remember the score but you’ll know the team bus got a Garda escort. Or a team bus, at any rate – you were really only able to catch it briefly as it rounded the corner.
Nourishing You think this is all harmless but it matters. Click by click, we’re eroding the stuff that is good and nourishing about following sport. Here we are, sliding quietly into the twilight of the year and for the first time in an age, the two biggest national representative teams are on good terms with the public at the same time. Yet it feels a mile wide and an inch deep, surface fondness on our side and suspicion-laced tolerance on the side of the players. As long as there are phones, that distance will be there and it will widen. The camera phone has made the relationship between player and supporter almost completely transactional. At its most innocent, it’s a snatched five-seconds, a fixed grin and a see-you-later. At a more sinister level, it’s CCTV in every room and imagined paparazzi in every social setting. You only had to listen to Paul O’Connell on Second Captains last week to get a sense of what has been lost. “I think the way players connect with supporters now is completely changed from the way it was when I started out,” he said. “You actually could spend a lot of time with supporters having a few drinks or having a chat or whatever it was when I started out. “Because there were no camera phones. There wouldn’t be people standing there waiting to take a photo of you. If you were in a conversation with someone, you ended up chatting to them for a good while. Once the Munster rugby talk was over, you ended up getting to know them some bit. “So the way we connect with supporters now has really, really changed. A lot of it is through social media and I just don’t think it’s the same connection as used to be there.” Refused a photo We complain that sportspeople appear lofty and distant without ever considering what it must be like to live in a world where people want to take your picture all the time. Kieran Donaghy has a bit in his book about the only time he ever refused a photo. His grandmother had just died and he was leaving training in a distraught state to go see her in the hospital. A mother with a kid stopped him to stand in for a picture and he said no and told her what had just happened and where he was going. And still he could hear her giving out as he walked away. These players, these teams, they all get roped off and sent further into their own bubble and we complain about it as if it isn’t our fault. Lee Keegan ended up on the front of the Sunday World yesterday because of a 10-second clip of juvenile shaping that made its way around various WhatsApp groups over the weekend. It was a nothing story and more fool the Mayo spokesman who offered up a quote for the inside spread. But lads – come on. Have some bit of wit. Put the phone away.
Jonathan Safran Foer: technology is diminishing us Have you found yourself checking email at dinner, or skipping from book to screen, unable to focus? The closer the world gets to our fingertips, the more we stand to lose
Jonathan Safran Foer The first time my father looked at me was on a screen, using technology developed to detect flaws in the hulls of ships. His father, my grandfather, could only rest his hand on my grandmother’s belly and imagine his infant in his mind. But by the time I was conceived, my father’s imagination was guided by technology that gave shape to sound waves rippling off my body. The Glasgow-based Anglican obstetrician Ian Donald, who in the 1950s helped bring ultrasound technology from shipyard to doctor’s office, had devoted himself to the task out of a belief that the images would increase empathy for the unborn, and make women less likely to choose abortions. The technology has also been used, though, to make the decision to terminate a pregnancy – because of deformity, because the parent wants a child of a certain sex. Whatever the intended and actual effects, it is clear that the now iconic black and white images of our bodies before we are born mediate life and death. But what prepares us to make life-and-death decisions? My wife and I debated learning the sex of our first child before birth. I raised the issue with my uncle, a gynaecologist who had delivered more than 5,000 babies. He was prone neither to giving advice nor anything whiffing of spirituality, but he urged me, strongly, not to find out. He said, “If a doctor looks at a screen and tells you, you will have information. If you find out in the moment of birth, you will have a miracle.” I don’t believe in miracles, but I followed his advice, and he was right. One needn’t believe in miracles to experience them. But one must be present for them.
Psychologists who study empathy and compassion are finding that, unlike our almost instantaneous responses to physical pain, it takes time for the brain to comprehend “the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation”. Simply put, the more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth – redefining “text” from what fills the hundreds of pages of a novel, to a line of words and emoticons on a phone’s screen – the less likely and able we are to care. That’s not even a statement about the relative worth of the contents of a novel and a text, only about the time we spend with each. We know that texting while driving is more dangerous than driving drunk. You won’t risk killing anyone if you use your phone while eating a meal, or having a conversation, or waiting on a bench, which means you will allow yourself to be distracted. Everyone wants his parent’s, or friend’s, or partner’s undivided attention – even if many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”. By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly. Novels demand many things of readers, but the most obvious is attention. I can do any number of other activities while watching a TV show or listening to music, and I can carry on a conversation with a friend while at an art gallery, but reading a novel demands putting everything else aside. To read a book is to devote oneself to the book. Novels always traffic in empathy, always bring “the other” closer, always ask us to transcend our perspectives, but isn’t that attention, itself, a generous act? Generous toward ourselves? * My father was not present for his children’s births – it was customary, then, for men to be in the waiting room. I witnessed my sons being born. My experience was richer, deeper, more memorable and fulfilling than my father’s. Being physically present allowed me to be emotionally present.
