e=mc2andallthat

As I wandered around a small shopping mall today, I observed a large number of people interacting intently with their smartphones. Nothing ground breaking there, you might say, but it called to mind a passage I’d read in George Eliot’s Essays (which is a treasure trove of exquisite writing of which I was completely unaware until a few days ago):

In fact, the evident tendency of things to contract personal communication within the narrowest limits makes us tremble lest some further development of the electric telegraph should reduce us to a society of mutes, or to a sort of insects communicating by ingenious antenna of our own invention.

George Eliot, “Woman in France: Madame de Sable”, The Essays of George Eliot

The internet is a further development of the electric telegraph. Mobile phone technology can certainly be likened to “ingenious antenna of our own invention”. Perhaps we will grow more insect-like as we incorporate the technology more and more into our physical structure. I suspect that “Google Glass” is only the beginning of the process.

But is this and similar technology in the process of reducing us to a society of mutes?

Yes and no. In my experience, digital communication can certainly help to spark conversation of the old-fashioned, face-to-face kind.

However, as my wife has frequently observed–acerbically, but with love, as only she can(!)–I am all too ready to crawl into my digital man-cave of an evening. I can’t help but be aware that I am also one of those people who often prefers to email or text rather than make an actual person-to-person phone call. And how does being a blog-writer fit into this pattern? Pass over those electronic antenna of our own invention, Alice.

I don’t think that I’m a particularly unsociable person, but it makes me think. Selective verbal mutism: is this the wave of the future?

T. S. Eliot predicted in The Hollow Men that

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I don’t think he was quite as prescient as the other Eliot. Perhaps it should read:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a Tweet.

And a Merry Christmas to one and all!