I keep harping on about how little we care for the spoken word nowadays compared to the past centuries, even just before the TV era; but what we have to contend with today is information overload. And much of it comes in the written format.
Forget the time when few people even knew how to read. Forget the even more distant past before writing was invented. Now we get emails, in tens and hundreds every day.
I work in an office, in front of a computer screen. I spend 7-8 hours, five days a week, reading and writing emails, updating websites, analysing data in spreadsheets, building queries in databases. And when I go home, or in my spare time, I am masochistic enough to sit in front if my personal computer, or more often my smartphone, scrolling through hundreds of emails, Facebook updates, tweets, websites, blogs, ezines, e-articles, apps, online dictionaries…. The list is too long to even remember.
How depressing. And yet, it’s not that I am masochistic. Rather, it’s today’s fairly common lifestyle in a rich country.
Whenever I go to an art exhibition, I try to imagine what the artist(s) would think if they were suddenly transported in this age. How would Rubens react? What would Michelangelo or even Leonardo do? What would an Ice Age artist say? I have a lively imagination, but I struggle to picture how such people would think, feel or act when faced with our world.
At the moment, I am waiting patiently for some big files to upload on a computer someone else will be using in their job. And what am I doing? Blogging. The written word is addictive, both to consume and to produce. I read some time ago of someone defining themselves as a “compulsory reader”, and although it was written in jest, I though that definition would easily apply to me and to the majority of the people I know.
My dad, now almost 80 years old, is just starting to discover computers and taking it as a challenge and a punishment, more than as a tool for freedom of information and individual expression. I, on the other hand, find it challenging to spend a few days without the internet.
I have an ambivalent attitude when it comes to the internet, because information available at all times can be an overkill and seriously damage your sanity. Sometimes I have to make a conscious effort to switch off, not just the screen but also the incessant spinning of thoughts that reading other people’s thoughts can provoke in me.
On the other hand, I delight in the ability to find information about any subject I can think of, and many I can’t even envision yet.
I have always found books (and written text in general) without pictures to be even more bewitching than illustrated ones, because they leave me free to produce my own illustrations in my head. I don’t think I’m the only one, so I will risk posting the fourth consecutive article without a picture, and go back to my emails. Happy reading!
