A Flood of Words
We have hardly begun to identify the alterations, far beyond our comprehension, that technology is working in us humans. Yours truly is a lover of words, a writer, a reader, and for gosh sakes a defender of the Prayer Book. I’m the sort of guy who might have a sticker on his car: “I [Heart] Words.” So imagine my perplexity when I learned the following, compliments of the indispensable New Atlantis.
From 1900 to 1990, the average American spent about one or two hours a day with words, reading and writing. This was more or less constant over those decades, but then came texting and the Internet. Today the average American devotes four or five hours a day to reading and writing. Kit Wilson writes that “today Americans spend up to a third of their waking hours encoding and decoding text.” A visiting Martian would think reading and writing were the main, characteristic human activity.
How many words are we talking about? Every minute, “humans send 220 million emails, 70 million WhatsApp and Facebook messages, 16 million texts, 530,000 tweets, and make 6 million Google searches.” Every day, “the average Internet user now sees as many as 490,000 words.” How many words is that? It’s more than the number of words in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Of course, most of those words are just skimmed over—but that too is part of the problem. We are awash in (to use again those academic words) “encoding and decoding text.” Put it this way: We spend more time putting things into words, and trying to understand words that have been written about things, than we spend with the things.
There is, for many people, a terrible anxiety if they are separated from this Internet world of text. If the phone is dead and all you can do is look at the walls, or go outside and take a walk—have an experience that is not first and last a matter of words—it feels scary. The fear is measurable: unmediated experience is increasingly shunned.
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What would the gospel writers say if Jesus were born in 2022 rather than about 2,022 years ago? They could not improve on Saint John. Into a world drowning in the abstraction of language, of words and screens, the Word, the one who was always with God, the Word through whom everything came into being, that Word “became flesh and dwelt among us.”
The Word that matters is a word of flesh. God did not save us by sending a text message. Go outside and look at the stars, smell the crisp air, reach down to touch the dirt, and open your mouth to sing.
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On the Web. Kit Wilson’s “Reading Ourselves to Death” is in The New Atlantis, number 68 (spring 2022), pp. 73-79, and yes, you can find it online: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/reading-ourselves-to-death
Out & About. Thus Sunday, December 11, I am to preach at the traditional services (7:30, 9, and 11:15am) at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas.