How our words mirror our intentionality, or lack thereof. By Ryan Ansin
As we create the underlying technology for FatherForm, a mentor pointed out that new or resurfaced language would likely be necessary for people to understand how the software unlocks closer relationships through the unfolding bonds born of curiosity and deliberate action.
That suggestion made my wheels turn over our current landscape of technology and its intimations when inspected more deeply.
A Slippery Slope
We are being influenced, for example. That is different from being guided, inspired, enabled. To be influenced is a passive activity. Influence is the power to change how people act, think, or feel without direct force. Do we really want our children growing up aspiring to be an Influencer? A word drawn from the same root as Influenza: influere, to flow into. The medieval mind believed an ethereal fluid flowed into us from the stars and made us sick. To be influenced, then, is to catch something. To stand still while it enters.
Notice the shape of that word again: influenced. Passive. Something flowing into us while we sit still. It turns out this is not merely a linguistic complaint, it is close to the whole finding. The mode of screen use most consistently tied to depression and declining well-being is the passive one: the scroll, the follow, watching as others enjoy. Not the active kind — the messaging, the making, the reaching toward a real person. Passive Facebook use has been shown, experimentally, to undermine well-being by feeding envy; and the dose is measurable, with each additional hour of daily social media raising the risk of depressive symptoms by roughly thirteen percent. To be influenced is to be diminished by inflow. To connect is to be enlarged by exchange. Our language had already sorted the two for us. We simply stopped listening to it.
Through our Cell phone, a phone made of cells, a phone that impacts our cells, a phone that puts us into cells, we become increasingly influenced. And here is the trap most of us have backwards: it is not that the feed is forgettable, necessarily. Individual posts are engineered to stick. What dissolves is us. In the dead-eyed scroll state, clinically named “dissociative absorption,” our ability to recall what we just saw is cut in half against the same content viewed with attention. Multiply that by the fourteen to twenty-eight hours a week the average thumb spends swiping outside of work, and the fraction that survives is almost nothing. Without the Memory Palaces suggested by Joshua Foer’s, Moonwalking With Einstein, it’s an incredible amount of time we’ve placed in the hands of an algorithm when we forget what we’ve spent our time on.
This is sometimes termed a News Feed: feed!? as if from a trough. And the word tells the truth we scroll right past: the scroll does not fail to feed us. It feeds us precisely enough to keep us at the trough, and never enough to send us away full. Our zombified thumbs imbibe some amalgamated message without ever recognizing it — fattened and unnourished at once.
It comes from the Cloud, which clouds our judgment of ourselves. Our reactions are logged there to keep raindancing — and you cannot hold a cloud, cannot stand on one, cannot steer one. We hand our memories, our children’s faces, our whole recorded life to something insubstantial and out of reach, then wonder why our judgment feels clouded and we live perpetually under a cloud. The forecast, if we keep at it, is a slow Liquid Death.
Our Self-Identities
We create Handles — and a handle is the part of a thing you grab to grip it, to lift it, to control it. Objects have handles. Celebrities and dangerous animals have Handlers. We named the exact place we can be seized and called it identity. These Handles are then clicked by Followers — the word of prophets and cults dressed in the clothes of hopeful fame. And what are all these Followers looking for? Content.
This might be the cleanest double-entendre in the list. We consume content — after all, economics has already named us consumers — yet we feel increasing discontent. The word itself confesses the bind: content comes from the Latin continere, to contain, to hold in. We are, quite literally, the thing being contained. Were we to return to creating instead of consuming, perhaps we would be Content looking at the clouds — instead of holding a Cell whose Web has gone Viral. A web, after all, is a thing a spider spins to trap and drain what wanders in. We named it honestly and cast ourselves as the fly.
Our Precious Time
Time is passing whether you like it or not. TikTok would like you to forget Tick Tock. By many measures the average focus on a single piece of feed content has collapsed over the last. There is a reason why TED Talks have gotten shorter as they continue to do their best to deliver inspirational ideas to the average viewer. Tick. Tock. The name never hid anything. It announcing the transaction: your time, metered out in slices, in exchange for an algorithm that grows more attuned to you as you grow less attuned to everyone else.
My brother loves an expression that runs the other way: “There is no Tock Tick.” You cannot un-ring the second that has passed; the clock does not go backward. He has traveled to more countries and helped more people than almost anyone I know, and he says it as a discipline — a reminder that attention spent is attention spent. There is only ever the next tick, and what we choose to give it to. He and another best friend have influenced me to jump into every body of water we see. Even if cold or asked to leave, a memory is created.
None of this is accident. Our attention has been offered up for grabs. We created the language between ourselves, with each other, creating keys to walk us right out of our own autonomy. Feed. Handle. Follower. Content. Influence. A word not yet repurposed, while diminished, us is the one that undoes the rest: attention. You do not need anyone’s permission to put the Cell down and return to the people in the room.
Stay curious about the language we use. The double-entendres speak volumes!
