Less | SCHOOL OF NO MEDIA: Beyond the Described & the Prescribed

MORE IS MORE?

The Unlearning Specialist — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 20:07:10 +0000

[Ed.: Are words just by themselves the essence of hyperbole?]

Death by Internet Hyperbole: Literally Dying Over This Column
By Jessica Bennett

From the New York Times
The text exchange was unspectacular: a friend explaining a video that had been posted by a classmate to his Snapchat feed. Jordana Narin, my 20-year-old research assistant, was half paying attention, sitting in my living room working on a project, texting between breaks.

“Omg literally dying,” she typed back, not missing a beat. She turned back to her computer.

But Jordana wasn’t literally dying. She wasn’t figuratively dying, either. In fact, she didn’t even crack a smile.

“I don’t even know what she’s talking about,” she told me when I asked. “I want to be like, ‘I don’t care.’”

But instead, she typed what to some may seem like the most dramatic response imaginable. Except that it wasn’t.

“It’s almost like ‘dying’ has become a filler for anytime anyone says anything remotely entertaining,” she said. “Like, if what you’re saying won’t legitimately put me to sleep, I respond with, ‘OMG dying.’”

R.I.P. to the understatement. Welcome to death by Internet hyperbole, the latest example of the overly dramatic, forcibly emotive, truncated, simplistic and frequently absurd ways chosen to express emotion in the Internet age (or sometimes feign it).

Other examples: THIS (for when a thing is so awesome you are at a loss for how to describe it); feeeeeels (for something that gives you multiple feelings); unreal!!!! (for when a thing is totally believable and only mildly amusing); yassssss (because “yes” will no longer do); -est (greatest, prettiest, cutest, funniest) EVER, which now applies to virtually all things; and “I can’t even,” for when something leaves you so emotive that you simply cannot even explain yourself.

There’s also a;lsdkjfa;lsdkgjs; meaning “I’m so excited/angry/speechless that all I can do is literally slam my hands/head/body against the keyboard” (thus producing a series of gibberish that usually involves the letters a, s, d and k).

“I use ‘I can’t even’ whenever I talk about babies or puppies, or sometimes couples, but not like couples our age, but older couples like my parents,” said Sharon Attia, my other 20-year-old researcher, a photojournalism student at New York University.

Other members of the “I can’t even” advisory system, she said, include: “I can’t,” “I just can’t even,” “I cannot,” “I literally cannot” and “I have lost the ability to even,” each of which can be used interchangeably to express hilarity, excitement, embarrassment, that something’s cute, that something’s hideous, or just that you’re freaking out.

But hyperbolic death is perhaps its own linguistic category, with recent causes that include (at least according to my Facebook feed): Beyonce’s Instagram (“dyyying”); a video of a huskie looking shocked when his owner wouldn’t give him the last bite of his food (“*dead*”); and Hillary Clinton, who was captured in a GIF brushing off the shoulder of her blazer during the 11-hour Benghazi hearings (“This is the best thing to ever have happened”).

Eternal rest can also take the form of “dying” (death in process), “not breathing” (first sign of possible death), “all the way dead,” “actually dead” and “literally dead” (just so you know), as well as “literally bye” (for when you’re about to die), “ded” (when you are dying so fast that typing an “a” would delay the entire process) and “RIP me” (after you’ve had a moment to process it). There’s also kms, or “killing myself,” which, as 15-year-old Ruby Karp, a high school student in Manhattan, explained it, can be used to say something like “ugh so much homework kms!”

In Jordana’s case, “dying” or “dead” had been used in recent conversations to respond to:

A friend drunk-texting.

Seeing a Dane Cook look-alike and his dog on the street.

An unlikely romantic pairing.

A friend live-tweeting “50 Shades of Grey” (so good she was “dying AND dead”).

How good an article was.

Hearing an author she admired speak (“omg actually dying”).

Eating Pringles in bed.

“‘Literally dying’ has become, like, the new LOL,” she said, referring to the acronym for “laugh out loud,” which, of course, if you know literally anything about Internet speech, means precisely the opposite.

The trend toward hyperbole appears to echo a broader belief among experts that young women are its first adopters. Studies have shown that women tend to be more expressive, using more personal pronouns, more emotive words, more abbreviations like LOL, as well as creative punctuation, emoji and even more descriptive hashtags.

But such speech is not limited to them. “I can’t even” has been around for at least a few decades, part of a linguistic concept known as “negative polarity,” when there are two negatives in a sentence. The use of “literally” in situations where “figuratively” would fit perfectly — you know, it was literally 100 degrees just last week — has been in use since at least the 1700s, said Jane Solomon, a lexicographer at Dictionary.com. And hyperbole is in some ways necessary, as the impact of certain words erodes with time. (Think of how “great” used to mean really great, like Catherine the Great great, whereas now it’s hardly better than “good.”)

The Internet has taken all these speech patterns and hit them with a dose of caffeine: the need to express emotion in bite-size, 140-character bits; the fact that we must come up with increasingly creative ways to express tone and emphasis when facial cues are not an option. There’s a performative element, too: We are expressing things with an audience in mind.

“I think this may be one of the major parts for social media; you are stepping onto a stage,” said Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguist and founder of Idibon, a company that uses computer data to analyze language. “Performance generally requires the performer to be interesting. So do likes, comments and reshares. Exaggeration is one way to do that.”

