 The biggest, I think, difference for me is that, as an artist or writer, the immediacy with which you have an audience with the internet, it's just so much different than, like, you know, as a poet in my younger, much younger years. Before it was sort of like, before I was doing a lot of online publishing, I was much more like sort of home with like head and oven, you know, writing slowly. And now it's more of a, the audience is right there. And because of that, I've actually kind of made a distinction, which like some people will call my Twitter account poetry, but I actually don't, and I don't know why I do that, but with my poetry, poetry, I like to, I prefer to not use anything so time sensitive. Like I want something that is more eternal because I think that's a direct reaction to so much of my life being spent online where like in some ways things are eternal. I mean like a search term, you know, a web page will live, can live forever. But at the same time, the turnover is just so fast that I think when it comes to poetry, it's like, I don't know, I want more space for like contemplation and also maybe something that just won't be thrown away so quickly. That's fascinating. I mean, John, do you find that there's something ephemeral about language online that is not, that doesn't hold for a long time? No, no, I don't, I don't find it ephemeral at all, especially since the nature of the medium is such that there's a certain permanence about it. I see the time that we're in as a linguistic improvement over the way things were before, although it's hard to feel it within our short life spans and seeing the changes happening at such a dizzying speed. And so for example, imagine this space, say 150 years ago, it may have been this building, for all I know, it wasn't this building, but this space you can imagine probably Edgar Allan Poe was here. Let's say something was going on here that involved language. If we could go back to that time, one thing that we would find odd is how arid the linguistic culture would have seemed because if you spoke, you were expected to speak in a high oratorical style, you were supposed to use remarks, all of us would have notes with us instead of just going blind the way we're doing it now. And if you wrote something, you were expected to write in tapeworm sentences. Henry James could have a career. And that was all really that there was. There was very little room for speaking in a vernacular way and having it considered artful except for the narrow realm of maybe a certain kind of quaint vernacular performance. You might write the way a working-class Irish person spoke in a book or there might be a book of verse, but that was it. Today, we have a much richer culture because for example, in addition to speaking in a formal way, although actually the space for that in the culture has narrowed considerably. It's considered artificial to speak too well. The fact is with spoken word poetry and especially rap, vernacular language used artfully now makes money and is part of the culture. You can't say that America has no poetry because America has rap. Then in the meantime, all of these things we're seeing online is chaotic and is variegated as it can look. What that is is vernacular writing occupying a space in the public square. Now, you can write the way you talk and we can reflect all the complexities and the nuances and the jokes in the way we talk in print. All of this is vernacular and spontaneous and it's hot and it's messy because that's what speech has always been, but we can do that in a way that was virtually impossible in, say, 1980. That means that we have a richer linguistic culture than we had 125 years ago. We have a richer linguistic culture than we had 20 years ago. I think it's all fantastic, myself. Just to push back a little bit, though. I'm playing devil's advocate because I'm not sure I hold this opinion, but if we already talk the way we talk, then how is it a broadening or an expansion to now start writing the way we talk too? Because when you're writing the way you talk, you're making it better because you can look back and fix things and you can affect things. So, for example, if you write in all caps, you're not yelling. You're yelling. There's an irony in it. If you really yell in writing, the last thing you're going to do is use those rather funny capital letters. So, it's artful speech written down. We couldn't do that when we were children. I love it. So, do you think that the irony... I mean, people talk about Internet speak, which we know is not a monolith, but when people sort of try to describe it as one thing, they say it's tinge with irony. That's sort of its prevailing characteristic. And it's interesting to think that maybe that irony comes from the necessary gap between speech and writing. When you translate speech to the page or to the screen, there is going to be something lost and something gained, and it's not a one-to-one thing. And so maybe the irony comes in to sort of signal awareness of that sort of slight disjunction. That's my next book. Yes. The whole idea that we think of ourselves as more ironic than people in the past, we're trained to think that couldn't be true, but I'm beginning to think it is true. And the question becomes why, and a lot of it has to do with exactly that disjunction between print and speech, which we now negotiate all day long every day. It makes us a different kind of person. I'm coming to suspect, yes, there was irony in 1925, but there was a different kind. There's something about modern language that I think bears looking into. As you can see, I started working on this about 10 minutes ago, but I can't get off of it. I'm going to be persistent. Well, that self-consciousness, the self-awareness, we certainly see that reflected all the time in social media and other online discourse. And