Language and Being Human in Technology

1. Ellul’s Legacy

What relevance do the pioneering analyses of Jacques Ellul have today, 100 years after his birth in 1912, 58 years after the first publication of La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle (The Technological Society) in 1954, and 18 years after his death in 1994? In a world where only the moment matters and the past becomes almost immediately irrelevant, that question is certainly pertinent. The very problem of the relevance of the past was one of many Ellul drew attention to in his examination of technological culture. If anything, we have seen Ellul’s judgments borne out as we witness the astonishing increase in and expansion of the technological nature and orientation of our existence. Just the explosion of multipurpose cell phones and personal computers, of email, Twitter, and text messaging, of digital reading devices, of blogging, of the Internet and Google, or of online social networks like Facebook has corroborated his findings and warnings.

In the considerations to follow, The Humiliation of the Word (1988), Ellul’s investigation of language in a society and culture governed by what he called technique and which we now generically refer to as technology, serves as my point of reference and departure. Since its publication in 1981 (in English in 1985), the assessments in that book have proven anything but antiquated and immaterial. The devaluation of the word, that is, of language, which Ellul described in The Humiliation of the Word is perhaps more evident now than so many years ago. The dominance of visual images, the transformation of language by technology, and a concomitant loss of meaning have been exacerbated.

It is important to note at the outset that this essay is an investigation of what has happened to language in technological civilization. It is not a diatribe or polemic against technology. There is nothing wrong with technology per se. And language itself can be described as a technology. At its most basic, it is a system of sounds that we combine to form words and structures of words called sentences. If we consider the written in addition to the spoken word, the alphabet must arguably be one of the greatest technological innovations of all time. A simple, but intricate system of signs, the alphabet allowed for the emergence of written language and for a monumental cultural advance, namely, literacy.

In Ellul’s opinion, the devaluation of the word began with writing (The Humiliation of the Word). That is certainly true. Like any technology, literacy altered us. It changed the way we human beings think and the way we perceive and relate to our world. Already in Plato’s “Phaedrus,” Socrates comprehended and described the negative consequences of such an amazing technological breakthrough: our minds, our ability to remember and think, would forever be changed, even in one sense weakened. We would commit to tablet or papyrus or paper or, much later, digital files what we previously had committed to memory. Nevertheless, writing probably did more to enhance the value of the word than it ever detracted from it. Although Ellul emphasized the primacy of the spoken word, we must now also consider the written word and reading, because the devaluation of the word he identified is in all likelihood most evident today in the new modes of reading and writing which our latest technological devices and programs have produced.

Following Ellul’s work in The Humiliation of the Word (1988), this study explores how technology has altered and continues to transform language, which in turn affects our thought, our relations with one another, and our existence as human beings in the technological milieu.

2. A Word About Technology

Although surrounded by and utterly dependent on technology, we remain essentially ignorant of its genuine nature and the all-pervasive role it plays in our existence. We make constant use of technology in all areas of our lives, but it and its effects on us remain poorly understood. When we think of technology, electricity, machines, computers, and the Internet generally come to mind, but it includes as well organizational methods and bureaucratic procedures. For that reason, Ellul preferred the word technique, though we now typically use the term technology, as I do here, to refer to artifacts as well as a general technical, mechanistic orientation, and modus operandi. As famously defined by Ellul, technique (i.e., technology) is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” What is more, “its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past” (Society, p. xxv).

No one can deny that we now use and rely on technology in every sphere of life: from agriculture, energy, medicine, telecommunications, and transportation to business, education, finance, politics, and psychology. It is today our milieu, our new environment. As a technological system emerged, it developed and expanded eventually beyond our control, to achieve autonomy and hegemony. Especially in combination, our various, seemingly innocuous technologies have become ungovernable. As such, technology is now radically different from any other time in human history.

Technology determines now, as never before, the modalities of our existence. As Ellul explained, it is “not a collection of technical goods which may be freely used, but a total ideological and pragmatic system which imposes structure, institutions, and modes of behavior on all members of society” (Ethics, p. 310). Its incursion is subtle, but profound. As we adopt technological innovations, we adapt and conform to them. Our technological structures and values govern and regulate not only our behaviors but also our language and thought.

3. Ellul’s Humiliation of the Word

Before I proceed to specifics about the state of language today, a brief review of a few key points in The Humiliation of the Word is useful. Although Ellul was much concerned with a theological problem there, I will not deal with that part of his analysis. In particular, Ellul focused attention in that book on the opposition of word and image. He asserted the primacy of the word (or language), specifically the spoken word, as a fundamental and decisive requirement for human society and culture, even for being human per se. What he identified was the inversion of that primacy by the visual image. In our time, he found, the image had overtaken and overturned the importance of the word. If “the age of extreme visualization” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 94) had arrived already in the 1980s (when the book was first published), we must now be living through its peak years. The prevalence and predominance of the visual image can easily be recognized and verified by the most cursory survey of our contemporary culture with its superabundance of ubiquitous screens: televisions, smart phones, tablets, laptops, and personal computers connected to an Internet, where images and icons reign and proliferate. Something like the extremely popular YouTube or Facebook services likewise demonstrate the supremacy of visual images and our devotion to them.

Ellul explained how technology and the image are inseparably connected. In the same way “technique transforms everything it touches into a machine” (Technological Society, p. 4), it turns everything it touches into an image. Indeed, the image is a function of technique. According to Ellul, the technological system produces a milieu of images (cf. Humiliation of the Word, p. 221). “The visual image,” he wrote, “potentially contains within itself all the traits and characteristics of what later becomes the experience, experimentation, and organization of technique” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 11). What is more, Ellul observed, “all techniques depend on the possibility of reducing to a drawing what had belonged to the order of the word” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 150). In other words, a technological society prefers to express itself and to formulate and conceive its world in terms of graphs, charts, statistical tables, drawings, diagrams, and schematics. As technology orients us toward visual images and away from words, it also subtracts value and meaning from language.

