Last night I was up late attempting to redesign my website, one of those bottomless pit activities that gobbles up the hours without feeling you’ve really done anything. What makes it interesting and worth doing though, is trying to imagine how (and if!) casual visitors to your site will make sense of your work in the way you’ve organised it- its easy to forget they mostly have no clue who you are and where your work has come from or is going. A coherent framework and easy navigation hopefully clears up some of that murkiness.
Anyway I’ve been reading more into the topic I posted on last time, and have re-visited some of the ideas I’ve had milling around, namely, language, communication and power. I continued researching into keywords, and their use in writing ‘sticky’ web content- that which is easily find-able by search engines and therefore delivers the web surfer-customer to your site. I discovered that content is written with specific keywords frequencies in mind, plus that there is an art of writing to accommodate ‘awkward key phrases’ while reducing ‘white noise words’ (the, and, as etc) and ‘filler phrases’ which distract the crawler bot. Language is optimised for maximum findability; again this connection between language, visibility and networked economy.
Speaking of white noise words, and of the reduction of language to key phrases brought to mind an article (http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/06/orwell-language-newspeak) by Nina Power, in which she discusses the spread of “Nu-Language,” so-called due to its inverse relation to the Newspeak of George Orwell’s 1984. Well-known words like doublethink, thoughtcrime and unperson have a ‘flatness’ or lack of affect, which belie the punishments and consequences associated with their use. Newspeak is a language spliced and truncated for political ends; the less words there are in use, the less opportunity for thought, especially resistant thought. “Each reduction is a gain,” the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four puts it, “since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought.” Power continues: “It is, therefore, above all in the language of Nineteen Eighty-Four that Orwell’s deepest fears about the fate of human freedom are expressed”.
This linguistic reduction is eerily prophetic of today’s spliced, conjoined web words (defriend, YouTube) but also the ‘reduction as gain’ formula echoes the profit maximisation through language optimization method of content-creation.
She goes on to describe the contemporary equivalent, which expands rather than attenuates language, filling it with a kind of ‘white noise’ of jargon, a junk syntax used across bureaucracy, managerial literature, academia, pubic services and the art world, where verbs, nouns and adjectives are interchangeable. It operates like a ‘linguistic fog’, obfuscating meaning with an ‘oppressive vagueness’, making resistance difficult since the listener has no clear sense of what is being promoted or advocated- which is precisely its aim.
Different means of acheiving the same ends: the slippage between what is being said and what is being done. Mark Fisher’s latest post talks about exactly this in relation to the current narrative being propagated by the UK government. As he puts it, the current linguistic doublethink is ‘we’re all in this together’, conveniently taking off from where ‘there is no alternative’ left off. He explains it far more coherently so I’d advise reading the post if you’re interested. (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org)
As for my work, this led me to experimenting with methods of attenuating language or reducing existing texts to create new ones. Textalsyer, for example allows you to analyse the frequency of words and phrases in your text (especially handy for working out if you’ve hit the target percentage of key phrase frequency when writing web copy). I tried it out on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind: ‘consciousness’ was the most common word and it scored fairly low on the readability index- no surprise there then. I’m interested in working with digested, digested reads- the pics I’ve attached are of 3 works of philosophy, auto-summarised into one sentence and rendered in sticky letters: pop philosophy at its ‘stickiest’.
