Language Wrap Up – 3 – A Guidebook to Internet Use Self-Assessment

We’re not QUITE ready to move on to the next iceberg just yet.  There are still some rather important things to say about language – and I’m sure I’ll just skip over a large number of other things that connoisseurs would likely spend a good deal of time discussing.  What I’m attempting to do with this trip down memory lane is to put the Internet into some semblance of the proper perspective.  If language was simply making word sounds that evoke mental images, that would be one thing.  That would simplify the transition to the internet significantly.  What I am saying is that if that were the case then writing a word (wait, we don’t know what writing is yet!) would be the same thing as speaking a word.  In a few cases, that is true, but in most cases words offer a narrative to another story being told by physical or other actions.  Your face tells a story.  Your hands and arms tell a story.  The snake that just slithered by tells a story.  Your words are likely an accompaniment to the symphony of information that is also occupying or passing through the space you and your audience are occupying or passing through at the moment.

If that weren’t enough, the use of language offers up other things – like common experience.  To make that even more powerful, you can use language to “experience” things you can’t experience in person, making a part of that a part of common experience.  I touched on the topic of passing down history and culture by word of mouth previously.  It is believed that much of common culture at least in the ruling classes was passed down by the use of professional storytellers or Bards.  They would make their living by traveling from place to place and performing the stories that represented common experience.  One would like to think that they were chosen for an uncommon ability to recall combined with a similarly uncommon ability to evoke the right images.  Their stories were also very likely tightly controlled by the elders from the class to whom they told their stories.  Of course other common experiences were passed down as well, and some of these would have persisted, but the most persistent would have tended to be the ones that were controlled and rewarded.  The point is that the abilities to communicate offered up through the use of language is immense.