Language Changes in New Media

The Latest News on Facebook (FB):

"tbh gymnastics got canceled! Snd we need to hsngout asap!" [translation: "To be honest, gymnastics is cancelled! And we need to hangout as soon as possible"]

"Lms and I'll rate" [translation: "Like my status and I'll rate"]

The major goal of new media is efficiency. We want to be able to do things faster and better than ever before. The new millennium has got the need for speed and not just in technology, but in language too. There are so many popular internet and text shorthands that they require a checklist to follow- List of Texting Shorthand. In addition new words are created to accommodate new technology ex. online searches become "to google," web logs become "to blog."

(Has the stripping down of language inspired the stripping off of clothes) 

In the ever changing environment of the internet it's harder for older members (online immigrants) to keep up. And ever harder to keep secrets secret. Parents are worried that this new world might be too fast for their young children. ChatSlang.com and CBS News have Parent Check Lists to make sure that parents know what their children are saying when they're online. 

CBS News:

CD9: Code 9 (means parents are around)
KPC: Keeping Parents Clueless
P911: Parent Emergency
PAW: Parents Are Watching
PIR: Parent In Room
PAL: Parents Are Listening
POS: Parents Over Shoulder
POTS: Parents Over The Shoulder
MOS: Mom Over Shoulder  

With shows like 16 and pregnant on the air an music videos with scantly clad dancers, its hard to believe that these shorthands are purely innocent, especially because a lot of the shorthands on a netlingo page sound like they came out of a Frank Miller novel.  8 - Oral Sex  A/S/L - Age/Sex/Location  BUFF - Big Ugly Fat Fuck CBJ - Covered Blow Job  CU46 - See You For Sex WTF - What the Fuck

(AAMOF walk down the RS in SC and you can find NEthing AAR A3!)

Especially in America where we work so hard to build and protect the concept of childhood I think when it comes to the internet the question one must ask themselves is, how fast is too fast?

The Fate of the Earth

1849, the first ever man-made bomb strikes Venice.
In the course of over a century, humans still struggle to represent, coat and categorized the devastation reaped by their own creations.

1959: Hiroshima Mon Amour
Resnais uses devices such as museums, flashbacks and cross cultural relationships to represent a devastation that the human mind cannot comprehend.  

1964: Dr. Strangelove, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Kubrick focuses on the humor in human ignorance/arrogance in attempts to denounce the bomb.

1982: The Fate of the Earth
Jonathan Schell takes on a different mode of representation, realism. From pages 47 to 55 Schell describes, in great detail, what the affects of a nuclear bomb would do to the city of New York. No idealist perspective, no narrative about a couple falling in love only to be literally ripped apart, no survivor heart breaks, no mothers' distant cries for their sons. In the event of a 20 megaton bomb, doom is unconditional and personal narrative cease to function. Schell comes at pages 47-55 from a somewhat anti-humanist prospective, treating humans as "debri" littering the streets (Book not titled, The Fate of Humanity). This method forces humans to look at the devastation reaped upon the city, rather then it's human inhabitants which makes this section somewhat unique. When we hear about disaster: Hiroshima, Titanic, 9/11, first we hear about the loss of life, 1,500/3,000/150,000 dead and missing, we rarely hear about the toll taken on the environment. When such disaster unfold, corpses return to the environment.

Ironically, the anti-humanist perspective often makes humanists feel small and vulnerable and even more human-centric. Useful for Schell's anti-nuke agenda. Another useful trick: Schell counters the anti-humanist approach by the use of the word "if." On the continuum from purely factual to definite, the word "if" lies it the middle. Ever threatening towards personal, towards definite, "if" is unsafe, unreliable.  

   Factual <--------------------------------------------> Definite 

"n.a." ---------> "if" ----------> "probably" ---------> "when"

Impersonal <-------------------------------------------------> Personal

"If" gives way to 8 pages of blunt, plentiful adjectives: 

burned, battered, crushed, irradiated, mute, pulverized, melted, vaporized, radioactive, genetic

"If'" really means "unless." Unless you want to be burned (battered, crushed and irradiated) then you better join the anti-nuclear movement because the dropping of a nuclear bomb has been done before and one day could be done to you.

Walter Ong, "Writing is a Technology..."