what's interesting is that, this is something John has talked about in the past, too, that gap that you're talking about between text and speech and how we make up for the fact that we are having something that's like speech but in a textual form, but we're missing things and we make up for that in various ways. And what are we missing? All the sort of non-linguistic or what are sometimes called paralinguistic features, things that go along with language. So the things that we do in terms of our gestures, what we do with our face and our tone of voice and all the rest that might be lost, and how can we make up for that through a little hashtag or emoji or something like that, which can help to present a certain kind of stance, an attitude. And it very often is a distancing kind of stance. Like, I'm saying this, but now I'm going to pull back a little. I might be a little sort of self-effacing about it. In a way, it's almost like a preemptive strike because people can so easily ridicule you and I'm going to do it to myself first by putting on a, using a hashtag or emoji that indicates that. And so, as John was saying, there are ways that we sort of are immediately ironicizing ourselves and our speech. And it's fascinating to watch because we do it to ourselves and then we do it to other people and there's this kind of interchange that happens where a particular linguistic turn of phrase, for instance, may pop up. And then, seemingly almost immediately now, it can get sort of recontextualized, re-signified in all these different ways and sort of shot through with all these different voices that are giving their own stances on it. So there's, you know, and that can happen immediately. I mean, we see it happening, for instance, with political language. There are plenty of examples we could talk about from the campaign. Hillary Clinton says the word deplorables and within hours, deplorables means something quite different from what she meant. Or on the other side when Donald Trump says a nasty woman or bad hombres. So there's this kind of re-signification that's happening so quickly. I mean, it's like, you know, within hours of a public figure saying something, you can get it on an ironic t-shirt. So that, you know, that process of, you know, has been so accelerated that we come to expect it. I mean, everything is already on its surface ironic somehow but appeal through those layers of irony to really understand it, if you ever do. And it's preserved. And so in terms of history, the fact that we are actually getting in this, at least relatively permanent form, these new expressions that come in means that we'll be able to know how we talked in the future in a way that it's sobering how little we can now. So for example, Film Forum ran a silent film from 1920, I believe, six, about a year ago. It was about a flapper. It was called Be Yourself. And you think, well, okay, Be Yourself means that she's gonna realize herself and be honest about herself. And you can't help thinking, that's a little present for a film in 1926. Be Yourself, why do they call it that? I did some digging around that. I don't know if you've found this expression. Be Yourself in the 20s, man. Ah, be yourself as in get real. That's something that people said. I found it in two things. Somebody's saying, ah, be yourself. But frankly, the people who said it are dead or close to it. And it's not something that you would find in any slang dictionary. I just found it by accident because I'm strange. And the fact is that in the film, because it's silent, you're watching people talking, what were they saying? They didn't sound like Fitzgerald novels. They didn't talk in full sentences any more than most of us do. What were they saying? We don't know. They're gone. Everybody's going to know what we were saying. I find that thrilling, even if I'm not here to see it. Okay, I want to jump on the be yourself catchphrase. Because something that really fascinates me about your work is that you use irony and the sort of hedging of internet language. Or you have not maybe so much in your most recent book, but you have used that self-consciousness to ironically show authenticity. The idea that everything is behind seven veils means that you are actually more present and more real than you might otherwise be if you hadn't used that system of codes. And I wonder if maybe you could take us inside how that works or whether that was intentional or whether that even makes sense. I think it's just dark humor. I think it's like what do they say? Humor is suffering plus time. So there's not much time actually. There's a lot. It's a lot faster. From bad idea to tweet is a lot faster than from bad idea to mailing a letter used to be. Or from bad idea to you know video. Bad idea to tweet is pretty fast. And I think actually in some ways that can make for some of the most like primal immediate language, but I think or it can make for some of the best writing and some of the worst writing. That songs that editorial filter. But in terms of the way irony plays with being oneself. I feel like if I make something humorous I can get away with more to some extent. Like I can tell more of the truth about myself. It's less scary to tell the truth about myself if there's irony. But it's interesting that we've been talking about irony as this result of sort of things shifting into a more textual basis and not being able to read someone's body language. Because I feel like what are some of the things that we've had to do to convey irony now? Often I feel like when you send a text message the irony can be lost and so we have to be more explicit in our irony. And hence emojis. Those will serve to be like only kidding. Or I've seen people will put asterisks next to certain words. There's indicators. And I found myself even LOLing too much. Sometimes I'll just get in an LOL