Ellul contrasted the sense of sight to which the image belongs with the sense of hearing to which the word belongs. The transition from word to image and from hearing to sight entailed another subtle move, namely, from depth to surface. When we see images, we have little need to process sense data. That is, we do not need to think about or reflect on what we are seeing as we take in the world around us visually. Images are characteristically understood immediately and effortlessly, whereas words require time and effort for comprehension. With sight, we remain on the surface of things. When we hear words, however, we must deepen our engagement and involvement, for we must do more to process and translate that sense data. We must think about and determine what the words mean. Even the simplest conversations often require us to stop, pause for reflection or consideration, and ask for clarification in order to gain understanding. As noted, Ellul emphasized the spoken word, but we need to include the written word here as well. And by hearing, we need also to speak of hearing with the “inner ear,” when we read. To be sure, we first “see” the text on the page, but then we also “hear” the words in our minds as we read and translate the symbols or letters first into words and then into sentences and meanings.

For Ellul, the distinction between image and word, sight and hearing, relates as well to the distinction between reality and truth. He adamantly asserted a distinction between the two categories and specifically connected the word to the order of truth and the image to the order of reality (cf. Humiliation of the Word, p. 102). As Ellul argued, truth and reality are two different domains, but we have conflated the two, so that we now believe that reality is the same as truth. What is real and what is true are not necessarily one and the same, however. For Ellul, the order of reality is immanent, physical, and empirical, whereas the order of truth is transcendent, metaphysical, and ethical. Whereas reality depends on the visual image, truth depends on the word.

While asserting the elusiveness of truth, Ellul said that “anything concerned with the ultimate destination of a human being [i.e., meaning and direction in life] belongs to the domain of Truth” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 28). Truth, he went on to explain, “refers to the establishment of a scale of values which allows a person to make significant personal decisions, and [to] everything related to the debate over Justice and Love and their definitions” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 28). Only with the word can those questions and concerns be addressed.

In a discussion of how linguistic, philosophical, and literary theory has devalued words, Ellul points out that language has come to be defined as a completely arbitrary system and, when taken to the extreme, has no relation to reality. Scholars of language have “destroyed the possibility of something signified” and now assert “that the signifier no longer has any value” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 99). As a result, “when language theorists take their analysis to its logical conclusion, they declare that no one is speaking, nor is there any content to communicate” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 157). That is, words and what we say with them no longer matter and no longer mean anything. Who cares what someone says, if their words are not related to anything or anyone? Words have become worthless.

The subordination of word to image, language to picture, or hearing to sight moves us away, Ellul found, from morality to a-morality, to a world beyond good and evil and true and false, a world where efficiency is the supreme ideal and value. Where the word has neither value nor meaning, truth disappears. That is, when we move away from the word, we move away from the order of truth and from the morality it makes possible. When words are moreover divorced from human speakers or writers, when no one is there in or behind the words, there is no one to consider or care about, eliminating the need for any moral deliberation. Good and evil, truth and falsehood, even fellow human beings mean nothing in such a context. If words are worthless, so are the human beings who produce them. A contempt for words and language, or as Ellul put it a humiliation of the word, attacks and prevents the viability of truth and of any ethical meaning. It allows the lie and establishes an ethos of meaninglessness.

4. Reading and Its Discontents

In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (first published 1982), Walter Ong (2002) famously traced the dramatic linguistic and cognitive changes which occurred with the transition from spoken to written culture. He concluded that writing had heightened and still “heightens consciousness” (p. 80). Citing Ong’s research, Nicholas Carr (2010) observed that “the vocabulary of the English language, once limited to just a few thousand words, expanded to upwards of a million words as books proliferated” (The Shallows, p. 75; also in Ong, 2002, p. 8). Thanks then to literacy and the printing press, language expanded immensely and “consciousness deepened” even more (Carr, 2010, p. 75). While the alphabet and literacy diminished cognitive ability in one respect, it at the same time brought tremendously valuable linguistic benefits and cognitive gains. Writing and reading allowed humanity to think in new and more complex ways. Literacy created a culture of reading and writing, a veritable culture of the word.

Although literacy continued to increase for centuries, a change began in the 20th century. Along with reading difficulty, reading ability began to fall. The “Plain Language at Work Newsletter” (2005) reported that “during the period from the beginning of the New Deal to the end of World War II, newspapers had climbed steadily in reading difficulty.” The introduction of readability tests and indexes in the late 1940s and early 1950s reversed that trend. Such tests and indexes determined that the average American read at the 6th grade level. With that news, publishers realized that they could increase the readership and circulation of their print materials, that is, increase sales substantially, if they lowered the average reading level, and so they did. For newspapers, it went from the 12th to the 9th grade. At the same time, the reading level of the United Press dispatches went from the 16th to the 11th grade. According to the Plain Language Newsletter, the average adult in the United States now reads between the 8th and 9th grade levels, a modest improvement over the course of a few decades. Currently, a 9th grade ability is required to read Time magazine, while USA Today calls for the 10th grade level (“Plain Language at Work Newsletter” online at www.impact-information.com), although levels of difficulty for different articles can vary considerably.

When the print media first reduced the level of reading difficulty, the level of reading ability for the average American did not change all that much. Since then, however, and despite claims for 8th and 9th grade abilities, something altogether different has occurred: the level of reading ability has declined significantly. As Richard Stivers reports, “Controlling for the level of reading comprehension, Jane Healy discovered that a ninth grade reading test in 1988 was ‘demonstrably easier’ than a fourth grade test in 1964” (Stivers, 1999, Magic, p. 47; also in Healey’s Endangered Minds, 1990, pp. 26-36). In other words, reading ability measured as 9th grade might more accurately equate with 4th grade ability. Recently, the National Endowment for the Arts published two telling and disconcerting surveys about reading in the United States: Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America in 2004 and To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence in 2007. The U.S. Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics reported that

Using the College Board as his source, Michael Alison Chandler (2011) reported in The Washington Post that in 2011 “SAT reading scores for graduating high school seniors” had reached their “lowest point in nearly four decades” (www.washingtonpost.com). Some suggest that the low scores result from more non-English speakers now taking the SAT, but its indication of a marked decline of reading ability certainly mirrors an already widely documented downward trend.

