Decadence and the Death of Communication
If there ever were any misgivings about the critical condition of the thrashing, flailing, fated art of expression, tête-à-tête, the Pre Raphaelite angst was chronologically misplaced. Looking to the Romantics for inspiration, riding on their Arthurian bandwagon steered by the prophetic John Ruskin, while Christina Rossetti rode shotgun was all very grave post 1848, but the 21st century renders the artistic escapade almost carnivalesque. Any doubt with regard to the regression of the human conveyance of thought has been secretly loaded into the caboose of messages which await us incessantly on the other side of the mirror. So, the next time someone barks out, ‘the world has become a smaller place’, dog them into substantiating whose world and how before their malfeasance goes viral.
Of course, everyone wants to talk, it’s the human denial of nonexistence that plants an impugnable seed that makes the individual confident that his or her words have a purpose and as the perpetual motion machine is a concrete idea, semantically speaking, speech engenders purpose. But just as human speech has travelled the lonely mile, it has shared a complicitious relationship with art, music, war and in recent times, technology. The implacable plethora of devices which serve to facilitate social intercourse have unfortunately administered such an extent of communicational placebo that the carcinoma of pseudo-communication has sustained a life of its own. The mere impact of infatuation that the user possesses for standing between a looking glass and a hand glass contributes to the creation of an exponential maelstrom of the same text, the same images and the same set of theories which rebound off a platform with hardly any friction. The internet, the holy mother of resource sharing has become a blaring, incongruent pot luck of a few flagrant opinions switching many hands like a penny, travelling the world without any expense, save time. Ironically, it is this very platform which is nurturing its own critique. The development of languages in the potpourri of svelte networking has resulted in the invention of the tentative abbreviations, slapdash art and little motivation towards any advancement in any value added interchange. Whether fallow brb saved anyone enough breath to complete a cursory will before the impending cardiac arrest or whether the Machiavellian smiley ever brought anyone fractionally closer to empathizing with another person’s chemicals in heat is hardly the point; the real question is in this dastardly discounted circumcision of the language was any progress even envisioned?
Tragically, the elegy of an arsenal of cell phones, tablets, computers and other ways to ‘reconnect’ with persons of interest concludes with a dolorous volta voicing an impotency to appreciate personal company. As we’re always together through our idiosyncratic Snapchat correspondences in pet shops or our Whatsapp billets-doux sitting by Powai lake, it is an indolent misery to meet someone once in a while. Where is the thirst for the dangling conversation – we practically scaled the Andes sometime in the last month, listened to the new releases of Korpiklaani a fortnight ago and hey, we’re screen siblings, we don’t need a rendezvous. More is the plaintiveness in making conversation, what was the constant single file beauty of letters across a flat screen – uniform, equally spaced and mediated – is now the eye’s adaption to the graceless motions of a face which lacks that disciplined delivery and the troughs and trials of a touch and go voice which is only too wary of pillory piranhas. The knock-down drag-out slaughter of the embellished self is momentary, the deception as the art becomes artifice lasts well into retrospection. In the end it is our enamel perfection in the armoire of graphic porcelain which eviscerates us; our revulsion towards our imperfections is as old and as rigid as deism. Occasionally, eschewing from the verity of private chagrin, the parley is light, joyous and ample with seasonal josh, but dedicated indulgence in the voyeurism of private lives leaves the reunion a little bare in terms of surprises, absolutions and the presence of good willed jubilation. It’s like rereading or having the fifth serving of prawn puttasenca, the constituents have not altered, the craving has settled. The cornucopia of reciprocation also advocates the ‘more is less’ abstraction. While I have five different ways of reaching the average friend, my choice of media is limited by word count, pixel checks, privacy barriers, professional civility and of course their continuance on the medium of my choice. Trying to swap between all of these totems of social supremacy, I get very meagre crumbs of information across such as a chipped toenail, two lines from a David Hall poem or a mawkish aspect of my CV. The obvious argument would meander towards an inefficient usage of all these means of communication which I haven’t mustered in my 21 years of existence. Agreed, but in my defence, these chariots of noncommittal ambivalence are all too new, getting newer every day, though proficient, will I ever reach peripheral proficiency? Instead, in the twenty one years of wandering the realms of privy experience, surely the pictures, the posts, the tweets and the shares are all raindrops that wash off the banyan tree to carry a sentient flavour of their former host; they do little to recompense its essence.
It is vain inertia which arises from the assurance that our last conversation was merely a week ago, it is the origin of a slow and steady root rot which will over the years recant all that binds a faction of minds. While it may pass for societal rectitude, unlike art which survives the artist, a message cannot outwear the messenger. The thespians will not perforate the sieve and our affections will not swaddle those who repudiate their ostentatious exertions at fostering good relations. Relationships are weaned on predilection and a certain tenacity which requires the old world idea of a face to face conversation, devoid of any media except the air we share. Much like any occupation whose accolades lie in the plane of commercial satiation, emotional salvation and an overall sense of being, communication takes vigour and a steadfastness which often escapes us in the course of our academic development. The undertaking is not gargantuan to an initiate, but distinction takes just as much perspiration as one’s professional moxie. An ascetic understanding takes degrees of failure, all of which span the massive mesic strata which divides the friendly from the friend. But you reap what you sow and this cultivation of communication is no different from the annals of any heritage of accomplishment. Sure, it means an hour dropped from a Napoleonic study schedule, leaving the sales meeting before everyone else and always appreciating that everyone else’s twenty fours are no shorter than yours. Yet, years and years hence, while others chaperone memories, you, embodying Shakespeare’s articulation of all that is spent, will possess ‘that which should accompany old age, as honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.’
