We seem to be bleeding out the positive energy that was sometimes the national style.
For many Americans this can seem like a season of despair. the constant din of alarming news on various platforms is wearing us out. Our politics now is fraught with controversy over the undoing of years of progress. Normal routes of trade and international cooperation have been undermined. And, as ever, gun violence continues at about 47,000 deaths a year: much higher than most other peer nations. All of this has been made worse by a president who has mostly abandoned the usual roll of ‘binding up the nation’s wounds’ with appeals to transcendent values. Instead, his ersatz rhetoric of hate punishes individuals and institutions unaccustomed to having to defend their usually laudable objectives. Add in the fact that that legacy television news is folding under the crush of MAGA and FCC threats. ABC, CBS and NBC have yielded enough to have imprints of the President’s shoelaces on their foreheads. How can a person escape this doom loop?
Most communities are safe, but the assurance of it is gone. No wonder people are looking to A.I. for prepackaged nostalgia for times that weren’t necessarily better, but seemed more civil.
Researchers like Harvard’s Stephen Pinker note that a look at a lot of hard data reveals our world is now safer and less violent than in previous years (The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2010). The difference is the expansion of the personal boundaries of the known made possible by news sites and social media that have penetrated and been absorbed by the culture. Clearly, Americans think they are less secure. Their perceptions of violence and disruption penetrate our mediated spaces: from school shootings to the collapse of the social or physical infrastructures of whole communities.
Through all of this it is worth remembering what “news” has become. It is now a 24/7 preoccupation for many of us. And we shift seamlessly from video news, social media, and various online sites devoted to updates and opinion. There is a transformation of attention to reporting from a one-shot glance at a newspaper or evening newscast into incessant doom scrolling throughout the day. All-news channels like CNN mostly attract an older audience and continuous viewership. This has been confirmed by research that includes the corollary that these viewers feel less safe even in their own communities.
What exacerbates the problem is the decline in the kinds of activities that generally made people feel better about themselves and others, such as attending live events, attending church services, or participating in clubs and service organizations.
If we remember that traditional news has usually included the worst things that happened on a given day, the pool of available encounters within a population of nearly 400 million is always substantial. Hence, we get Robert Putnam’s representative image of a person bowling alone to feed our sense of personal isolation. Our discomfort is also fed by the steady drone of crime as entertainment, such as the elaborately produced and popular Netflix documentaries about lethal family members.
Solutions
So if news is now ubiquitous and a heavy tax on the soul, what are the solutions? How do we become less sour and more productively engaged? Of course, expressing opposition to the authoritarian impulses of this administration is a must. But it may also make sense to follow neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin’s advice to seek the restorative power of music. Among other things, music can reinstate our faith in the ability of different people to come together in support of one single vision. The parts of any composition are complementary rather than competitive. It is also gateway to those parts of the brain that tap into positive feelings rather than harsher binaries of languages that ask us to pick sides. One can chose any musical form open to the non-discursive world of moods and feelings that are usually resolved in harmonic resolution. As Nietzsche noted, “Life without music would be a mistake.”
Baroque music usually lifts my spirit. It always reminds me what smart people working together can achieve. The lucky souls who have the talent to effectively enable this inventive world could be playing Bach. But they could also choose a modern classic like that selected by the Danish Girls Choir.
Some people find respite in putting digital media aside in favor of hiking, fishing, reading, or a simple game of cribbage. Modern media observers note that A.I. images of nostalgic scenes from the 90s or earlier on Instagram can do the trick. But anyone temped to find redemption through a richer experience of life can do better than find it on a cramped three-by-five device. Our politicians may be failing us. But there are still so many around us or nearby who are still on their game. Why commit to mediated experience through the filter of someone else’s political or ideological agenda?
Why would we cede to strangers the most characteristic elements of our presence?
Several recent YouTube videos have shown experiments where a person agrees to work with an A. I. firm to create an avatar to stand in for themselves. The effort involves a little more work than I thought: lots of sampling of one’s voice and body to get enough “data” to create a passable clone. For some reasons this has some appeal, even beyond gaming.
