One of the more bizarre and interesting developments in the the last couple of decades is a greatly increased popularity and usage of aphorisms and quotes by nearly everyone who has a keyboard connected to a power source. If you're on one of the big social networks, I'm sure that you see this every day. Suddenly, all of your friends have the wisdom of the ages tumbling from their lips, or at least pasted on their daily "Wall" posting.
I've seen posts from folks whose reading habits don't stretch any further than the sponsor labels on NASCAR racers that quote Nietzche's, "That which doesn't kill us......."
And I can't exclude myself from this trend, either. Often when a friend is going through trauma or sorrow I'll Google up something soothing and pithy. When I'm in the midst of a political argument and need the weight of a pronouncement made by a founding father to smack some armchair radical State-ist (of whatever stripe) back in line, well.... I set my search engine to humming.
Usually this search entails the hunt for some quote that I vaguely remember, so there is at least that much of my own composition of other's ideas that is actually "composed" by me, but sometimes I will just make my first effort to address injustice by simply typing "Injustice" and then clicking on the little magnifying glass icon. And I feel fairly certain that nearly everyone online is doing this to a greater or lesser degree.
So.... what exactly are we doing when we engage in this activity? Are we just slightly more subtle plagarizers of the thoughts of others when we say, "I believe it was Montaigne who said....." just after we have googled up a quote that just happened to be by Montaigne? Or are we just accepting our status as cells in the growing gestalt organism that is now the mass of written modern communication? And, unwittingly, are we becoming a bit smarter than we were as we pretend to be smarter than we are, since now that we have ganked certain thoughts in print, we may possibly yet bring up in a face to face conversation: "I believe it was Montaigne who said......" ?
I don't really feel bad about what we're doing as a written culture. I'm not playing Holden Caufield here, and calling us all phonies. ("I believe it was Holden Caufield who said.......")Everyone seems to know that this is going on, and in the long run nearly all knowledge has passed from one person to another by various media. I just wonder sometimes if we are collectively giving credit where it is due, or are we backing up our own shake-y cred by willy-nilly name dropping all of antiquity. Little bit of both, I guess.
And really, this all could very well could be the most positive of any development. Just a shift in facility, ehhh? For example, I've got a "Bartlett's Favourite Quotations" on my desk that I used to use on occasion when I actually wrote things.( I mean, when I actually put pen or pencil to paper. ) and I never felt like I was "cheating" when I found a good quote. I think that any guilt I'm going through concerning instantly having the world's wisdom at my fingertips is the relative amount of ease involved in utililzing the treasure trove of accumulated human thought. Are we smarter? Or, are we more stupid because we no longer go to the encyclopedia, the dictionary, the Bartlett's, or to books at all for the resources for our composition?
Most would say, "Calm down. It doesn't matter what medium is used to communicate. What matters is the communication."
May be. May be.
But I believe it was Marshall McLuhan who said, "The medium is the message."
I didn't Google that, BTW.
