Language and Resonance in the Age of Efficiency

In the age of second brains, productivity tools, and character limits, everything around us — if that preposition can be used to talk about the internet — seems to be pushing towards concise communication. Reaching wide audiences requires all-terrain language, and the urgency of the present moment, amplified by chronological feeds, doesn’t allow for much stylistic variety. Efficiency is key — compressing as much information as possible to the least amount of words is the ideal of all communication.

While I do agree that many areas of interaction, like good leadership or effective collaboration are built on concise explanations and easily transmittable ideas, the potential of compressed meaning has its limits. When language is reduced in this high-modernist quest for efficiency and common sense, something of the essence of what’s needed to create truly new ideas is lost.

Think about your favourite book, an individual passage that made you feel something, gave valuable insight, or even changed the way you think about the world. Why did this particular piece of writing touch you?One of my favourite authors is Milan Kundera. I first read 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' in my early teens. Year after year I keep going back to the book, reading it through a new prism each time as my experiences in life grow and shift focus. One of the many passages I’ve kept close over the years is the following: “The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor.”

When I’m reading, what makes me stop and think is a sort of ‘resonance’. For an idea to resonate, it needs to do the following:

• Something in my subjective experience or previous insight connects to the idea in front of me and gives it potency. The connection between two ideas always carries the possibility of a third, new idea.
• It moves me through language. I might find the phrasing particularly harmonious, the choice of words unique or playful, or an individual sentence might make me relate to the author in a way that provokes emotion.

Resonance is what makes an idea stick, rather than serving merely as another piece of information. In ‘Observations on ‘Wild’ Psychoanalysis’ Freud notes that if knowledge alone (of one’s symptom) without affect was enough, his patients could be cured simply by asking them to go to lectures or read books, and that “such measures have as little effects on the symptoms of nervous disease as distributing menu cards in time of famine has on people's hunger." A true, transformative insight requires being experienced through affect.

Freud’s metaphor is very much applicable to the information ecosystem we live in today. While we have immediate access to masses of information, we seem to be regressing in terms of how we relate to it (and perhaps, through that, how we relate to each other). Information in the form we consume it today seems to create more anxiety than resonance. In our quest for efficiency, we risk losing the power of language to deeply affect us — to touch our poetic memory. Without affect, we keep accumulating information to optimise towards goals based on existing structures, rather than striving to create new ones.

Historically, thinkers with a distinct or difficult style have often been celebrated posthumously. Kafka, Hegel, and Proust all rose to significant fame only after their deaths. The impact of rich, ornament language can be less immediate than that of concise writing, due, perhaps, to the smaller initial reach. However, the depth of insight it can give to the reader willing to go through the experience makes for texts that linger in time, and ideas that have the potential of infiltrating culture at large. This isn’t to say that concise text can not provoke affect and insight, but something about prolonged attention and contemplation give playful, even complex writing its disruptive power. It makes the potentially resonant surface bigger.

Common sense, like common language, reflects current reality. By relying solely on it to communicate on ideas we risk losing out on a different one in the future — in order to think in new ways we need new language.The tools we communicate with online should enable unusual, exceptionally creative ways of expression and language to be shared and discovered. There is no reason, if not the limitations of the interfaces we use, for wild ideas on the internet not to have the kind of lingering, evergreen value a classic book has — ideas that resonate on a deep level, that we can revisit, that evolve over time. Even ones that don’t immediately take hold.