In my own experience as a professor of literature at a mid-sized state university, I too have detected not only a decline in reading and reading ability but also a fairly widespread and thorough distaste for and aversion to reading. In the straw polls I periodically conduct, the results indicate that the average student reads next to nothing. The students in my general education course about what used to be called “world literature” are a cross-cut sampling of the university, and they characteristically (some categorically) do not like to read. A solid majority will not read what is assigned (on average 60 odd pages a week), even though the students know they will be checked with very simple, 5-question, pass/fail quizzes. Moreover, what papers they write in my course frequently display a fundamental disregard for words and ignorance about language functions.

A comment on the website of a British company offering Cisco Certification Training Courses (n.d.; Cisco Systems is the multinational networking equipment company) testifies to an apparently common aversion to reading books and blatantly suggests that it is entirely reasonable and understandable. “The old fashioned style of teaching, with books and manuals,” we read, “is an up-hill struggle for the majority of us. If you’re nodding as you read this, dig around for more practical courses that are on-screen and interactive.” Reading is disparaged here, because it does not belong to this historical moment, because it is difficult and, worst of all, allegedly boring. The explanation goes on to recommend that we cease reading books and the like and turn instead to visual images, concretely illustrating Ellul’s argument: “Fully interactive motion videos utilising video demo’s [sic] and practice lab’s [sic] will forever turn you away from traditional book study. And you’ll actually enjoy doing them” (www.ciscocertification.co.uk). The sentiments expressed on that webpage are now widespread and hardly unusual. Why read, when you can look at pictures or better yet videos? Reading is hard; you have to have learned and know something, namely, what words mean in order to read and understand what you are reading. Looking at images is easy; you do not have to learn how to see pictures.

One might argue that people are now simply writing and reading different from and even more than before, thanks to email, text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter, or that they are reading books, journal articles, and the like online, except that there is not really all that much writing and reading going on online or with our various digital devices. Thanks to the efforts of various researchers, we know that people who read online don’t. The work of Sav Shrestha and Kelsi Lenz, along with that of Jakob Nielsen, on the eye gaze patterns of people reading online reveals that they trace an F pattern, scanning first across the top of the “page,” then dropping down the page and scanning partway across, then dropping to the bottom of the text and finishing with it (Carr, 2010; see also Bauerlein, 2008; Shrestha & Lenz, 2007; Nielsen, 1997, 2006, 2008). As I read the report, I realized that that was precisely what I myself did. We know as well that the “pages” we are looking at and “reading” on a computer, tablet, or cell phone screen contain but a fraction of the text found on the page of a printed book or journal. In other words, we are not reading even what little there is to read; we are not even skimming the text; we are jumping into, across, and getting out of it as quickly as possible.

5. Visual Images

While Ellul identified a new age of images when he wrote The Humiliation of the Word, there has been an accelerated proliferation of images since then. While television remains the predominant medium of the visual image, it is being superseded by, or perhaps it is more accurate to say merging with, the PC and its various extensions. Television was certainly the medium of choice for decades, but now the Internet and sites like Hulu and YouTube or services like Netflix are providing much of the visual content found on television as well as a vast amount of material not available there. The digital natives turn on and to their smart phones, tablets, and laptops rather than their televisions for visual entertainments. Without doubt, YouTube now attracts and entertains a huge share of the viewing public. Even so, and as Carr (2010) observes, “Most studies of media activity indicate that as Net use has gone up, television viewing has either held steady or increased” (pp. 86-87). Hours spent in front of the television reached 153 a month in 2008-2009, their highest since Nielsen began to collect data in the 1950s and that time does not include watching television shows on computer (p. 87). At more than 38 hours per week, TV time essentially equaled a full-time job. In combination, the number of hours spent watching television and online visual images must be enormous and reveals our chief (pre)occupation.

The extent of our immersion in visual images is certainly significant, and the image definitely competes with the word. Citing an extensive study from 2009 conducted by Ball State University’s Center for Media Design, Carr (2010) reports that “most Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a television, a computer monitor, or the screen of their mobile phone” (p. 87). That amounts to more time than the average 40-hour workweek of full-time employment. He continues with information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “American Time Use Survey” for the years between 2004 and 2008: “young adults between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, who are among the most avid Net users, were reading printed works for a total of just forty-nine minutes a week” (p. 87). That is only 7 minutes a day, no more than a few full pages of text.

Like Ellul, Neil Postman (1986) recognized the transition from a word-centered to an image-centered culture. His analysis of television in Amusing Ourselves to Death documented the pernicious and pervasive conquest of images. As Postman demonstrated, television imposed its particular values on everything from politics and religion to personality and morality, placing emphasis on images and entertainment while deemphasizing serious thought and discourse, in a word, words. Emulating television, print media of all kinds increased the use of images. Newspapers like USA Today led the way along with magazines, but textbooks in the social sciences and the humanities followed suit with the inclusion of more and more images. Now most print media and many textbooks mimic the appearance of webpages with various pictures, graphs, and boxes or “windows” of assorted information. Once the domain of words, textbooks for courses in English, history, political science, or foreign languages are filled today with visual content: pictures, charts, tables, graphs, drawings, and the like. The enormous popularity of graphic novels like Watchmen (7th grade reading level), V for Vendetta, Maus, the Sin City series, or Girl Genius (which ranks considerably higher on Amazon than much “serious” literature) similarly tells much about the state of reading, the image, and the word today. There, the illustration is primary and dominant, the word secondary and subordinate.