spiral of LOL death. I'm texting with someone and everything is LOL. Instead of saying yes even things that are not funny at all. I've been crying and texted LOL actually just to kind of take the pressure off of having to be a human being having feelings and risking saying something vulnerable. So I guess I don't know. I think it's a question maybe we do have more irony now but like is our humor more stupid? Or I don't know. What's the way to say it? You guys are the linguists. I don't think our humor is more stupid. But I think it's not only the irony it's also just the transcriptional honesty. So listen to most conversations. We laugh and giggle much more than we might assume. It's a social easing. They're little martinis that you stick in between every couple of senses. For somebody who never laughs doesn't do all of that meaningless giggling that's an indication that they don't like you really. It's part of being a person. If you were going to make a robot seem real the robot would have to learn to do all of this senseless laughing that we all do. LOL is just that. It basically comes in exactly where you would go. And it means that you're actually transcribing the way people actually talk. It's wonderful. We don't know how Eleanor Roosevelt talked. But we know how we talk. She went but we never get to see it. I also feel like there's with LOL like if I'm texting with someone from an internet chat with someone let's say a chat room. I'm never in a chat room but let's pretend you know I didn't really even knew what that was. It was a strange place. I feel like bad things happened in there. You could tell. Yeah. It stayed out. Dark. Yeah. Bad things happened. I feel like LOL can kind of the amount of LOLs that equate to even someone I mean laughing out loud, forget it but even just a huh. I wonder how many LOLs to huff. What's the ratio? Cause I almost feel like LOLs and we have soothing someone else too. I'm hearing what you're saying even if it's like I want you to go away. Definitely. Yeah. It's like a little a tons pill I don't know why I thought of that but it's for the conversation. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean again it sort of takes the place of certain yeah ways that we sort of lubricate our conversation and make it easier and you know linguists talk about sort of the fatic function PHATIC. Where you're talking about the function where we're using language just to sort of open a channel, maintain the channel, let you know I hear what you're saying, I am not right. And then you know so all of that those things that we do just naturally in terms of turn taking in a conversation that we do face to face we find these new ways of expressing it whether it's LOL or just a K for okay which is you know generally just the death blow. I'm told that that's the angry one. Right? Well it depends. I mean you know this isn't some monolithic kind of usage I mean in certain in certain subcultures that K could be let's say dating I don't know that could be a very sort of difficult thing to deal with what is that K I mean when it's just could you just pick up this stuff from the store on your way home K. I've heard what you said. I'm not disagreeing with it. I understand there's no problem here. You need a reaction for me I'm providing one. Over and out. Over and out. Roger that. You don't smell a little bit of well if I must in that K. Well in that exact situation if I got back the K it would be well why didn't you pick up the cereal. That's a lot to read into a K but okay. So K period I think would be a real I mean if you're going to bother to punctuate your text like you are feeling some feelings I think yeah. Recently I had an experience where I wasn't sure if someone was mad at me and the last text they had sent had a period and I was like shit that like it's on but then I looked back and every single one of their texts even when we were in like lovely times had been ended with a period so it's a very it's not a nice thing to do to a person that sounds like a sitcom plot. Well I think that's so hard because it is changed so fast I remember when I first started texting it's oh how do I make sure that people know that I'm joking like what emoji or what jokie things can I include. But now it's like how do I let people know I'm serious so it's like I am mad at you and I'm like oh I hate you too I'm like no I'm really mad at you like that was terrible so I guess maybe the solution to that is like don't have those freighted conversations over text but yeah it's hard it's a jungle. What happened to email is a question there was a time when one could write long emails and it was considered normal I would say that time I think of Yellowtail Wine being fashionable it was around when blogs were just coming out and there was no kale and you could still you could write emails and somewhere around 06 or 7 you started getting very brief responses to long emails and I learned nobody wants them anymore unless they're over a certain age I'm 51 my census that people about 65 and over still don't mind but other than that I've learned nobody wants a long email it seems texting replaced it but it means you can say less am I getting old and feeling that way? I think the actual correlation here is kale so it's not texting it's kale now he says e-kale e-mail has become e-kale the tipping point I remember this what about you on that? didn't you used to write long emails? there's definitely been a shift it's fascinating to see how something like email which seems so cutting edge 20 years ago whatever now seems old fashioned now seems quaint something you would associate with Sandra Bullock on the net some old fashioned idea of what we do online sleepless in Seattle right and I think that's definitely if we're looking to the future that shift is ongoing and certainly when people are now these days