What Is Communication?

I was shocked to read in The Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr saying he did not have the patience any more to read books like he used to.

Then, after thinking about it, I realized the same is true of me. I have read books since using Squidoo that I might not have read when I wasn't trying to be a better communicator. Certain books and Squidoo have helped me focus my goals about sharing my interests in Emily Dickinson poems, adult-child family relationships, bereaved parents, pets and astrology. Obviously, I believe progress is implicit in new digital communication technologies, or, I wouldn't see these changes as positive for me.

However, I absolutely do suffer from the decrease in the number of novels and collections of short stories I let myself get lost in, compared to, say, five years ago.

"Narratives are a staple of every culture the world over. They are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information," says Ben Macintyre at Timesonline. "Last year Hollywood veterans and scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology teamed up to create a laboratory aimed at protecting the traditional tale from oblivion: the Centre for Future Storytelling. However ludicrous that may sound, they have a point. Storytelling is the bedrock of civilisation. From the moment we become aware of others, we demand to be told stories that allow us to make sense of the world, to inhabit the mind of someone else. In old age we tell stories to make small museums of memory. It matters not whether the stories are true or imaginary."

The "decline in handwriting" is a matter of concern to educators. Even though my father had no education beyond the eighth grade, his penmanship was beautiful. I mean gorgeous. He could have made money signing something, I feel sure. My handwriting is worse than his and my children's is worse than mine.

Since handwriting has been taught less and less in school - something that started long before computers, what does the digital age have to do with it? Why should we care?

"The capacity to write well and quickly on a keyboard encourages rapid thought, and often (not always) the spell-checker will underline a misspelling," said Umberto Eco, in guardian.co.uk recently. "Although the cellphone has taught the younger generation to write "Where R U?" instead of "Where are you?", let us not forget that our forefathers would have been shocked to see that we write "show" instead of "shew" or "enough" instead of "enow". Medieval theologians wrote "respondeo dicendum quod", which would have made Cicero recoil in horror.

"It's true that kids will write more and more on computers and cellphones. Nonetheless, humanity has learned to rediscover as sports and aesthetic pleasures many things that civilization had eliminated as unnecessary."

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