In addition, our ubiquitous and indispensable personal computing devices—desk tops, laptops, smart phones, and tablets—rely heavily on and orient us to a world of images. Pictures, images, and icons populate the digital “landscape.” Our smart phones and tablets present us with a screen-full of images for a host of various apps. I hardly need to describe the kinds and number of pictures, large and small, we see when we use the internet or attend a PowerPoint presentation. What we are witnessing is a colossal increase in visual images at the expense of the word. As Ellul pointed out, “images once were illustrations of a text. Now the text has become the explanation of the images” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 117). Images not only displace but also replace words.

The extremely popular social network known as Facebook is anchored to and awash in images. The new mandatory format or platform initiated for Facebook and its users in the first months of 2012—its Timeline feature—relies chiefly on visual effects. As the company name moreover indicates, “faces,” yours and those of your “friends,” in other words, visual images are the foundation of the content on display there. Facebook offers each person the opportunity to indulge in a mini-spectacle of the self, and a spectacle is necessarily all about the visual experience. Actual words, sentences, or texts appearing on Facebook pages are minimal. They are not much more than decoration, “window-dressing,” for the graphics of the webpage itself. With respect both to their number and content, the words there are superficial and essentially extraneous. Often, we need not even use words on Facebook, since an icon allows us to “say” whether we “like” someone or something or not.

The scourge of meetings and presentations, PowerPoint may be the very embodiment of language transformed into image. As noted, a technological society desires and conceives its world in terms of graphs, drawings, tables, charts, and diagrams. PowerPoint turns everything into those forms. It reduces language to a minimum and converts it into a table. The typical PowerPoint slide depicts a very few words (often not even complete sentences) arranged as a very few bullet points so that the words look not like a sentence or paragraph, but like a chart. Indeed, the very idea of a slide show, a foundational principle of the format, places whatever words are involved in a PowerPoint presentation firmly into the realm and under the authority of the visual image.

6. Reconfigured, Technicized Language

Besides the subordination of word to image, the architectures and structures of our technology have actually reconfigured our language. As Ellul wrote in The Technological Society, “technique transforms everything it touches into a machine” (p. 4). Everything must accordingly be patterned after and function like a mechanism, so too, language. Uwe Pörksen (1995) related the specifically technical or mechanistic characteristics of our language today to Noam Chomsky’s theory of syntax. By virtue of his fame and authority as a linguist, Chomsky served to institute and normalize a mathematical model and technical definition of language. So understood, words equate with numeric qualities and acquire the properties of abstractions, equations, and formulas (Pörksen, 1995, p. 93; see also van der Laan, 2001, p. 350). According to Pörksen (1995), Chomsky produced “the most advanced formulation of a mathematical concept of language,” which was also “the most adequate expression of our age” (p. 95). For George Steiner (1989), too, such a “numerization” of language represents “the central ‘motor’ and motion of spirit in our present condition.” What is more, Steiner realized that it elucidated and accompanied “a general retreat from the word” (p. 114). In short, words essentially disappear, when they are mathematized and numerized so as to accord with the requirements of a technological civilization.

Pörksen’s characterization of technicized language as “plastic words” reflects the kind of mechanization Ellul wrote about. By “plastic,” Pörksen meant not only flexible and malleable but also modular (as his subtitle indicates) in that such words can be assembled and disassembled like the plastic building blocks made famous by Lego. Such words resemble or become the replaceable, interchangeable parts of a machine. In the way a machine functions, language, too, has to be standardized, predictable, reliable, regular, and replicable. Because they are interchangeable components, plastic words acquire an ability to mean anything, but in doing so they also come to mean nothing. By extension, words in a technological culture take on a general meaninglessness. For instance, pro-life, pro-choice, freedom, equality (cf. Stivers, 2008, Illusion), conservative, liberal, relationship, quality, substance, solution, even welfare, care, and value mean everything and nothing. Pörksen (1995) calls them “context-autonomous” words (p. 99). (Cf. Pörksen’s book, pp. 25-26, or my article on “Plastic Words” for a list of “plastic words” and for further elaboration.): The word “smart” is a case in point. When applied to phones and classrooms, both nothing more than inanimate objects or collections of such objects, “smart” gains and loses meaning, invites the comparison or equation of human with machine functions, and actually degrades intelligence so that it becomes simply a designation of technological devices at our disposal.

In a technological world, language has to be rendered serviceable to technology and must conform to the fundamental principle of technology, efficiency. Vocabulary and syntax consequently have to condense. Too many words, too many meanings, and too many syntactical possibilities make language too complex and too unwieldy. Communication of information becomes too problematic, but especially inefficient (van der Laan, 2001), at least for technological purposes, which now are the only purposes. According to the standards of technology, linguistic complexity, ambiguity, variation, and possibility are too meaningful, consequently undesirable.

7. Reductions

While the gross amount of words being written in the world now may have increased since the advent of PowerPoint, email, texting, tweeting, blogging, and posting on Facebook, the actual vocabulary or lexicon, not to mention sentence complexity and meaningful content, has diminished substantially, both in quantitative and especially qualitative terms. In his analysis of PowerPoint, for example, Edward R. Tufte (2003) documented an obvious reduction of language. As he points out

the PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about 8 seconds of silent reading material. The slides in PP textbooks are particularly disturbing: in 28 textbooks, which should use only first-rate examples, the median number of words per slide is 15, worthy of billboards, about 3 or 4 seconds of silent reading material. (p. 12)

“Especially disturbing,” he writes, “is the introduction of the PowerPoint cognitive style into schools.” Instead of writing a report using sentences, children make PowerPoint reports, where words are subordinate to the clip art images.

Elementary school PP exercises (as seen in teacher’s guides, and in student work posted on the internet) typically show 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation consisting of 3 to 6 slides—a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. (p. 13)

That corresponds to 16 words or 3 seconds of silent reading a day in the course of a typical school week. Those presentations characteristically reduce the number of words to a minimum and the content to superficiality. PowerPoint, Tufte showed, becomes ridiculous and useless, in a word, pointless.