looking for more secure forms of communication that won't somehow get hacked e-mail seems even less of an appealing thing as a mode of communication but you know it's certainly texting has taken its place in many ways but you know it's also I think just the sort of the short form communications that we have whether it's text messaging tweeting and various other things in some ways we expect more of that kind of rapid fire call and response type of communication and to the extent that I get emails very often they look like that now and so I think there are certain expectations that are changing it's like we should be able to say what we need to say in this very concise format and obviously there are sort of more long form explorations and things but in terms of just sort of everyday communication in some ways we may have sort of stripped down a lot of the bells and whistles we're not necessarily so concerned with how do I start this e-mail how do I end this e-mail how do I address this person we could just go straight into the message without even having a dear so and so or high so and so or whatever because that's just more the expectation now and we don't need to figure out a sign off either you know and so obviously there are situations when you're dealing with someone that you're not necessarily comfortable with where there might be a certain power dynamic say between a professor and a student and things like that where these sorts of issues become sort of more fraught and how you sort of craft this message but for the most part when we're dealing with people in our surroundings people that we're familiar with we can dispense with a lot of that and so yeah I mean that seems to be one ongoing trend that we're witnessing I mean would you relate this to sort of the onrush of information that we're all experiencing now like we need a more compressed way to communicate with each other because there's just so much out there I remember I was reading a little bit about I think this guy was writing in the mid 90s but he was saying that instead of sort of savoring language online we are hunting for information sense and so we kind of ruthlessly scan the page and we think what can we extract from this and then move on to the next thing and if we don't get a cent then we're off to the next thing and you have lost our interests goodbye forever and so I do wonder whether this is a matter of information overload as opposed to just changing more as for no reason yeah we do have an information overload or at least a whole lot more than there once was I can distinctly remember say 1995 what I read from physical magazines and newspapers I did not feel that there was too much I wanted to read more than I ever could read but there was more time to I hate to say it but to look up and smell the roses now with the endless temptation of the devices that all four of us are going to be looking at as soon as we step off of that stage yes it's harder to read a book it's harder to read a long New Yorker article and there's just so much that we can learn from the 100 things that we look at every day now I think we can idealize the extent to which any of us were truly taking in all of that long form literature before so for example yes you would sit and read a mile long article in the Atlantic about this, that or the other thing but I don't know but how many people were really reading the whole article and how much were we retaining of all of that all of that may have been a sort of Victorian artifice that was hanging on maybe the fact that we're all now living in a village where we're communicating in short overlapping bursts all the time and increasingly reading in that way maybe it's more natural and maybe in the end we're not losing anything is my tendency but there's a part of me that misses that you could curl up with something not so long ago and there was nothing to look at on your phone that wouldn't have made any sense it's harder and harder I will never again write a book longer than about 180 pages because I just assume I wouldn't want to read a book longer than this I know I can't hold their attention and I've learned more and more lately that spoken forms get to more people than anything that's on a page because people carry their earbuds around that's not it's not going to change but it is it's dislocating how quickly all of this has happened very much so Ben you're a scholar of these trends but I wonder if you have actually absorbed any of them as a writer and columnist to all street journal well it's funny I mean I tend to write in these 500 word bursts or a thousand word bursts just because that's kind of the format that I've inherited and it continues to be a useful one you can keep people's attention for that length if you're sort of writing a newspaper column length I do find though that extending beyond that into longer form things sometimes I do find that I've trained myself to write this particular length and get one sort of coherent message out and then you're done you're on to the next thing so the way that people are consuming things with this kind of information overload you might pick one article to read one message and then you're on to the next thing I would say that in some ways that sort of informs my approach but I've always been short attention span anyway where I want to focus very intensely on one particular say word in the news or language issue people are talking about and then move on to the next thing and so if anything I would say yes with social media and everything that leads to this this kind of people just focusing on one thing for a fluid of attention and then moving on to the next thing that's probably encouraged some of my bad habits in terms of having that short attention span and I'm finding I'll go back and read columns that I wrote a year ago or two years ago and think