In Buddhism we have a concept, a principle of sorts: to appreciate life as is it. To know one's self, as well as to know that one has no real self. I think Giuseppe Tornatore captures this ideal state in his movie The Legend of 1900. The movie is a biographical account of the life of Danny Boodman T.D. Lemon Nineteen Hundred (1900 for short), a man that was born, lived and died on The Virginian. When he was 27, 1900 met a man named Max that became almost obsessed with the idea of 1900 "leading a full life" and getting off the ship. He constantly tells 1900 of the life to be lived on land: finding a wife, getting a job, staring a family. "Life is lived out there," he tells 1900, pointing out past the gangway. 

1900: “Why Why Why Why Why. I think land people waste a lot of time wondering why.  Winter comes, you wish it was summer. Summer comes and you live in dread of winter. That’s why we never tire of traveling, always chasing some place far away where it’s always summer. Doesn’t sound like a good bet to me.”  

(Did I mention 1900's a bad ass pianist?)

When examining the relationship between humans and technology it is good to always keep in mind the balance we must keep in our lives. How much of these advancements are the natural progression or evolution of being and how much of it is forced     progress for the sake of progress. When do we go out searching for the horizon and when do we sit back knowing that soon the sun will rise with or without us?

Ong and I strut a fine hairline fracture when talking about naturality. He starts by saying “There is no way to write “naturally.”(19) claiming that we must learn to write and use instruments not organic to our bodies while everyone beyond certain disabilities learns to speak. Why are these two activities so essentially different that one is considered unnatural? Would is be more natural is one use there own bodies to create words? Does Sid Vicious carving out letters onto his own chest in the middle of Sex Pistol concerts present a more natural setting for the written word? What about ancient writing systems, are those also un-natural? Studies of feral children show that without contact with human adults the children will loose the ability for oral speech. Why is a child that howls and runs around on all fours considered natural while one that sits up and speaks considered natural?

Ong plays somewhat of the devil's advocate is his piece before making his final points. He follows comments on naturality by saying, "Technologies are artificial, but -paradox again- artificiality is natural to human beings." (20) And although I still have qualms about the "natural" and "unnatural" essences of practices and objects, I will let the questions end here and conclude that practices and objects simply are. We chose whether to integrate them into our lives and society; whether to accept and make them natural to us. 

One more point I'd like to touch on from Ong's article is how "Writing separates past from present." (22) The introduction of this piece seems to tell it's reader that because they have the ability to read the piece, they are lacking some other sensibility. Ironically, by having something we lose something else, in this case, the ability to think as non-literate thinkers do. (Not necessary illiterate, for oral cultures are considered non-literate, separate from literacy) “… without tremendous effort we cannot separate it from ourselves or even recognize its presence and influence.” (15)

In choosing literacy, we not only chose it for ourselves, but for those that come after us. In this, we should not portray literacy in the light of things we leave behind. We must know and examine what we leave behind while looking at what we gain ahead. Yes, writing separates past from present, but its that separation that creates a variety of knowledge that makes life interesting. It creates new disciplines, new history. We still forget, headstones crumble, memories are lost, but those things that important to us are immortalized for those that will come after us, and with the use of the internet, those memories are not stacked in some landfill, or in an underground library, they can be stored somewhere that is virtually endless (or appears endless, I actually have no idea how the internet really works).  While writing separates past from present, we combine them internally through experience. We are still the time capsules carrying the past into the present, now we just have a sweet bag (like Mary Poppins) to carry more then we ever before imagined.

Although I found Ong's text interesting and thought provoking, I do not enjoy his style/format. I don't enjoy texts that make me wish for things I know I cannot have, it's a poinsonous state of thinking. We know how these new "technologies" help and hinder us and we have chosen our path. It is not a time to wait for summer, for summer is already here. 

“Writing is a cousciousness-raising and humanizing technology.” (27)

Not Her Best Moments

Not Her Best Moments

[WOMAN#1 begins on her back. Center (stage) right.

WOMAN#2 begins standing at her piano. Center (stage).

WOMAN#3 begins face down, at her breakfast place setting.

Her hands still holding the plastic silverware. Center (stage) left.

WOMAN#4 begins among scattered photos and albums. (Stage) left.

WOMAN#5 begins at her kitchen table. (Stage) right.

Liberally.]

