For a while now, I’ve been considering the fact that much of what I read, think, and talk about, goes mostly un-documented. Very seldom I’ll commit an idea to writing. I’ve kept no diaries of the days of my life. As if I had never existed in this timeline.
But I do exist, or did. See the kid with a bucket?
Who would care on my take on life? Very few people. Really.
Nonetheless, it’s statistically possible that somewhere, someday, someone could speculate on my opinion on computer products, experimental music, politics, philosophy, education, religion, or various other topics of interest to technology types.
Then again, maybe not.
At a minimum, though, I would have made myself available to the curious out there. A good enough reason to make an effort and try writing down relevant stuff, I thought.
I got behind a keyboard, started a few lines, and soon enough, semantics creeped in. It can be said that poorly-articulated statements that go undocumented for a while, will inevitably change. Some words will be replaced and others will be left out, the syntax will be altered, and after a few iterations of the ‘listen & repeat’ process, the original words become a matter of speculation.
If the stakes are high enough, a phrase’s original meaning (the author’s intention) can conceivably morph into something so different, as to be considered an utter falsehood the writer could have never been known to have said, or could have concocted, even if she tried.
Enter politics and prose.
Misquoting with human language is easy because word selection, positioning, phrase construction, punctuation, ignorance, and human error, can and will have a tremendous impact on meaning. That’s plenty to have control over.
It takes only minutes for a public figure to make some ‘loosely coupled’ remark, and for the blogosphere to go into a rampage over what was miss-interpreted, or otherwise purposely taken out of context.
An occurrence not uncommon when the stakes are high, I might add. Politicians will use certain words in a tightly controlled vocabulary, to carefully build messages that mean one thing to the untrained eye, and another to the expert reader aware that true meaning resides between the lines.
Professionals know that connotations must be identified and controlled. Some are better than others, but generally, people making a living at this, know exactly how to best use words in a paragraph to achieve a stated goal. Equally important, good writers know that introducing enough ambiguity (omitting keywords) will furnish a semantic way out, or a plan B of sorts. Not to sound too Chomskian here, one could call this type of literary manipulation: manufactured deception.
In addition, coupling textual manipulation with individual idiosyncracies, or the fact that people will interpret uncommon vocabulary with varying degrees of accuracy. It is conceivable for two people given the same statement to arrive to different conclusions, whether or not (1) prior knowledge and (2) personal worldviews are common to both.
I often wondered why a perfectly simple phrase will almost always mean something slightly different to my parents than it did to me. There is always a little twist, a variation on a theme. There are some absolutes one could believe are evident in and of themselves, but unless statements are plainly obvious and tightly written, get ready for further explanation.
We are dealing with human language, a means of communication created by primates. Knowing just a little about human nature and looking at history with a student eye, one should be able to find reasons that make language manipulation so prevalent throughout the ages.
Control, power, exploitation? Perhaps.
Now we learn from scholars analyzing the biblical manuscript tradition (a.k.a. textual criticism), that even Jesus Christ was misquoted by those who wrote down (and/or copied down) the accounts of his teachings. The thousands of “differences” between the earliest and later copies of the same manuscripts of the books of the New Testament prove one thing:
manual duplication of important documents should be strongly discouraged.
For the last two-hundred years, textual critics have been analyzing and comparing old texts in old languages to reconcile manuscript discrepancies in text and attempt determine what may have been the actual words Jesus spoke, and from them rescue the true meaning of his teachings.
Guess what?
Over two centuries of textual analysis has shown scholars that without the originals, it will be impossible to reconcile discrepancies between later manuscripts.
Furthermore, they came to the disturbing conclusion that, based on the available manuscript collection, it would be impossible to determine with any level of certainty, the words Jesus actually said. It stands to reason then, that without the actual words, it is impossible NOT to misinterpret the meaning of what he said.
For the thousands of people that grew up believing in the infallibility of the biblical text, the irreconcilable interpretations of inconsistent texts present a formidable challenge to their belief. Professor Bart D. Ehrman reports that “there are more differences between all the manuscripts, than there are words in the whole New Testament” (Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why)
Without wanting to sound solipsistic, therein lies the predicament of religious literalism: without the original words of a document, it’s impossible to know its true meaning. Without true meaning you get the type of world we live in: religious bloodshed sanctioned by a celestial finger.
An example of manufactured deception? May be, may be not, but short of having the originals, anything we could say about it becomes speculation.
One has to wonder why an omniscient god would not intervene in the ‘preservation’ of his own words? If god knew that over time his revelation for humankind would become suspect due to textual corruption, why not preserve it by divine intervention?
Damn scribes! Then again, changing words to affect meaning started early. Very early.
In fact, it is likely that as our earliest ancestors learned to utter sounds and use words, it was only a matter of time before they realized that if someone didn’t quite get it, there was money to be made!
Knowing that my writing is likely to be impeachable, did it matter if I got misinterpreted due to poor writing skills? Perhaps. Then again…, we all have moments of transcendence and may be I could catch my own errors in time to avoid total ridicule .:.
Someday, somewhere, my kids or their kids, or their kids’ kids, will wonder what dad or grandpa thought about life in the Southern vs. the Nothern hemisphere, culture, ethics, friends, love, relationships, programming iPhones, mountain biking, trout fishing, hardwood floor installation, faucet replacement, toilet repair, backyard cooking, Malbec harvests, etc. The triviality of the topic should not matter.
We should all be quoted correctly, as in deprived of ambiguity, only because we happen to be the product (or bi-product?) of the information age, and with information and experience comes knowledge, and with time, knowledge dies when we do.
So… we should all be engaged in a virtual conversation with others, that can be recalled on demand, in real time, to be interpreted as accurately as possible for the benefit of the consumer.
So I decided to invest time to digitize some timestamps of our realities. No paper would be used, no ink, just some server space on a remote data center somewhere out West. Being a little green-compliant, made me feel better.
It started to make some logical sense.
Was it wishful thinking that someone would care? Probably.
Would it be worth the effort? Like Fox Maulder, I wanted to believe.
And that’s how some blogs start, I guess.
Thank you for reading this far.
Voilá… bolsón digital.com para los amigos, los de siempre..:..
ADC
