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| Homo est animal socialis or in ancient Greek, as originally written by Aristotle, zôon politikon. In a well received recent book, the Munich journalist P.J. Blumenthal (2003) collected in detail what he could find in the literature about the fate of feral children, i.e. on children that grew up in the wild or, in wider terms, spent a significant time of their development isolated from contact with other human beings. He comes to the conclusion, that humans as we know them are the result of social interaction during a critical developmental period. If this interaction - for any reason - fails, the result is a creature more ressembling a wild animal than a human being. |
| Interaction with other humans: we heavily depend on it, and we only feel well if this interaction succeeds and develops favorably. This interaction implies that we act on others and that others act on us. In ancient times, without technical schnickschnack as newspapers, books, telefon, radio, TV, and computers, our interactions were restricted to local groups. We knew just a handfull of people, and our experiences were restricted to a rather limited range, limited by our basic physical capacities. This idyllic situation received a first blow with the invention of writing. |
| As long as our utterances are received by those that can hear us, we can be quite sure about our audience. At least they have to be close enough so that they can understand what we are saying. In most cases, the speaker knows the listener, and the listener knows the speaker, and any speech content will easily enter into our endless human game of acting on and being acted on. The scene changes dramatically with writing. |
| Whilst we are writing, we usually sit alone, trying to concentrate. Sometimes our writing is addressed specifically to another human being that for the moment is too far away to hear us speaking (we call that a letter). Sometimes we address a community as e.g. a journalist addresses the readers of a newspaper. It may even happen that we address a community we are totally unaware of (as e.g. I presently do). But why? Why am I sitting hear, typing words into the internet? Whom am I supposed to act upon, and who acts upon me? |
| Poets, journalists, authors, novelists, writers, composers, and also painters and sculptors very often create their output without any clear idea about their receivers. It has been claimed that some of them wouldn't even care to be received. But that's a lie. It is intrinsically human to care about being received by humans. It's the endless play of giving and expecting to get something in return. |
| Due to technical developments, our creations can be multiplied nearly indefinitly. Books written by a single person are translated into dozens of languages and are read by millions of people. Millions of people are acted upon by a single person, and millions are acting back on this single person. Of course, nobody can stand to be acted upon by millions. Here, the system clearly has hit (and exceeded) its boundaries. |
| Everybody has the natural desire to be received, to excert some action on others, with recognizable feedback. That's foundamentally human. In a natural, pre-technical society, senders and receivers found to their equilibrium without major problems. And even a few decades ago, sending was associated with technical obstacles that limited the number of efficient senders to a minority, with good chances to be received. But today? |
| Today, millions of internet sites, if not presenting explicitely pornographic material, are visited in essence by robots and search engines. That's the ordinary clientel for third millenium senders. More and more people are presenting their views, long desperately to be heard, succumb (at least transiently) to the illusion of acting upon others, only because others have done so for centuries by apparently similar means. Will they be heard? Who is to receive all this material? Finally, we all may turn into futile senders, with messages not received by anybody, since everybody is fully occupied by sending and by waiting for replies... |
| P.J. Blumenthal (2003) Kaspar Hausers Geschwister. Piper. |