?
To be sure, many of us are required to put in facetime with groups that can drain our energies. I remember a faculty meeting where we had an extended debate about what kind of pencils to pass out at open houses. It would have been nice to have an avatar sit through that discussion. Similarly, those obligatory photos of faculty found in a hallway just outside of most academic departments can be awkward. I always thought that I might quietly slip in a picture of the classic film star, Cary Grant, above my name. The narcissists passing by would never notice. But others might quickly recognize that Grant’s agreeable likeness is nothing like the prickly guy they know from faculty meetings.
As a rhetorician I am interested in the process,where we pass off someone’s, nay, some electronic device’s efforts to stand in for our personal rhetoric. Among other things, A.I. is about finding another way to clothe part of ourselves.
But why would we cede to strangers the most characteristic elements of our presence? Think of living life with only a collection of greeting card words to represent our feelings, or depending on the slack descriptive prose of a high school textbook to describe everything else. Most of us would hate these limitations. We’ve worked hard in life to acquire a recognizable and successful identity that reflects our experiences and values.
We all carry unique rhetorical fingerprints.
If I was still in a classroom on a daily basis—and characteristically overestimating my persuasive powers–this would be the point I would want to pass on to my students. They should insist on the perogative to speak in their own authentic voice. No A.I. system is going to get it quite right. How could it? Lived experience is unique to our biological selves, not to silicon-based and generic memories pasted together by an anonymous organization in our name. By early adulthood we have already earned the right to see and describe the world in our terms. Achieving a coherent and specific lexicon is a significant developmental achievement, a kind of rhetorical fingerprint. Ceding control of the ways we leave our mark on the world is fool’s errand. It is one thing to sing another’s song. It is altogether different to allow any other source to speak in our name.
Of course my logic includes the premise that we see our discourse as an extension of our authentic selves. But straight discursive prose tends to be generic: the same kind of language you might find in a Wikipedia article or a textbook. Some students asked to write about what they do not yet fully know may be only too happy to pick up anything already written that they can claim, even though this is plagiarism. In assigned reports and summaries of events, schools encourage student writing that is disassociating and neutral. The defining fingerprints of any author will be concealed. Even so, pure exposition tied to one’s own avatar won’t garner much interest. Who really wants to be a talking encyclopedia? Most of us need to have a unique rhetorical style that is ours alone. This is what it means to earn the honor of authentic authorship.
Researchers like Harvard’s Stephen Pinker note that a look at a lot of hard data reveals our world is now safer and less violent than in previous years (The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2010). The difference is the expansion of the personal boundaries of the known made possible by news sites and social media that have penetrated and been absorbed by the culture. Clearly, Americans think they are less secure. Their perceptions of violence and disruption penetrate our mediated spaces: from school shootings to the collapse of the social or physical infrastructures of whole communities.
If we remember that traditional news has usually included the worst things that happened on a given day, the pool of available encounters within a population of nearly 400 million is always substantial. Hence, we get Robert Putnam’s representative image of a person bowling alone to feed our sense of personal isolation. Our discomfort is also fed by the steady drone of crime as entertainment, such as the elaborately produced and popular Netflix documentaries about lethal family members.
If I was still in a classroom on a daily basis—and characteristically overestimating my persuasive powers–this would be the point I would want to pass on to my students. They should insist on the perogative to speak in their own authentic voice. No A.I. system is going to get it quite right. How could it? Lived experience is unique to our biological selves, not to silicon-based and generic memories pasted together by an anonymous organization in our name. By early adulthood we have already earned the right to see and describe the world in our terms. Achieving a coherent and specific lexicon is a significant developmental achievement, a kind of rhetorical fingerprint. Ceding control of the ways we leave our mark on the world is fool’s errand. It is one thing to sing another’s song. It is altogether different to allow any other source to speak in our name.