oh yeah it's already passed out of my memory it's like that's what we were talking about I was actually just talking to I used to write for the Boston Globe before I wrote for the Wall Street Journal and I was catching up with my former editor Amanda Katz and we were reminiscing about 2012 when I wrote for the Boston Globe and my most popular column by far was the one that I wrote about YOLO and the big thing in 2012 and here we are five years later it's YOLO what is that one my students use it you only live once yeah alright but these things have such a short shelf life very often where just looking back on something like from that from five years ago just seems like an eternity YOLO is it still current can I do it no it was there was a Drake song that featured it and it got this flurry of popularity in early 2012 when I wrote about it in the summer of 2012 young people were already sick of it and anybody over the age of 20 didn't even know what it meant so there was this weird age divide that had happened but then people like Katie Couric started using it and it was definitely dead at that point but I feel like that whole process that happens that churn just happens faster and faster now where obviously things like slang terms always have this what was popular last week might not be popular this week it just like fashion it can change very quickly but it just feels like social media now allows that churn to happen even faster so that you missed yesterday's meme too bad by the time you get to it it's now layered in so many layers of irony that you have to sort of peel apart if you sort of missed this sort of ongoing development and the birth and death of a particular meme or turn of phrase remember how important the hashtag seemed in say 2012 all those articles that people like you and me had to write or read and how students would write papers about it well now that's kind of passe well I wouldn't say passe it's being used but is it as interesting as we thought it was I don't know I think it perhaps had a certain peak and these things often go in cycles I think there's also a sort of in group out group thing that gets created I remember when I first went on twitter I didn't know what the hashtag was and it was weird like everyone was using it and I felt very estranged and I was like why is there a pound sign or like a waffle like I kept seeing it as the waffle like I thought I kept picturing it as the waffle and same with like the sideways when you do a heart that's like the less than sign three like I just did not understand and then but sometimes there will be a there'll be something like language or like a term that'll come up on twitter and like I feel like it's something like I take a long time to actually google it like I resist googling it but then finally there's like a moment where it's like you know I have to and it's always like the dumbest origin you know but it seemed so mysterious and like you are not of the moment like the most recent one was I think the well maybe not the most recent but the Dr. Phil there was a girl on Dr. Phil and she was like she said cash me outside cash me outside it was like a couple weeks ago I never knew what that was I didn't have time to check it out so and when I saw it it was like this is where it came from you know because people I really like back to all you know I really have to find out the origin story of this cash me outside and I was like it's a doctor like it was very strange so sometimes it is it's a little sad to peel back the layers cash me cash outside it was like do I want to know like just like come fight me outside she was like saying to her mom okay yeah right I remember so but you know people people really they really took to it yeah I mean I think a similar experience I had last week was everyone was mad about pineapple pizza was that just me it was two weeks ago you were a little slow on that one yeah I saw that on Facebook I didn't understand why were they angry I think they found an objectionable that people would put pineapple on their pizza it's like a strange hill to die on but also something that was settled many many years ago we are an affluent society wow but you can feel kind of nice standing outside of time and saying I have no idea why the kids are talking about pineapple pizza I don't know what this set of letters or this acronym means and yet I live yet I persist and I move on and it's okay thirsty that's what poetry is for me what's thirsty I heard somebody the other day say thirsty and I could tell it did not involve water that's is that newish well I'm all thirsty what was she talking about I think we don't know what it means it definitely came up in the American Dialect Society where did the year voting about two or three years ago yeah it's that old I don't know what that means I'm sure it has even older precursors but to be desperate thank you wanting something in an unseemly way or just seeming often it's about appearances I would say just sort of like doesn't mean horny desperately horny is that what it means I mean I think you can be thirsty you can be thirsty about ambition but I think the standard use if I may is horny the canonical definition these things come up so quickly I don't know all these things I think we should take some questions from the audience maybe I wonder how it would be the best to do this you guys raise their hands I find it very interesting that we talked about speech and language but so much of what happens in communication now is via video and images photographs, photographs that are overlaid with all kinds of stupid little things that distort them in various ways maybe the question is why can't we focus on that I was actually going to make a snarky comment when we were discussing the replacement of email with text and I was going to say now everybody is snapchatting that's right