We think of technologies as wielders of information and manipulators of matter. Google, we all know, is in the business – as they put it – of organising and making accessible “the world’s information”. Other technologies are more earthy – the car propels us over land at speeds our legs cannot attain, and the bomb allows us to kill many enemies in ways our bare hands cannot. But technologies are not only effective at achieving or thwarting the aims of those who encounter them, but are affective. Technology is not strictly technical. “I love you” – the same “I love you” issuing from the same person with the same sincerity and depth – will resonate differently over the phone than in a handwritten letter, than in a text message. The tone and rhythm of voice craft the words, as does the texture and colour of stationery, as does the glowing font of the text chosen by our mobile phone manufacturer. We love our Macs more than our PCs because Apple was more interested in harnessing and inflecting the affective resonances of its technology and in restricting a smaller coterie of elites to guard and guide these affects so as to create a distinctive ecosystem. We find ourselves “playing” with smartphones in a way we never did with the functional handle of a traditional landline phone because, whereas the first phone was designed by engineers thinking in functional terms, the phones in our pockets nowadays are always built in dialogue with marketers who have carefully noted how colour and curve, brightness and texture, heft and size make us feel. We consumers forget that technology always plugs into and produces certain affects, the building blocks of emotions, as well as full-blown emotional experiences. We forget this, but successful companies do not. They remember and profit enormously. We forget at the expense of who we are. Most of our communication technologies began as substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a message possible without the person being near their phone. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster and more mobile messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements on face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.
Each step ‘forward’ has made it easier to avoid the emotional work of being present information rather than humanity
But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes. It’s easier to make a phone call than to make the effort to see someone in person. Leaving a message on someone’s machine is easier than having a phone conversation – you can say what you need to say without a response; it’s easier to check in without becoming entangled. So we began calling when we knew no one would pick up. Shooting off an email is easier still, because one can further hide behind the absence of vocal inflection, and of course there’s no chance of accidentally catching someone. With texting, the expectation for articulateness is further reduced, and another shell is offered to hide in. Each step “forward” has made it easier – just a little – to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity. The problem with accepting – with preferring – diminished substitutes is that, over time, we too become diminished substitutes. People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little. Or just feeling what’s been designed and sold to us to feel. The novel has never stood in such stark opposition to the culture that surrounds it. A book is the opposite of Facebook: it requires us to be less connected. It is the opposite of Google: not only inefficient, but at its best, useless. Screens offer a seemingly endless supply of information, but the true value of the page is not what it allows us to know, but how it allows us to be known. * Like so many people I know, I’ve been concerned that phones and the internet have, in subtle ways, made life less rich, provided bright pleasures at the expense of deep ones, have distracted me, made concentration more difficult, led me to be elsewhere far too often. I’ve found myself checking email while giving my kids a bath, jumping over to the internet when a sentence or idea doesn’t come effortlessly in my writing, searching for shade on a beautiful spring day so I can see the screen of my phone. Have you? Have you found yourself putting loved ones on hold so you could click over to a call from an unidentified number? Have you found yourself conflating aloneness with loneliness? Have you found your relationship to distraction reversing: what was once a frustration is now sought? Do you want to click over to the other call, want to have an email to have to respond to, want – even crave –the ping of an incoming, inconsequential message? Isn’t it possible that technology, in the forms in which it has entered our everyday lives, has diminished us? And isn’t it possible that it’s getting worse? Almost all new technology causes alarm in its early days, and humans generally adapt to it. So perhaps no resistance is necessary. But if it were, where would it come from, and what would it look like? With each generation, it becomes harder to imagine a future that resembles the present. My grandparents hoped I would have a better life than they did: free of war and hunger, comfortably situated in a place that felt like home. But what futures would I dismiss out of hand for my grandchildren? That their clothes will be fabricated every morning on 3D printers? That they will communicate without speaking or moving? Only someone with no imagination, and no grounding in reality, would deny the possibility that they will live forever. It’s possible that many reading these words will never die. Let’s assume, though, that we all have a set number of days to indent the world with our beliefs, to find and create the beauty that only a finite existence allows for, to wrestle with the question of purpose and wrestle with our answers. We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts. It’s not an either/or situation – being “anti-technology” is perhaps the only thing more foolish than being unquestioningly “pro-technology” – but a question of balance that our lives hang upon. One day, nanomachines will detect weaknesses in our hearts long before any symptoms would bring us to a doctor. And other nanomachines will repair our hearts without our feeling any pain, losing any time or spending any money. But it will only feel like a miracle if we are still capable of feeling miracles – which is to say, if our hearts are worth saving.