The Magical Effect of Tossing Words Around
Out of curiosity, I recently googled to find out how many SMS-messages are sent each day. The number turned out to be in the trillions! That's a lot... A lot of words, a lot of noise. And within all this noise, there is communication – a new paradigm of communication. Communication is perhaps the most important field of our existence, of any living organisms' existence. I would even go so far as to say that communication is the very foundation of life – of so called 'coexistence '.
If we take it back to the days when we lived in caves, there probably was a different type of communication than we have today, my own guess is that it was less precise, but at the same time less complicated – less cluttered. A gesture, a facial expression, or a shout... Along with time, we seem to have added layers of complexity to it, and as languages started to appear, the layer of precision likely became more prominent. Depending on the vocabulary of the people communicating, our words and the way we assemble them can enhance the flow of information. Words are the intermediaries between the things to be conveyed and the actual things. If two people are talking, and both of them have a broad vocabulary – and are intellectually capable, complexity can be added to communication.
Now, what do I mean by complexity? Complexity appears to be the more personal layer. If we were machines, we wouldn't be able to have complexity at all. Machines deal with raw data, while us humans deal with something, in lack of a better word – playfulness. If we only interpret the words, and not the underlying meanings, we would become more like machines. It's a concept which has been characterized in the Terminator movies, for example, where the terminator is unable to grasp what the boy is hinting at – unable to read between the lines, so to speak. Reading between the lines is a form of personal communication, recognizing ourselves in each other.
When we meet a person, we often make immediate unconscious judgment, like, “can this person take a joke?” and so on – and as we get to know that person, the field of personal communication expands (of course a simplification as it depends on other factors as well). What's key to my point here is that the amount of data we pass to one another is immense! Not only because we send SMS, instant messages, and talk over phones – but also the increasingly more advanced word use. A 'fuck' these days is a whole different word compared to a few decades ago.
What strikes me about all this, is the sheer magnitude of the vibrational level we live in – compared to a thousand years ago, every thing is vibrating, quaking. Even if most of those 1'000'000'000'000 of messages passed around are merely noise and redundancy, it doesn't change the fact that it's bound to a constant refinement. What I mean is perfectly illustrated by something Steve Jobs said in an interview – in which he told us that he had been shown a “rock-tumbler”. When you put rocks together and tumble them for long enough, they will eventually come out beautifully rounded and refined. It seems like this is how things tend to work pretty universally, from planets, to smaller rocks, to us humans throwing around words – constant collisions leading to refinements which equals more than the sum of their parts.
Grammar and spelling was corrected using http://www.onlinecorrection.com/