Gaps and Crevices

Gaps and crevices. A rock climber roomed down the hall from me in my freshman dorm. His talents and passion are relentless. He made several expeditions up Mount Everest in the 1980’s. One route up the 12,000 foot vertical Kangshung Face of Everest is named after him. He undertook that ascent with no supplemental oxygen bottles, no sherpas, no radios and three other climbers. About an hour from the top, 28,700 feet above sea level, he saw prayer flags strung between rocks and purple-robed Buddhist monks chanting a blessing ceremony. He took off the outer layer of his gloves to take a photograph. The temperature was 40 below. Not realizing he was hallucinating, he simply watched the monks before passing out. When he awoke he realized the perilous place he was in if he continued on to the summit. Ed Webster turned around and started down. Life was more important than the summit. A fellow climber continued solo to the summit. Ed lost eight fingertips and three toes to frostbite.

I wasn’t there. But, those events play like a movie in my mind. I can almost hear the film score.

Fifty years ago Marshall McLuhan wrote about hot and cold media. The medium was the message. His notion was that different media invite different levels of participation on the part of the viewer. Movies were hot. They enhanced a single sense. The viewer did not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. TV was cool. TV required more effort by the viewer to determine meaning. Comics were very cool. Due to their minimal visual detail, comics required a high degree of effort to fill in what the cartoonist may have intended to portray.

For six seasons I enjoyed the TV show Lost. I devoted a lot of effort to determine its meaning. I will miss it.

Authors often want to evoke a particular emotion in an audience. T.S. Eliot strove to express emotion in art. He expressed particular emotions by a formula of words, objects, situations or chain of events. His objective correlative expressed a character’s emotions by showing rather than describing feelings. When that formula was shown the emotion was evoked.

McLuhan popularized the notion that new media exerts a gravitational effect on how we reason and in turn on social organization. He suggested that print made possible individualism, democracy, capitalism and nationalism.

Text messages are like knitting someone a holiday sweater. How it is accepted may not overlap with how it is given. There are gaps or crevices. Gaps may be filled in with a smiley face. Crevices, maybe not. The human voice carries information about the speaker's identity and affect. A lot of new media does not.

New media effects how we reason. This may be good. We like voices. But, McLuhan wrote, oral societies were tribes ruled by fear. Humans are hard wired to connect with emotions before we reflect. We first fill in communication gaps with emotion. In the long run, the high degree of effort need to fill in the gaps and crevices of social media may be a blessing and not a curse. It makes us think about what we are missing.

A friend in college introduced me to semiotics. We talked about the significance of symbols. She had a tattoo of a tornado on her hip. She told me that symbols are classified by the way they are transmitted. To coin a word or a symbol, a community must agree on a simple meaning. How a community codes symbols represent the values of that culture. New shades of connotation of symbols are drawn every day in every aspect of life. To coin T.S. Eliot, my friend's tattoo still mixes memory and desire.

I devotedly followed the recent Presidential campaign; especially the primaries. Seems like a long time ago. I was captivated as the talking heads capsulated the daily back and forth of the various campaigns. I was spoon fed politically charged emotions in real time. It was relentless. It felt tribal. I’ve turned off the talking heads. I have not tuned out social media. I just try to be aware of its gaps and crevices.