Technology changes us, our attitudes, our way of life, our habits, our language. For good and ill, the mechanical clock utterly changed our sense of time; the automobile transfigured the physical and social landscape of the United States; the PC and cell phone altered the way we communicate. The technology first conditions, then locks us in to specific behaviors and to specific ways to use it and to speak, write, and think. When we use a technology, we use it as it is designed to be used.

While email had already introduced a minimization in communication via language, Facebook along with Twitter and texting has reduced it even further. Now, and as far as I can determine, email apparently requires too many words and is fast becoming a remnant of the past, since text messaging and Facebook are essentially replacing email as the preferred mode of communication. Anyone who has used or looked at email, Facebook, or text messages can instantly realize what linguistic reduction is and what pressures a particular technology places on us. The screens we typically have for an email essentially restrict us to small “pages” of text the size of a program’s and/or device’s format. To be sure, we could write more, but the medium conditions us to write according to its parameters. In short, an email is supposed to be short and concise.

The cell phone is likewise a technology designed in a specific way to serve specific purposes, one of them speaking to someone else, another texting. Initially, the cell phone functioned much like regular telephones, but the advent of texting initiated another application. Cell phones are now used extensively for texting. As with email, the very design of the cell phone determines and limits what communication by texting is: quick and cryptic. Text messages tend to be a few words or abbreviations, generally not even enough to fill one small cell phone screen. The screen we work with is tiny, so we craft tiny messages. Because we type in our letters and words with our thumbs, it is not conducive to long messages or lengthy correspondence. The medium creates certain psychological expectations. When a text message extends beyond the length of one screen so that a new “page” opens, we register a subtle cue that we are pushing the limits of what is possible, reasonable, or even permissible.

While texting has no specific character or word limit, the size of the cell-phone screen and the size of the memory available for one text influences, if not outright causes us to restrict the length of our texts. In consequence, we write and send texts that are no more than a sentence, more likely a phrase or two, in length. Likewise, typical Facebook posts or comments are mostly only a few lines long. In the cyber-space of Facebook, there is theoretically an infinite amount of space for written communication, but almost all posts fit into a fairly narrow “window” or box designed for a text message. Although the window automatically expands as a message is written, rarely do posts extend beyond a few lines in the preset space of the narrow rectangular message box in the middle of the Facebook “page.”

As we adapt and adjust ourselves to the structures of our technological environment and our technological tools and toys, our language and use of language changes. Twitter is another example of our conformity to technology. It only permits a specific and limited number of characters, 140, to be used for each tweet, so that is as much as we write or communicate using that service. And no one objects. (On my own cell phone with a 2¼ by 1¼ inch screen, that is less than four full lines of letters.) It is true that we could continue to tweet and tweet, sending one tweet after another for as long as we can and care to. But each tweet is short and clipped. How long could we keep it up against the urging of the medium saying 140 characters is enough? And how long would we care to continue? In accord with the technology, we configure our words, our sentences, our language, and our thought to fit the mold of email or text messaging or Twitter or Facebook.

In The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts (1994) called attention to what he called “language erosion” (p. 128). Not only do we use fewer words, our technologically shaped language contains fewer, if any “complex discourse patterns” (cf. Birkerts, 1994, p. 128). What is more, he observed, “ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing” (p. 128). They do not really serve any purpose in a technological culture. A technical understanding of language, a desire for efficient communication, and technologies designed for minimized language prevent, even eliminate, substance and profundity. We are left with a simplified and impoverished language. Words on screens, ethereal and ephemeral, are essentially unimportant. Bauerlein (2008) reports a study by Jakob Nielsen which found that users typically “allot only 51 seconds” to an email (p. 145). As Birkerts (1994) remarks, “Words now arrive onto the screen under the aspect of provisionality” (p. 157). They are temporary and transient, there to be deleted or lost as the feed or thread scrolls ineluctably onward into the void of the no longer relevant past. In her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, Sherry Turkle (2010) reached a similar conclusion: “An email or text seems to have been always on its way to the trash” (p. 168). As words destined for the garbage, they could hardly be worth less.

But what of the content of text messages, Tweets, Facebook entries, or blogs? The vast majority of them is inconsequential and actually not worth mentioning at all. The one question Twitter was initially designed to answer—“What are you doing right now?”—necessitates and eventuates in banality and triviality. It is built in to the conceptual architecture of the technology. What each of us happens to be doing at any given moment in the course of any given day is not all that important, nor anything anyone really needs to know about. The market-research firm, Pear Analytics, inspected 2,000 tweets for a 2-week period in August 2009 sent between 11:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. The analysis established the following:

Whether “conversational,” “pass-along,” or “self-promotional” tweets are any better than the “pointless babble” is not clear. The Twitter website itself boasts that it offers “the fastest, simplest way to stay close to everything you care about” (http://twitter.com/about). From the review conducted by Pear Analytics, it is hard to see that tweets contain much of anything worth caring about. Based on the percentages above, it is probably generous to conclude with an estimate that at least 70% of Twitter traffic is trivial. Certainly, people are texting and tweeting constantly, but little of it was worth writing in the first place.

Facebook molds content into triviality in the same way. How significant was the “talk” on Facebook in 2011? At the end of the year, Melissa Locker (2011) reported on Time’s online News Feed that “high-profile deaths, an impending natural disaster, the Royal Wedding, and the Green Bay Packers” received more attention than anything else. The top 10 global topics for Facebook, gleaned from its own records, were posted by Brian Anthony Hernandez (2011) on the Mashable website: (1) the death of Osama bin Laden, (2) Packers win Super Bowl, (3) Casey Anthony found not guilty, (4) Charlie Sheen, (5) the death of Steve Jobs, (6) the Royal Wedding, (7) the death of Amy Winehouse, (8) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, (9) military operations begin in Libya, and (10) Hurricane Irene (“Facebook Reveals 2011’s Most-Popular Status Trends” online at http://mashable.com). In other words, sensational events and people to which and to whom most people had no particular and no personal connection were what mattered most on Facebook. Add to that the myriad updates about what songs, television shows, musicians, actors, athletes, sports teams, or video games people liked, and discourse slips into inanity. What did not make the top 10 topics on Facebook in 2011 is just as illuminating and telling: the wave of revolts known as the Arab Spring, the U.S. economy, Greece and the European Union, or the ongoing war in Afghanistan, to name only a few. Our technologies ultimately affect whether we respect the word and what it communicates, whether it or anything else means anything or nothing to us.