And so it is, then, that a member of the boy band One Direction shows off his pecs onstage, and girls on Tumblr coo that their “ovaries are exploding.” That when the pop star Taylor Swift hosts a series of surprise listening parties for a new album, her fans respond that “My poor heart could not keep up,” “call me an ambulance,” “we all died” and “I literally had to plan my funeral arrangements cause I wasn’t going to make it.” Even editors do it, writing headlines that declare “This rapper will restore your faith in humanity” (really? Will he?) or that you “need to drop everything and watch this.” Yes, it’s as if we speak in click-bait now, every response more dramatic than the last.

Yet if a bacon-flavored ice cream sundae gives you all the “feels ever,” or you are “dead” over a cute cat photo, how do you respond if something is actually dramatic?

One idea is to play dead. That’s the concept behind @omgliterallydead, an Instagram account that features a skeleton (“Skellie”) engaging in everyday activities: drinking a pumpkin-spice latte, relaxing in a sauna; out for sushi. Skellie is a play on death, clearly, yet when I mentioned him to a college student I know, she responded: “Skellie is LIFE!!!!” (What’s more dramatic than being six feet under, rolling in your grave, actual skeleton dead? “The afterlife, obviously,” joked Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist.)

Or, if you’re Madison Jones, Ms. Narin’s roommate who recently responded “dead” to a baby picture her father had texted her, you prompt a family-wide panic about the state of your health.

“What?? Dead what??” her dad texted. “Maddy?”

“Dad I’m fine holy cow!” she replied. “Dead at that pic cause it’s rly cute!!!”

Jessica Bennett’s first book, “Feminist Fight Club,” will be published in 2016.
© New York Times 2015

In Between

The Unlearning Specialist — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 13:58:06 +0000

In between the beginning & the ending… from Silent Light – Stellet Lijcht – Luz silenciosa (Carlos Reygadas)

Any Given Moment: Brother Steindl-Rast

The Unlearning Specialist — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 23:49:22 +0000

Brother David Steindl-Rast, A Network of Grateful Living (ANG*L) and his many books!

Br. Steindl-Rast, against solidification:
The religions start from mysticism. There is no other way to start a religion. But, I compare this to a volcano that gushes forth …and then …the magma flows down the sides of the mountain and cools off. And when it reaches the bottom, it’s just rocks. You’d never guess that there was fire in it. So after a couple of hundred years, or two thousand years or more, what was once alive is dead rock. Doctrine becomes doctrinaire. Morals become moralistic. Ritual becomes ritualistic. What do we do with it? We have to push through this crust and go to the fire that’s within it. — During Link TV’s Lunch With Bokara 2005 episode The Monk and the Rabbi.

Normalisation/Normalization

The Unlearning Specialist — Sun, 25 May 2014 18:16:04 +0000

On October 8 1976, Michel Foucault described the process of normalization [in French].

Le 8 Octobre 1976, Michel Foucault décrivait le processus de normalisation.

http://schoolofnomedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/FoucaultNormalisation.m4a

The transcript of this interview by Philippe Nemo will appear at a later date/Une transcription de cet interview par Philippe Nemo devrait apparaître ici.

Pour écouter l’interview… If the above audio does not load…

Pas de Musique! No Music!

The Unlearning Specialist — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 22:17:02 +0000

The Break-In Scene

Jules Dassin on Rififi and his deciding not to use music for the longest time ever in commercial cinema

Close To Open

The Unlearning Specialist — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 04:30:37 +0000

From the L.A. Times:

These blind mice hear like Stevie Wonder

Blindness can alter the neurons that process sound, according to a new study that would suggest how unusual musical talent develops among blind singers, such as Stevie Wonder, pictured at this year’s Grammy Awards celebration. (Christopher Polk / Getty Images)

By Geoffrey MohanFebruary 5, 2014

Want to hear as well as Stevie Wonder or the late Ray Charles? A blindfold not only might help, it could re-wire your brain in the process, a new study suggests.

The study, in mice, was the first to show evidence on a cellular level of a phenomenon that has been relatively well chronicled behaviorally – damage to one sense can be compensated with strength in another. And that compensation can happen later in life, when the brain is generally less susceptible to rewiring, the study found.

Blinding mice for about a week altered synapses connecting the thalamus to the auditory cortex, according to the study, published online Wednesday in the journal Neuron. The changes in hearing acuity were not due to recruitment of vision neurons, which remained unchanged, while those in the auditory cortex exhibited more sensitivity and discrimination among sounds, the study showed.

“We always thought that the adult brain just couldn’t change, and there was some evidence supporting this,” said study author Hey-Kyoung Lee, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Mind/Brain Institute. “The plasticity is really reduced. The surprise here was that we were able to regain that by depriving vision. And it’s not the visual area that changes; it’s actually the auditory area that changes. So we were doubly surprised by the findings that we had.”

The improvements also were dependent on experience – deafened mice that had been subjected to the weeklong blinding did not experience the changes in auditory synapse activity, according to the study, which also involved the University of Maryland.

Researchers believe they have described a kind of crossed synergy in the brain – one sensory area induces another to be more amenable to change, even though its own architecture remains relatively inflexible.

In the brain, then, it takes a village to create a Stevie Wonder.