WOMAN#3:

I found myself, naked-

WOMAN#1:

Writhing beneath him. I found myself nailed to the headboard, the sacrifice of our marriage-

WOMAN#4:

I found myself lying next to him, he’s sleeping. I’m trying to wake him, I’m screaming, screaming-

WOMAN#2:

They have killed the sun. We have now found our place-

WOMAN #5:

I’ll admit it wasn’t one of my best moments but at least I can say that I did it all for love, however absurd that sounds…

WOMAN#1:

[Sits up]

He was having a hard time of it. Used to come home from the bar late at night and just need to hold me. He used to cry, clutching my sweater between his fingers. The first time, I didn’t know what to do. I’d never seen him cry before. And he was a big guy. It’s hard to imagine those that are bigger and stronger than us to be vulnerable y’know? It broke my heart. I held his head in my hands and pressed my lips to his, feeling his tears fall over my cheeks. I tried to give him my strength.

I take his head in my hands and see desperation growing there like a virus. He turned his sails towards the oblivion of Wonderland and disabled the anchor, no stopping, no turning back. His hands become clumsy, his breath rotten with the stale stench of late nights spent awake, caressing a bottle of his latest forged nirvana.

I take his head in my hands. The night air is cold in my throat. His breath stings my nostrils. The weight of his body presses into my lungs as he mounts me, suffocating me, his attempts to love me; my attempts at screams bury themselves deep inside my guts.

WOMAN#4:

No!

WOMAN#3:

Stop!

WOMAN#1:

You’re hurting me.

His body on top of me is heavy, slick with sweat, pressing into my lungs. He enters me, heaving and grunting. I place both of my hands on his chest and push against him with all my strength. I beat my fist into him, but he just pins my arms underneath me, pulling them from the sockets, he doesn’t

WOMAN#3:

Stop!

WOMAN#4:

No!

WOMAN#1:

Doesn’t know that he’s hurting me.

Suffocating me, the night burns in my lungs as I suck in the last bits of air my body can reach towards. My vision begins to blur, I feel my limbs, my body becoming heavy. Thoughts on repeat. Slick with sweat. He presses his body deeper and deeper into mine. Heaving sighs of a love that once sent shivers down my spine.

WOMAN#5:

I love you baby, oh I want you so bad.

WOMAN#1:

He is so gone, so lost in his own body that he doesn’t even realize that the body beneath him is growing cold, no longer belonging to me. It’s just a memory vessel, strewn with reminders of love. A wedding ring,

WOMAN#4:

No!

WOMAN#1:

The watch he bought me for my birthday,

WOMAN#5:

Stop!

WOMAN#1

Anniversary presents.

WOMAN#5:

I love you baby.

WOMAN#1:

I want to say it back but your tears have choked me out, my body is growing cold, love. Oh baby, you took my breath away.

WOMAN#5:

[Turns to WOMAN#3]

I love you, baby.

WOMAN#3:

Ow.

[Slams silverware into table]

Ow.

[Slams silverware into table]

Ow.

Time moves slower here in Wonderland.

Words fill my mouth, exploding like pomegranate seeds,

between my teeth.

I allowed myself to be swallowed

By the carnivorous mouth of the rabbit hole,

teeth tearing my body to pieces.

My body mingles between the fibers of the continental breakfast napkins,

pooling onto the 40$ a night carpet.

Slow halt of blood in my veins.

I never wanted to die, babe,

my threats are empty,

you know that.

You know that

I just like the feeling of falling

falling in love,

falling off the earth,

falling out of conscious.

My life has become a roadside spectacle.

I live by the seat of my pants

I never knew that we would both end up on our knees.

WOMAN#5:

I gaze at you and ask you what I can do to help

but I am not equipped to handle what direction your pain takes today.

You pulled all the teeth from your mouth

preparing for your verbal breakdown.

You moved too fast for me,

so I experienced our lives through the ever changing pictures on your post cards.

One sentence

scrawled on the back,

words too busy to breathe…

WOMAN#3:

“Wish you were here.”

I never meant for it to be this way.

All I wanted was to be able to bear my soul.

WOMAN#5:

All I wanted was for you look at me, with that empty smile,

like you want nothing more than to be a building on my skyline.

But we’ve got some issues to work through.

