From The New Atlantis, June 21, 2022:
This essay is not real.
Join me in a thought experiment. Imagine you are imprisoned in a room by a despotic regime and allowed contact with the outside world only through a primitive computer. Called a text-only terminal, the computer lets you send and receive as many written messages as you like. It lets you read as many articles as you like. But it can’t display images or videos of any kind, nor play any sound. The only understanding you would have of the reality beyond your four walls — aside from the trays of food slid under the door — comes from the words on your screen.
What would your grasp of the outside world feel like? Over time, increasingly abstract and dreamlike. Even those with whom you had regular contact would increasingly become simplified, abstracted, flattened characters. The world would come to you doubly translated, first into text by somebody on the outside, then back out of text in your mind. You would end up with a vague approximation of the world, and how close to reality it is you would never know.
Now imagine that, instead of a text-only terminal, a TOT, you had been given a VOT, a video-only terminal. It allows you to interact with the outside world only through video calls, video news reports, TV shows, and so on. This too would be an imperfect way of perceiving the outside world. But it would be what we might call an edited version of reality, rather than an abstracted one. With a VOT, you would be restricted to watching the world through a digital window, but you would still have a reasonably good idea what the world out there was really like.
Clearly, none of us have experienced anything remotely as dramatic as either scenario. But the text-only terminal is a useful exaggeration of what, at a much subtler level, has happened to all of us over the last few decades. We are awash in text. The cumulative cultural effect is a kind of mass delusion. We may believe that all this text somehow captures reality. But as the words engulf us, the world recedes ever more from our grasp.
Swimming in Words
Between 1900 and 1990, the amount of time the average American spent reading and writing remained broadly consistent: somewhere between one and two hours a day. According to a 2012 McKinsey report, the addition of text messaging and the Internet raised that amount to something closer to four or five hours a day. Most people were illiterate four hundred years ago; today Americans spend up to a third of their waking hours encoding and decoding text....
....MUCH MORE
Voltaire pretty much nailed it with:
"Ils ne se servent de la pensée que pour autoriser leurs injustices,
et emploient les paroles que pour déguiser leurs pensées"
—François-Marie Arouet--'Voltaire', Dialogue xiv. Le Chapon et la Poularde (1766).
"Men use thought only to justify their wrong doings, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts"
