Silent Noon, and a good talk

Here are the lyrics to a song I want to learn soon:

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass--
The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:
Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.
All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.
'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:
So this winged hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.

- Dante Gabriel Rossetti

R. Vaughan Williams has written a hauntingly beautiful melody for these words. I highly recommend the recording of Bryn Terfel singing it. Seriously, go listen to this song.

On Thursday night I attended a lecture by GCC professor T. David Gordon. He talked about the culture that is formed by different types of prevailing media. There have been five main media: oral, manuscript, typography, image, and electronic.

Oral media is what came first, before we learned to write; and it cultivates a strong sense of community membership. If everything is word of mouth, the vocabulary is small (you want to be sure you're using words everyone else knows), and words don't travel much. What people mostly use their brains for is memory, because if you can't write things down you have to remember them.

Next we had manuscripts. For a long time it was extremely expensive to create manuscripts because they had to be handwritten on animal skins. So only the incredibly important things that defined the culture were written down. Manuscript is a time-biased medium; there is only one, but it lasts thousands of years. This would be as opposed to radio waves, which are a space-biased medium and can travel long distances instantly, but cease to exist as soon as you stop broadcasting them.

Typography came next. With the printing press we created books. Now many things could be written on paper, not just the culture-defining works. Since reading is a personal activity and a good Dickens novel is assimilated differently by each reader, this medium cultivates a strong sense of individuality. In addition, the medium of books relies heavily on imagination. Dr. Gordon noted that there are two authors to each book: the writer and the reader. This is why you feel so satisfied after a long read: because you have been part of the process. Your brain has worked to imagine all of the things in the book you read. This can also be why watching a movie based on a book you read can be a disappointment - it won't be the way you imagined it.

Another important aspect of the typography medium is that it cultivates a long attention span. When Lincoln and Douglas debated, they took five hours. That was scheduled - they didn't run overtime! The reason why this was possible is because people had long attention spans. You could and would read a book for five hours.

The typography medium also increases the culture's vocabulary. It wasn't word-of-mouth anymore; an author didn't worry that his readers wouldn't understand a word he put into his book, because they could look it up. The culture's vocabulary exploded as new words kept being formed to communicate the nuances of what authors were trying to say.

Image media and electronic media were invented within a decade of each other, with the first telegraph and the first photograph. Image media stimulate our passions or emotions and rarely apply to reason - Dr. Gordon used an example of a photograph of Gerald Ford bumping his head on the top of the airplane door as he stepped out. The only reason is that he was tall, of course, but the image kept being shown on the TV for weeks, and it helped to degrade popular opinion of President Ford. Now, if you'd argued with words, "Gerald Ford is an incompetent president because he's tall," it wouldn't influence anyone. But the picture does. Abraham Lincoln could not be elected president today, simply because he was not good-looking. TV cameras wouldn't favor him. Jacques Ellul noted that images are the favored tool of propagandists.

Finally we have electronic media. This is the spectrum of media that has snowballed in the past century, first with telegraphy (invented within ten years of photography), then radio, then telephones, then television, then computers, the Internet, cell phones, and beyond.

Electronic media cultivates a number of disturbing mindsets. First, as we see best with television, is the short attention span. In the early days of television the average length of a "take" in a movie was 45 seconds. Now the average take is 2.5 seconds long. There is a constant change of perspective. Constant motion. We're not a people who could sit through a 5 hour debate anymore. Next we have what Dr. Gordon called "disincarnation." This is the abandonment of the "here and now" as electronic media instantly connects us to anywhere in the world, to anyone or anything with whom we wish to exchange information. One problem with disincarnation is that people near us become much less important. We can be sitting in a room with people made in the image of God, but we'd rather IM or text a friend somewhere else in the country.

A third trend with electronic media is a contemporary mindset. Nothing really matters except what is now. We can't use electronic media to talk to anyone in the past. Even videotape cannot take us back very far - for example, we can only get to know Winston Churchill through books, since he was dying when television was invented.

Dr. Gordon closed with an exhortation to his listeners to avoid media that would shorten our attention span and trivialize our pursuits. He even went so far as to suggest we avoid computers and cell phones as much as possible. Our personal conversations should not have to be interrupted by electronic media, and the time we spend watching programs on the television that are only here for a moment and then gone could be much better spent in books, learning about the people who came before us and where our place is in the world.

It was a terrific lecture, and I'm going to write an essay about it for my HUMA 101 class - Dr. Edwards, my professor, attended the lecture and encouraged his students to make it one of their essay assignments.

I started this post on Friday and I just finished the last bit of it today. I'll write back soon and let you guys know about the SGM Relationship Weekend Tim and I attended in Pittsburgh.