There’s a field of land mines scattered in the hallway between the living room and the kitchen and I’ve been tip-toeing to breakfast every morning.

Look into your big, blue water stained eyes and sigh.

Ask you,

what form does your pain take today?

WOMAN#2:

It’s hard to say.

Hard to say

Hard to say

What do I hate most about myself today?

WOMAN#4:

I spend most of my time at work sitting down, hoping that no one will notice how big my ass is getting. But by the time I reach my house every afternoon I’ve become so paranoid that all that sitting is just gonna make my ass fatter and fatter, so I run up and down the stairs of my apartment building, chugging water and eating nothing but protein bars.

WOMAN#3:

When I use the bathroom, I’m so afraid that someone will hear me that once I sat in the stall for an hour waiting to be alone.

WOMAN#2

I found myself naked

In front of the bathroom mirror
but did I like what I saw?

In the mirror, in the mirror
When I was ready to bear my soul

Who is the fairest of them all?

WOMAN#1:

I wake up 20 minutes before my husband every morning so that I can put my face on before he wakes up.

WOMAN#1 & 4

Nobody, not even my own family has seen me without make-up on

WOMAN#1

For the last 20 years.

WOMAN#3:

I was so afraid that if I wasn’t smart enough, I’d never make any friends. So I studied and I studied until I realized I was studying alone. I 23 years old, and I’ve never been out to a bar with friends, never had a birthday party.

ALL WOMEN:

I live in extremes.

WOMAN#2:

I’m too tall.

I’m too fat.

I’m too smart for my own good.

My own good?

It’s hard to say

What do I hate most about myself today?

ALL WOMEN:

It’s hard to say

What do I hate most about myself today?

[With different inflection. In separate meters.]

What do I hate most about myself today?

WOMAN#4:

I am the wrong woman.

Things were never right, so I guess I’m not surprised.

He never actually wanted me.

I am

                             the consolation prize.

I am

                             the next best thing.

And I was so in love with him I pretended like

I was

                             her,

                             the one he fantasized about.

I’d say things I thought she’d say

I’d act the way I thought she’d act.

I tried so hard to change his mind

to get him to love me.

When he looked at me he saw so many faces but he never saw mine.

WOMAN#5:

She told me that love was endless.

Said we’d

                         take every opportunity to celebrate our lives.

That we

                         would always say, “I love you.”

Not only when we had smiles on our faces and butterflies in our bellies

but when we were angry,

and frustrated,

and fighting

because it always means the same thing,

no matter what.

WOMAN#4:

He was always honest, that was one of the things I loved most about him.

He’d never lie to me, even if it meant hurting me, he was always honest. I guess it helped me grow my skin. He was always so sure. If I had a problem he had an answer. He had the whole world figured out. But I was still learning. I was still growing. He became alien to me. He became the unmovable. This honest man of answers became stone in front of my eyes. There was no talking to him, no reasoning with him. He had the whole world figured out. He knew all his lines, memorized all the motions. As I changed I grew away from him. My skin was now a barrier blocking him out.

We didn’t talk,

We didn’t touch.

WOMAN #5:

One day she was

just gone.

No note,

just gone.

Months later I got a call from the police. I’d forgotten she’d put me down as her emergency contact. They’d found her in a hotel room off route 66 with her wrist slit all the way up her forearms.

Suicide.

WOMAN#4:

I’ve never felt so invisible.

WOMAN#5:

It’s like she never even saw me.

WOMAN#4:

He has become the unmovable

WOMAN#1:

I wake up, naked, buried between the sheets of his spent passion. My body aches but my breath has been restored. I pad toward the closet, pull out my overnight bag.

[Begins to wipe off stage make-up]

WOMAN#2:

I never thought I would be able to leave you

WOMAN#1:

But I cannot continue to be a building on your skyline. I will not be a martyr for love.

WOMAN#3:

[Unravels her bandages]

I am not your sacrificial lamb.

WOMAN#2:

You are not the object of my strength

WOMAN#4:

No!

WOMAN#3:

Stop!

ALL WOMEN:

I live in extremes.

WOMAN#3:

Constantly searching for my center path.

ALL WOMEN:

I am my own object of strength.

WOMAN #5:

I’ll admit it wasn’t one of my best moments but at least I can say that I did it all for love, however absurd that sounds…