Perhaps it’s my job, or perhaps it’s simply who I am, but I think about ways to communicate a lot. I read more than my fair share of newsletters these days, for example, and spend my day — for my job, I promise! — online scrolling through the internet for information. In years past, I practically lived on social media or listening to podcasts, although my fervor for both has dimmed significantly as both spaces became overwhelmed by right wing voices that were more interested in demonizing everyone that wasn’t like them, and profiting from it. (I know a bunch of people who’d disagree with me about that characterization; they’re wrong.)
I think about the voices we put on for our different spaces, and the ways in which people write for newsletters or personal blogs are different from other spaces. The me I am “here” is more digressive, and less definitive than the one I am while working, for example, and less likely to make a cheap joke to close things out. (Well, I hope so at least; bad jokes are ingrained in who I am no matter where, however.) This is the space where the Elliott Smith line about being “not uncomfortable feeling weird” lives, which is fully not something I can embrace in professional spaces.
Different people flourish in these different spaces, to my eye, finding voice in a way they can’t otherwise. I’m fascinated by that — by the empowerment that different formats and outlets provides to different people, and seeing who finds themselves in each new incarnation. I think back to what it felt like doing Wait, What? with Jeff for more than a decade, and how that felt like a different thing to every other way I presented myself online, and how freeing it was; to this day, I recommend podcasting to people whose minds work certain ways because of the opportunities it presents that writing literally can’t.
I read something recently that suggested that the written word was authoritative, whereas the spoken word was conversational, and that the difference is something that needs to be considered more seriously as we move into a post-literate society; it’s an idea that’s been lodged in my mind ever since, as I play with it and try to work out what to do with it.
I don’t believe it fully, of course — social media is written, and inherently conversational and non-definitive, surely — but there’s definitely something to it that I’m trying to unpack. Am I trying to find a way to make my preference (Writing) do something that is better handled in spoken word form? Am I a square peg, trying to find a way to fit into a round hole? And how am I supposed to deal with the very idea of a post-literate society, anyway…?