Nina Schuyler’s thoughts on the Slow Language Movement struck a bit of a chord with me, especially as my days seem to have become filled with noise. Noise from a house full of young children, noise from an infant who even now is just beginning to fuss, noise from the mp3 player continually playing the latest download from librivox. Noise.
When I sit down to write, I find concentration difficult. My mind races and ideas stumble over one another. And I find the internet a noisy place to compose my thoughts. The endless stream of random bits of information. The noise of Twitter, of my email box, of my feed reader, of following link after link after link. Sometimes I need the quiet to write. More often, I need to write to find the quiet. That one strand of a thought I wish to follow and the act of writing brings my thoughts into focus.
Recently, I have longed for a complete thought. But I thought maybe, with the spurring of Nina’s entry, I’d settle for a complete sentence. A really good, long sentence. One you have to concentrate on to appreciate its meaning. One that goes beyond a single 140 character tweet.
Slow language.
Perhaps somewhat serendipitously, a sentence came to mind. Not the whole thing, of course. It was much too long for that. But from the reservoir of my mind came another entry dealing with internet noise.
The ability to recall passively collected information that was gathered purposelessly in the past and put it to use in the future is a particularly powerful form of intelligence. Why Online Noise is Good for You
A long sentence with some alliteration, even. I have mounds of passively collected information, gathered purposelessly. I never set out to find it. I just bumped into in my travels about the internet. Sometimes, it becomes relevant and I am amazed at just how much of that random noise I find myself searching for later.
But I am by nature introspective and reflective. The best books are those I cannot wait to put down. Those which have sparked a thought or a way of seeing I want to reflect on further. I interact with text, part of why I so love blogging. Here, I pull some ideas apart, and draw others together. I correspond with a piece of writing as I normally do in thought, but more formally. More complete. I take the noise of the internet and slow it down, if only for a single entry.
Beyond simple recall of particular information in the past, internalized noise can be just as useful in the formation of wisdom and perspective as introspection, thoughtfulness and other forms of attentiveness can be. Ibid.
Carpe clamorus*? Is the best means of managing the noise to simply embrace it over morning coffee? Or do we need to pull away, slow down and dust off our college reading lists?
Slow language? Or swimming through noise? Which characterizes your relationship with the information age?
*I have no idea if my made up Latin is grammatically correct.
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For a bit of noise and reflection, check out this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling, lolcats style!
Slow language, my specialty!
I’ve even been called impenetrable!
The inability to hear myself think drives me beyond frustration. Noise–I feel violated by the constant noise… and then after a bit too much quiet and reflecting, I seek it.
We live in much too noisy a society, imo. Hearing oneself think seems to be fading from our human experience. I watch my youngest child and he seems lost if there isn’t noise and activity around him. Of course he is quite the extrovert; he thinks by talking; he makes sense of his world out loud. That is beyond my abilities, or even my desires. I like having a private world of my own, in which I can think, create, ponder… and nobody is there to interrupt or critique or divert.
Which characterizes my relationship? It’s a constant battle in which the noise is winning.
Shawna, right now, two of my children are running in a circle through the house yelling “Charge!” I’m longing for the quiet of last night as I wrote this, even with the baby just beginning to fuss. I can only take so much of “just noise.”
I need quiet time after everyone goes to bed. (Like now.) I tend to be overwhelmed by internal noise anyway, but I find the internet can make it worse at times.
Today, we were out sailing, and all 6 of us were on the boat. Forget listening to the water lap the hull. Forget hearing the breeze in the sails. The kid static was almost unbearable. We’ve tried to use boat time to teach them to be listeners, but it seems to drive them frantic.
Now, they’re not netizens, or very computer-oriented at all. Nor do they watch a lot of TV. So how does a moment’s quiet make them crazy? Is there something I’ve failed to teach them? Sometimes I wonder.