and the gifs and the memes etc. it's ever more pictorial that's definitely true I don't know if it's necessarily that the pictures are going to take over but you can see it as a dynamic synergy between all these things I kind of like the pictorial creativity where you kind of have cave writing beats rap in a way but that's just me trying to be accepting I don't know the whole development of emoji has been fascinating in that it's these little pictographs basically which shouldn't on the face of it have necessarily been as successful as they've been because you just started with a very limited set of course the Unicode Consortium keeps expanding and adding new ones but once that became available to people on their iPhones especially on their virtual keyboards it became sort of a new tool in their arsenal and so you can see this kind of you can see this efflorescence of it where even though it doesn't seem like it should be something that could really develop organically again because there is some consortium out there deciding which little pictures you're allowed to use and not to mention all of the difficulties where you don't even know if the emoji that you're using will appear the same on the device that it's being received on means that it's sort of fraught with all these sort of ambiguities and so forth and yet it's been fascinating just to see just how successful it's been certainly in the future there are going to be more of these sort of combinations of text and picture and voice in some combination and those graphic elements where people are having fun with it you know but I think the tech companies are trying to figure out how can we best exploit people sort of impulse to express themselves graphically, pictorially I mean if you think also about the like yeah the animated GIF for instance I mean in some ways that's like old modern technology that keeps people keep holding on to that animated GIF because you know you can just plop it into you know whatever you know tweet or whatever you're and it almost at this point I mean has this kind of like low tech appeal to it it can be something kind of grainy and it's just you know but it adds an extra element that you know text and you know moves it somewhere else or again can be a kind of meta commentary on what you're talking about a reaction you're sort of providing your own reaction and so that's what you know what I see all of that happening but and we haven't we haven't talked we've been focusing mostly just on the sort of the textual side of it there's this more graphic element and then you know the combination with voice I mean I mean if we're talking about the things that are really going to be dominating in the future it's going to be much more about sort of voice technology and how we use that and now we're as obviously anyone who's interacted with Alexa or Siri or Cortana or you know one of these digital assistants you know that's where the tech companies are focusing all of their work on like natural language processes and things like that where you know we'll look back on these days it's like you know they were using they were texting that just seems so old fashioned when you know sort of voice and picture maybe the primary modes in the future I think I think when you get into the sort of things that you're talking about which are very interesting in themselves a linguist would say that there's a stretching of the very essence of what you might consider a language to be the three primary elements of what for example human language is would be shared attention without shared attention there's no language capacity for associating arbitrary symbols with concepts and then sharing of ideas if you're not focusing shared attention upon using arbitrary symbols to share ideas then that's a different kind of language than what there was so I think we might even need a new word for what was going on with the bits and the bytes and the mistakes that they're making or the networks that they're coming up with that's linguist me and I'm used to that particular blob as applying to what I call language maybe I could extend myself into thinking of language as something else you know what I mean? first thing there's the three things the first is shared attention so code code which they call languages there's Python, there's HTML there's like a gazillion different languages it's creating something which I guess is a sort of it's manifestation is something that which we share multiple people focus on but it's like the language itself the words itself aren't what we're focusing on it's like the the mirage or the illusion or what the language creates like anything we look at online is comprised of that language but it's just we're not looking at the code itself we're not seeing it but it's kind of it's interesting it's like a more covert language underlying everything that we're looking at online so the code is allowing language but the code is a language but the code from what you're saying is the code itself a language under this definition? that's a genuine question I think the code is a language I think the code is a language yeah it's creating spaces where where there can be shared attention and what we're shared attention, arbitrary symbols and then exchanging ideas right which is definitely whatever you're going to do with the ideas is a different subject but exchanging ideas and also it's a code it's a language amongst coders too so that things can have a uniformity like in the way that there's a signifier of something like when I say apple point to an apple it means apple to me it means apple to you that's why there's also a language amongst coders so that they can identify those are languages, that kind of coding I think the audience member might mean something else broader if I could pick up on that just to take Watson as an example of the