8. Stunted Thought

In the October 20, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, Louis Menand (2008) wrote a review of a book by David Crystal (2009) called Txting: The Gr8 Db8. There, Menand reports that Crystal is not concerned by the effect of texting (or of the devices we employ for that practice) on language, although an estimated three billion people then owned cell phones and sent over a trillion text messages that year (Menand online at www.newyorker.com). The numbers for Twitter are similarly staggering. As of 2011, Twitter had over 300 million users worldwide who generated over 300 million tweets and over 1.6 billion search queries per day (“Twitter” online at online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter). The idea that texting or tweeting actually increases literacy since it provides more opportunity for people to engage with the language through reading and writing fails to examine and explain the nature of the technological devices and programs we use on the one hand and the language we produce with them on the other. Abbreviations, emoticons, and initialisms are not really the issues. Rather, the language itself, its tiny lexicon, its simplified syntax, and its diminished contents are. What Crystal did not understand is that as we use technology, it shapes us, our language, and our thought in its image.

Since “the intellectual process of reasoning is related to the word” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 214), a degradation of the word has dire consequences for our cognitive functions. Technology changes the vocabulary, structures, and contents of how we speak, write, and read, but it affects as well the way we think. After all, we think in and with language. Indeed, and as Ellul observed, the word actually “originates a specific mode of thinking” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 214). Language and thought are so intertwined and interdependent as to be indistinguishable and inseparable. There is no way we can dissociate our vocabulary and our ability to formulate sentences from our ability to think nor from the breadth and depth of our thought. Over time, stunted linguistic abilities and powers of expression impair and stultify our thought processes as well. As Ludwig Wittgenstein (1988) remarked, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (p. 56). The more reduced our modes of linguistic expression, the more reduced are our modes of thought—that is, the less we are able to think.

In The Shallows, Carr (2010) traced how our use of Google reshapes our neural pathways, hence our brains, minds, and thoughts. Our heavy use of computers and the Internet, he reports, can even restructure our brains and leave us with devolved cognitive abilities, if not outright impairment and damage. Certainly, our mode of thinking is similarly affected and shaped by our steady and intense emailing, texting, tweeting, or Facebooking. Our technological devices and their formats literally determine the limits and boundaries of our language and our thought. We have no “big” thoughts, when we formulate them as little messages for little screens.

Edward Tufte (2003) found that PowerPoint likewise produces “a distinctive, definite, well-enforced, and widely-practiced cognitive style that is contrary to serious thinking” (p. 26). Our hyperextensive use of the various iterations of the PC and its extensions, Birkerts concluded, turns us away from concentrated reading and from the word, resulting in “a reduced attention span and a general impatience with sustained inquiry” (p. 27). In Greek, logos means word, but also reason which is rooted in and relies on that word. Analysis and synthesis, logic and dialectic are consequently products of the logos, the word, as well (Humiliation of the Word, p. 214). To despise the word is then to despise reason. To the extent that we move away from the word, we diminish our cognitive abilities and powers of reasoning.

Our technologies are now doing more than changing the way we relate to words and think: they are actually thinking for us. A television commercial in March of 2012 made this telling assertion about the Blackberry: “It’s my other brain.” The ad suggests that we need and should want something else to do our thinking and that it should be done by our technology. I hardly need to explain how Google works. A Google search often begins with a box in the upper right-hand corner and with typing in the first letters of the word or words we intend to find. Google obligingly completes the word or phrase or thought for us, also supplying several possible variations, before we have even typed the second letter! Texting can function similarly. If you begin to text, some phone systems will automatically put together letter combinations and compose a message for you. Or you can select from a list of already prepared messages. In any case, the program anticipates and “thinks” for us. When the program or device provides the list of options for us, it at the same time limits our thought.

Of course, the premier example of machines thinking for us is artificial intelligence or AI. In February of 2010, IBM introduced a new supercomputer and AI system called Watson. IBM calls this technology DeepQA (www.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson). Developed in cooperation with Columbia University and the University of Maryland, Watson “applies advanced data management and analytics to natural language in order to uncover a single, reliable insight—in a fraction of a second.” As IBM envisions this technology, it will deploy “across industries such as healthcare, finance and customer service.” Although not mentioned there, law is a possible and probable application for a Watson-like system in the future as well. In an IBM promotional video, the program director for Healthcare and Life Sciences Research at IBM Joseph Jasinski asserts that we would never “replace a trained doctor” with a Watson. Watson would only ever be a physician’s assistant. Such pronouncements are either utterly ingenuous or utterly naïve. While Jon Iwata, senior vice-president for IBM Marketing and Communications, asserts that “Watson is a very necessary advance,” David Ferrucci, Research Staff Member and leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM, declares that “it is irresistible to pursue this.” They give voice to the imperative that if it can be, it must be, and will be done. What consequences the full realization of this research might entail do not appear to concern people like Iwata and Ferrucci. With the ever broadening implementation of AI technology, our own thinking runs the risk of atrophy.

