Near the end of his mammoth 6-volume Oxford History of Western Music (which, I must confess, I haven't read all the way through), Richard Taruskin suggests that musical notation may now have outlived its usefulness. Notation emerged in order to preserve and transmit music, to enable other people to play something far beyond the context it was originally composed in. But when I can upload my latest composition straight onto YouTube (be warned), why bother writing it down?
A few years ago, the top Facebook execs apparently decided that prose was going the way of musical notation, if not necessarily the dodo. Their thinking was similar to Taruskin's. Now that we can just speak into a camera and upload the video onto the world-wide web (as they're calling it), why would anyone go to the trouble of writing their thoughts down?
The huge shift to video on social media that the tech execs anticipated hasn't quite materialized (at least not yet). There are a lot more videos online, and YouTube has become a venue for spoken commentary and argumentation (what the Greeks would have called rhetoric) from ordinary citizens in a way that was never quite possible in the world of TV, with its relatively few channels overseen by hierarchical corporations. And yet, people are also still writing a lot of prose.
I think that's a good thing. The written word, you see, still has its advantages.
The main one is that it allows both writer and reader to take things at their own pace. That means you can wait till you're really sure of what you're saying to write it down. You can look up everything you can find bearing for or against your argument and include it in a footnote. You can even change your mind and write a completely different sentence to the one you thought you'd be writing. And your reader can go back and puzzle out what you've written if they don't quite get it the first time round. They can pause for a while to ponder what you've said before moving on to the next paragraph.
Writing also has some plus points when compared to conversation. Now, I'm aware we're all intensely aware of the joys of in-the-flesh interaction at the moment, after weeks if not months of lockdown. In-person conversation has its plus points too (not least of which is that we seem to find it inherently enjoyable). But we're also all aware, I think, that there are things we choose not to say to people's faces. Often that's a very good thing. Often it's a result of an apparently natural tendency to want to be kind to each other. At other times it can be a result of hierarchy or outright intimidation. That means it can often be easier to state what we really think in the privacy of our own rooms (or, at least, behind the partial screen of a laptop screen).
Of course, many people are retreating to their rooms to voice their thoughts - they're just doing so into a camera rather than on a page. They're obviously free to do so - I'll defend their right to that to the death, even if Voltaire might not really. But what shift to video there has been has brought with it its own issues. We're rarely intimidated in front of someone talking to us on YouTube in the way we might be in real life, and (as comment sections attest) we usually feel free to reply in ways we wouldn't in person (sometimes even to a pathological degree). But videos do transmit things about a person - like passion and attractiveness - in a way that often distracts us from the tough but necessary work of evaluating claims on their merits. Since the types of charisma that videos transmit aren't equably distributed, it can also exacerbate various forms of privilege.
All that, obviously, is why I've written this entry.
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