The world on paper, part 2

David Olson discusses ideas about communication, understanding, and interaction that are not only interesting but relevant to everyone, in every walk of life, in every place. Even as I sit here, watching the CW Saturday afternoon movie Contact, as Jodi Foster tries to explain the message from outer space and how it is to be interpreted, interpretation touches me. You could say it's the reason we're here, to try and understand it all--life, the world, the past, the present, ourselves, each other...I thought the fact that our modern understanding of the word "interpret" is the same as "to construe" or see in a particular light, while the older meaning of the word is "to reveal," "to understand." Sort of suggests that maybe the fuckedupness of the world could be related to our view of what truth is...we're all so modern and communicate with a million people from everywhere a million times a day, overpopulated, overstimulated, overworked, overpressured. Stay home from work one day and watch daytime television--between Divorce Court and Springer you'll see how shallow and pedantic we've become. There's too much to make sense of, and our making-sense skills have been corrupted. Makes one wonder what does matter, what is true, in the end, bottom-line.

"The seventeenth century view which many writers refer to as 'Modernism' was the invention of a new solution to the problem of interpreting texts; what these same writers refer to as 'Post-modernism' is recognition that there is no ultimate solution." I was happy to have this succinct handle of post-modernism, as it has become one of those words people just toss around to sound smart. I Googled 'post-modernism' for images only and found everything from crappy art to a naked woman doing a headstand. I liked this one for some reason:
Even Wikipedia says, "Postmodernism is an idea that has been extremely controversial and difficult to define among scholars, intellectuals, and historians, because the term implies to many that the modern historical period has passed," and warns readers of weasel words. How many other words and ideas and gestures have lost their black and white, becoming a gray mess dependent on the context and diplomacy of interpreters?

I thought Chafe's "idea unit" idea (unit) was interesting, but what if your idea consists of more than one noun phrase, more than seven words, and more than seven seconds? That's all a speaker's consciousness can handle?

On page 120ish, Olson talks about conversation implicatures, the stuff you just know how to interpret, the structures of interacting. I like how little kids make up jokes, knowing and playing with the rhetoric form of joking, but not making sense yet. My older brother and sister still tease me about the dumb unfunny jokes I told as a kid, and now my four year old nephew is doing the same thing. I also think that if we could keep our first-order metarepresentations like when we were kids, where we didn't delineate a different between what is said and what is meant, we'd be a little happier. Of course, the givers of messages would also have to have this naivete, a lack of wanting to deceive or confuse...I remember reading that I Love Lucy was the first television show featuring schemes and secrets of a housewife, intended only for humor, and how this show's impression of societal consciousness led to more widespread and unabashed dishonesty. Kinda of harsh on Lucy, but still an idea worth examining--how does what we watch and laugh at affect us? Has literacy done the same thing on a much more general, diluted, and unintentional level?