9. Narrative Lost

In addition to thought, language gives rise to narrative, and narrative to knowing and to finding meaning. Throughout history, narrative has been a fundamental and essential human activity. We have used it to gain knowledge of and give meaning to experience and existence. As Louis Mink (1978) observed, “Even though narrative form may be, for most people, associated with fairy tales, myths, and the entertainments of the novel, it remains true that narrative is a primary cognitive instrument” (p. 131). With narrative, we search for and define who we are. The great narratives, whether religious, political, economic, or scientific, have allowed us to pose and answer questions about where we have come from and are going, in other words, about existential purpose. Since ancient times, humanity has needed and used narratives (Graeco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, or Secular-Humanistic, for example, in the Western tradition) to provide knowledge and meaning, but with the ascendance of technological culture and a devaluation of the word, narrative has lost its value and importance.

Like language itself, narrative depends on and creates coherences. In technological culture, however, coherence dissolves. The links and clicks, the “send” and “delete” eliminate coherence and preclude any narrative. As the messages we write with our technological devices reveal, they themselves are disconnected and incoherent as well. Every communication now resembles a hyperlink that in a few clicks transports us to an entirely unrelated topic or thought. In Tufte’s (2003) opinion, a technology like PowerPoint actually abolishes narrative. As he explains, “the rigid slide-by-slide hierarchies, indifferent to content, slice and dice the evidence into arbitrary compartments, producing an anti-narrative with choppy continuity” (p. 10). The Facebook “feed” functions in much the same way. It may look as if it provides a history or a story, but the feed only provides disconnected factoids and superficialities that then disappear from view. And what narrative does texting or tweeting provide? Here again, the messages are sliced and diced, fragmented, lacking any larger context or connection. As our technological devices, mindset, and habits devalue the word, they also undermine narrative. When narrative disintegrates or disappears, we lose a crucial means to understand ourselves and our world. Ultimately, the technological frameworks that govern and shape our language actually produce an antinarrative with which we are unable to know or find any meaning for ourselves and our world other than technology.

Now, we no longer even need to think and write our stories. A company called Narrative Science (n.d.) offers its clients automatically generated “narratives” from its “artificial intelligence platform.” It “produces reports, articles, summaries and more” (www.narrativescience.com). As explained in a short notice on the Forbes website (essentially quoting from the Narrative Science website):

Narrative Science, an innovative technology company, turns data into stories. Narrative Science has developed a technology solution that creates rich narrative content from data. Narratives are seamlessly created from structured data sources and can be fully customized to fit a customer’s voice, style and tone. Stories are created in multiple formats, including long form stories, headlines, Tweets and industry reports with graphical visualizations. Multiple versions of the same story can be created to customize the content for each audience’s specific needs. (http://blogs.forbes.com/narrativescience)

Ellul’s remark that “no one is involved any longer” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 45) with what is spoken or written has found its fulfillment in this technology. As we adopt that technology, we will actually abandon and lose both narrative and the language that produced it.

10. Relationship

Besides thought and narrative, language predicates and posits relationship. In the same way spoken language requires interlocutors, the written word depends on a dynamic interaction between an author and a reader. Altered by technology, our habits and practice of language and means of communication have eroded relationship, however. The online utility Chatroulette illustrates the deterioration and meaninglessness of relationship in technological culture. The mordant allusion to Russian roulette in the name itself suggests the utter insignificance of human life, let alone relationship. In March 2010, it was estimated to have 1.5 million users (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatroulette). It randomly pairs strangers with one another who can then “chat” or “next” the other person (i.e., abruptly move on). Yet precisely those conditions undermine relationship. What connection, commitment, involvement, or meaning can arise from an online encounter, where random strangers can “next” and dismiss (more or less “delete”) one another? Sincerity and authenticity play no role in such essentially anonymous, disengaged pseudo-communication. In such exchanges, no real dialogue takes place, and words do not serve any true relationship.

Evidently—and no formal research is necessary to verify this point—many people now prefer to relate, if that is the right word, with minimal words and with little if any actual personal involvement. So, for example, acquaintances, students, friends, and family have indicated to me that they prefer to text someone rather than speak to the person on the telephone, let alone face to face. It is now too much effort, and too personal, to write so much or actually to speak to another person in person. That attitude and behavior represents an actual avoidance of relationship. We are supposed to be more connected than ever before, thanks to email and Facebook and cell phones and texting and Twitter, but it is merely the pretext or pretense of relationship. We actually find ourselves more disconnected, separated, and isolated than ever before.

According to the company website, “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life” (www.facebook.com/). The minimized language and reduction of content on Facebook makes it difficult to credit that assertion. It is likewise difficult to see how scores or hundreds of people “friended” by a given individual can actually have any relationship, given such superficiality. In fact, the superficiality of the connections and exchanges which occur on Facebook undermine any genuine relationship. The implied promise of relationship goes unfulfilled.

I am sure anyone reading the story I am about to tell has had the same experience and witnessed the same event many times. It is the scenario where two people sit across from each other, meeting together for coffee, a cocktail, or a meal. Instead of conversing with one another or discussing what might be happening around them, they are handling their smart phones, texting or tweeting someone, checking their email or Facebook pages, or some other apps for some other kinds of information. They are together, but alone, as Turkle (2010) puts it in her title. According to her research, moreover, some people would now even prefer to talk to a robot or an AI than a real human being. Though letters may be entered and words transmitted, language in these instances repeated thousands and millions of times a day does nothing to establish any real relation between human beings. When we discount and devalue words in this way, they are no longer “the means of human relationship and dialogue” (Humiliation of the Word, pp. 210-211). Yet we have to engage in real dialogue and establish relationship and community with fellow human beings through our words.

11. Choice and Human Freedom

As Ellul explained in The Technological Society, it was possible before now for the individual to break away from and repudiate technology and get along without it. In the past, he observed, “choice was a real possibility” (Society, p. 77). We are so utterly dependent on an immense, complex technological system at this stage of history; however, it is essentially impossible to refuse anything it offers us. It is the structure of our world today, the fabric of our existence, and the most important feature of our lives. Something as low-tech as electricity illustrates this point. If the power goes out, everything fails and everything falls apart: cooking, heating, cooling, lighting, telecommunications. All office work stops immediately. In a supermarket where the power has gone out, nothing works: no lights, coolers, freezers, cash-registers, doors. We cannot get our groceries. We cannot leave the building.