promise that we are often sold nowadays with artificial intelligence as being a way that computers are now supposedly having a kind of comprehension of language and the way that if you watch commercials that seem to be endlessly on these days about Watson having these seemingly human interactions with Serena Williams or whoever you know, in a way it's constantly irritating to me to see the way that because we have certain preconceptions of the way that whether it's Hal in 2001 or other science fiction depictions of artificial intelligence whether it's in the movie Her for instance and what our expectations are and what is actually being delivered I would say that Watson is a very you know, very useful for various things it was built as this kind of to master this kind of question answering task and on Jeopardy that's exactly what you need you know, big enough sort of database of information and you can extract information you can do that question answering task very well and there are all sorts of other applications we might be able to use that for helping doctors diagnose cancer or whatever they want to do with it right, that's why I brought up that example but the the the expression of Watson as this sort of you know, sentient creature is I think playing into our preconceptions of what we think an artificial intelligence should be like it's fascinating to see what's happening these days for instance with chatbots for instance where there are lots of very interesting developments that are going on with providing certain services very sort of limited roles like Watson that can be played, certain tasks that can be done by talking to a machine basically and actually sometimes in some of these applications of AI like chatbot what you're actually getting is human assisted AI so that it's it's a machine that's programmed to sound like a human but it might be getting some help from a human who is sort of behind the scenes and helping out so it's a human acting like a machine acting like a human you get into these very very odd things but I mean I think that what we see in terms of developments of that in the future too is that we're reaching a point where with chatbots and things like that which might in some cases you know pass the Turing test seem like you're interacting with a human on the other end but not quite and that not quite leads us to a situation where we talk about the uncanny valley if it's just slightly off it can be very disconcerting maybe even horrifying if you're having an interaction with something that you assume is a human at the other end and then you realize it's not and in some ways I prefer a kind of more artificiality to my interactions with a digital assistant or anything like that we can sort of maintain that divide and you know we don't have to worry about that uncanny valley problem I mean who among us has not been engaged in conversation and then suddenly realize that the person you thought you were talking to is not human and so actually can we be alive yeah I feel like these are the beginnings of human 2.0 when we are getting rid of these these kind of characteristics that I feel are very essential to who they are as human beings now what if we over time diminish that are we already seeing the beginnings of human 2.0 or whatever you want to call it extended argument long arc argument is not natural that is not what humans are hardwired for we are hardwired to have choppy conversation about one thing at a time and to make a case with 7 bullet points and various more overs and however that is something that is largely only possible when there is writing and writing didn't come along in humanity until if humanity had only existed for 24 hours until after 11 o'clock p.m. so the natural thing is not frankly to dig deep in the way that you are saying what human people do human people as opposed to other people is they chat at one another and to the extent that you go deep it would happen very gradually and it wouldn't be about many things I don't mean that human beings aren't intelligent but the long argument is a laterally artifice is threatened I think in our modern culture because we are more and more oral and we are taking in writing in smaller bits now you can idealize how many people were really taking in long form arguments in 1906 but you get the feeling it is going to be many fewer in 2026 because of the nature of the technology and how hard it is to pay attention to anything for very long what we have to change ourselves is that it's not as if human beings weren't that way before there was maybe a brief shining moment when the long arc argument had a certain primacy you could call it I hate to say education but it's going to be harder and harder to sustain attention upon this digging deep that you are talking about I'm not sure what to do about that we've managed not to talk too much about politics but it just feels like the transition from the Obama era to the Trump era is it certainly feels like there's been a kind of a shift in what is prized discursively and the fact that Trump readily acknowledges he owes his presidency to Twitter he said something to that extent the fact that he's able to package these little bombs that he can put out into the world 140 characters at a time which have this ridiculously outsized importance so that we're still talking about a tweet that from a few weeks ago about wiretapping and making jokes about him misspelling tap or whatever just the way that one single message like that can have this kind of outsized importance and he has absolutely no interest whatsoever in any long rumination on a particular topic he has a very short attention span so with that now as a kind of a political model for our discourse that in some ways reflects the changes that have been going on in terms of these sort of more bursts of communication rather