While skimming through the list of old text message conversations on my phone I thought about how many words we use. So, I decided to write something a little lighter.
Words have power over us. They can influence is to great feats of kindness or horrific acts of violence, yet the words themselves have become cheaper. Just imagine how many words arrive in your mailbox, both physical and electronic, every day, they’re in your news feed, on the television and radio, coming from the people you live with and the people you communicate to over remote conferencing applications.
We are swimming in words, drowning in them. Words bracket everything we do, are contained in and constrained by everything that we do. Even the visual arts eventually get described in words. Computer programming even is done in words, although then it is converted into machine code which stretches the definition of the word to unrecognizability for most people.
So, as a matter of course in a day, we must disregard, ignore, filter out or encapsulate many of the words that are thrown at us. We use email filters, recycle bins, mute or inattention to allow us to only see and hear the words that mean the most to us. It is self-defense! We are buried in information, which is mostly conveyed with words, and much of it may not be relevant to you at the moment.
The act of this filtering cheapens the word though and because advertisers and influencers know that they could be filtered, they try their best to create more words, new methods and new twisted ways to get your attention, making their words even cheaper still.
There are more words posted to the Internet than we can read in a day, there are more videos posted to YouTube than we could watch in a day (many of which contain words) and it is just astonishing, amazing, awesome and if you think about it long enough, also terrifying.
So, if you have read this far, I thank you for reading my few words. I am one small voice in the billions on the Internet, so just the fact that you took a few minutes out of your life to listen to me rant is pretty special to me.