We are no longer able to choose whether or how or how much to use technology. Again, some simple and mundane examples illustrate the point. Does anyone really have a choice today about using a cell phone, a computer, or PowerPoint? Consider the students at my university. They truly have no choice, but to use a computer. Otherwise, they will not have any classes, because they have to enroll for courses online. I likewise have no choice, but to use a computer, because I have to record their grades online. Otherwise, they will not receive credit for their courses. Or consider PowerPoint for presentations in the classroom, the business meeting, the conference session, even in church. PowerPoint is expected of us all, and the pressure (much like peer pressure) to use it is all but irresistible. To be sure, some people refuse to use PowerPoint, but they brand themselves as retrograde to audiences that dismiss the traditional talk, lecture, or discussion presented in words, sentences, and narratives not only as passé and unwelcome but also as entirely objectionable and unsatisfactory, not worth their time or attention.

The technologies, devices, media, and programs we use every day all day long—cell phones, tablets, and computers, Internet browsers and websites, email accounts, Facebook webpages, and word-processing programs—all mold us in their image. They discourage us from deviating from their predetermined parameters. As Menand (2008) points out, “There is, as it happens, a Ten Commandments of texting, as laid down by one Norman Silver, the author of ‘Laugh Out Loud :-D’). The Fourth of these commandments reads, ‘u shall b prepard @ all times 2 tXt& 2 recv.’” Specific technologies in an enormous system of technologies are designed to be used in specific ways, and deviation from those ways is essentially impossible. As we have seen, there is no real saying “no” to technology anymore. It has escaped our control. Nevertheless, the word remains and potentially is, as Ellul asserted, “a liberating force” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 68).

As powerful as the spoken word is and as dominant as the written word became, language did not dominate us. We remained in control of the word. While writing altered the way we thought and even helped us to think better, it did not think for us. Without doubt, language is a potent technology, but the word, dialectic and open, always allows for choice. We can always choose whether or not to speak, listen, pay attention, read, write, or respond. We can choose whether or not to agree, to believe, to accept, or to refuse what is said or written. According to Ellul, the word respects the freedom of the listener, but it expresses and even produces the freedom of the speaker when he chooses to say what he finally says, and chooses to eliminate other things he could have said. The word creates a free space between two people, through the possibility of understanding and misunderstanding. When the word becomes imperative, it places the listener in a situation of free choice. (Humiliation of the Word, p. 221)

With the word, we assert both our freedom and that of others. Although endangered by devaluation and reconfiguration in technological culture, the word nevertheless retains its potential and capacity to liberate, even from the strictures of technology.

12. Being Human

What does it mean to be human in a technological society and culture? At the core of an answer to that question lies the word. Ellul wrote that language, especially when spoken, “constitutes the basis of human specificity” (Humiliation of the Word, p. 3). Birkerts (1994) similarly considered language itself “the medium of our deeper awareness” (p. 113). If Ellul is right about language, and I think he is, then the devolution and devaluation of language poses a threat to our humanity. When our language becomes a function of the technological system, we likewise become a function of that system, and our humanity is diminished. When we speak and write in accord with technology, what matters most to us are not human, but technological values. We base our decisions not on what is first and foremost good for human beings but on what is necessary for technology, namely, efficiency, precision, quantification, and objectivity. Honesty and faithfulness or sincerity and sympathy, in contrast, are human concepts and have no meaning in a technological context or for a machine intelligence. When we speak and write in accord with technological principles and values, we conform to technology and, along with our language, transform into mechanisms ourselves.

For Brian Christian (2011), author of The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us about What it Means to be Alive, “the most central questions of being human” are about meaning and relations with other human beings “within the limits of language and time” (pp. 13-14). He, too, senses the link between language on the one hand and being human and finding relation and meaning on the other. In his discussion of the Loebner Prize competition, a yearly Turing test designed to evaluate how human our computers are becoming (which in a way also examines how human we still are), Christian concluded that we speak more and more like computer programs designed to “think” and “speak” like humans. “What a familiarity with the construction of the Turing test bots had begun showing me,” he wrote, “was that we fail—again and again—to actually be human with other humans” (p. 32).

Christian’s discovery is or should be deeply disturbing and cause for great concern. It demonstrates how we have adapted to and adopted the essentially inhuman form of communication our technological tools and toys have configured. In a technicized society like ours where words and thoughts conform to technological demands, intelligence ceases to be “the intelligence of the humanities, of human beings as such.” As Ellul realized, it becomes “the intelligence that cooperates with the robot [or machine] and that is modeled on artificial intelligence” (Bluff, p. 387). In a strange reversal, we have come to model our speech on the structures of our technological devices and our AI systems. Christian (2011) fails to grasp how and why this has happened. He thinks that the human being and computer “are symbiotes” which “need each other,” “keep each other honest,” and “make each other better” (p. 14). He mistakenly believes that “the story of the progression of technology doesn’t have to be a dehumanizing or dispiriting one,” but something quite the contrary (p. 14), something positive and full of promise. Even though he saw that we fail to be human with each other, he failed to recognize that we have indeed been dehumanized, because we become a function of the technology we use and unwittingly serve.

To underscore an all-important point, technology changes everything it touches—and it touches everything now—“into a machine” (Society, p. 4). In other words, everything becomes a mechanism, words and language, even the human being. How human are we, one person texting another or emailing another or Facebooking another, employing a reduced and technicized language, engaged more with technology than with another human being?

Although under siege, language still offers the means to exercise our full humanity in an overwhelming, technological milieu. To be human, we need the word, not a technicized, devalued, meaningless language, but words which we inhabit, which we invest with value, purpose, and meaning, and which establish our relation with fellow human beings who also have value, purpose, and meaning. To root our humanity in that word is to subordinate technology and take a step toward freedom.