Post-Language Apocalypse: The Lonely Typist

Imagine you are on a stage and the only prop you have is your wit. The audience is filled with razor sharp tongues enhanced by megaphones, and somehow you have to mesmerise these tongues into wagging good reviews of your performance. Your chest puffs with the first winds of a brilliant thought meant to awe this crowd into submission, but instead of articulate phrases and carefully crafted metaphors, you croak. Like a prince turned into a toad, you feel masked by your animal image. Nothing is certain now, except for the bad reviews, which will crowd every web page and blaze rejection in the headline.

I expect this is what social anxiety feels like. I thankfully have a lesser version of this and just feel like an elephant with a speech defect around people most of the time. But for those with full-blown social anxiety, every encounter must be fraught with dangers. So much so that withdrawal into a social replacement may seem to be the only possible secure avenue. The inevitable result is a masked loneliness compensated for through virtual contact in even the most populous of places.

 How do we mask loneliness? I suspect many replace human, face-to-face contact with TV shows, video games and everything else the web has to offer. Communication in a traditional sense then falls out of practice and the ability to be witty or simply converse often erodes.  For those not gifted with gab, speaking with another, sharing a thought will not be forced upon them and need never be practiced with the proliferation of social aids.

I cannot possibly condemn the screens in front of which we spend so much time. I enjoy everything they have to offer far too much - I can self-publish a blog, snoop on friends via facebook and gather all the information I need to nourish my soul. Yet even as I have a voice, somehow I am still voiceless. I am disembodied and safe from any direct experience of a tongue lashing. The screen has not enabled me to communicate or share better with others, nor has it given me the tools to enrich my experience of life.

Sometimes I worry that with the erosion of speech will come an increasing gap between the solitary path we all walk and the capacity to share this experience with other solitary walkers. Are we not becoming more lonely as we forget how to speak?

It is possible that language evolved as a social tool to aid cooperation and increase our chances of survival. When we awake one day from our virtual life, will we remember how to cooperate, how to share and how to express our inner life?