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- A taboo of modern culture: we actively make ourselves stupid; we are stupid. We don’t have anything to say. We aren’t very good at saying when we do have something to say.
- Language is in regression. Phone-culture prefers a visual semiotic; is predicated on visual semiotics. Words are largely reduced to the status of tags attached to images. Words are useless appendages, prehensile tails.
- It’s obvious that as a portable means of, or technology for, inputting information, the book has been displaced by the phone. This means that the word has been displaced by the image: the pixellated image to be precise.
- Phone images have less representational complexity than the language of the best books. I have no precise way of measuring this, but the loss of complexity, I would speculate, is exponential: by several orders of magnitude. Hamlet or Milton’s Satan or Austen’s Emma or Joyce’s Leopold Bloom: these are magnificent creatures made out of language; I don’t think the parameters of human cognition and self-recognition can be similarly nourished by GIFS or selfies.
- Software reflects hardware. The software of the phone is simple compared to the software of the book.
- The Gutenberg galaxy expands; the smartphone galaxy contracts.
- “The words of the world are the life of the world.” (Wallace Stevens) If we take this remark seriously, then, logically, we realize that the life of the world is dying.