than you know a thoughtful rumination on a particular policy topic and that sort of thing I mean it does give you pause to think are we on the cusp of more serious change or is this just something because we're so caught up in the moment this sort of political moment we may be sort of giving it perhaps more significance than it deserves I think we're stuck with it for good if Richard Nixon could have sent out tweets in 1960 he would have won it's really a matter of what the technology allows and Trump happened to come along at a time when he could do that and when you could see him online speaking with his one sentence thoughts and with his savory ways of putting things little Marco believe me all of that appealed not to a uniquely insensate electorate it was ordinary that's the way people have always been at a time when you would never hear a presidential candidate speaking that way the smoke filled room tended to filter people like that out and so it seemed as if things had improved but really all it was going to take was the invention of something like Twitter for someone like Trump who's not interested in oratory I don't find him extremely inarticulate he's normal but for someone like that he doesn't even have to try and yeah he can become president it's going to be more of that it's going to be a very interesting 50 years but if I if I understand your concern just really quickly it's not even just that he is not engaging in long ideas but he but you're saying that the way that we talk now sort of favors the talker over the listener and that there is not really a way to respond and I actually I take issue with that I think they get a compelling vision but maybe not an accurate one and that actually we have more opportunity to talk back to respond to like bring more voices into the conversation than we ever have before and so that might be another reason for hope just you know yes we tweet into the abyss but then the abyss tweets back and if you ever check your mentions after you've published a piece about Trump for instance hypothetically you will see that the void is tweeting very loudly so I do think that actually we haven't become less less interested in dialogue actually dialogue seems to be elevated in a way that it didn't used to be in the in the era of smoke filled rooms and that's something that at least encourages me go ahead John very quickly it's that usually in my experience they're not an hour they're relatively short and listening through the ear takes less concentration than taking something in through the eye especially for most people and my intuition is that most people listen to podcasts while doing something else they're going to work or they're doing the laundry and so I think of it as demanding less of the attention span for most listeners than reading a book to be perfectly honest I do a podcast but I don't listen to them they're kind of a readaholic and so I don't know but from the feedback that I get from my listeners all three or four I get the feeling that it's a very good podcast they are listening in a way that takes less strenuous effort than curling up with nonfiction pages Ben what do you the beauty of podcasts is I think there are so many different kinds now and so that part of the appeal is you can find your niche just like in kind of online culture whatever you're interested in you're going to find other people who are interested if you want to hear stand up comics talk about their troubled upbringing or something like that then you can hear plenty of that podcast for that? several but or if you want to learn about something interesting about language then you can listen to a half hour or so about that I think it is true that it helps that it's something that you can consume while commuting or doing something else and so that allows it to sort of override our short attention spans but I think it also shows especially in ones that are sort of set up more as a kind of a conversation we still have that real desire for insights that you can only get after really sort of feeling comfortable with another person and sort of digging deep I would say that goes against whatever trend we might be talking about in terms of the superficiality of discourse I think that there still is very much people do want to find out things in more depth in more detail get caught up in a story get caught up in the details of some interesting linguistic issues just as an example random example so that's a good sign but I think perhaps it is easier to do that through the ear these days than devoting the time to read a long piece in the New Yorker or something like that because it can accompany other activities and it can just sort of seep into your consciousness as you're going retro-day I think we have time for one more question you look so eager in the glasses something that I had just picked up on and that is right now and so I'm just curious and mystified by the fact that the only non-English word would be for a British conversation which was Trump's famous insertion of this emoji is a Japanese word but okay touche point taken and I would just say that a lot of what's happening that's very exciting these days in the field of natural language processing has to do with automatic translation the strides that have been made in the sort of more statistical methods that have allowed things like Google Translate to get pretty darn good in a lot of different languages beyond the expectations of a lot of people who thought that it would always be limited to just sort of figuring out the gist of something in another language what also interests me when we're talking about sort of crossing that linguistic divide trans-languaging as some people call it is that sometimes technology can certainly facilitate that in automatic translation is a great example of that but it's interesting too how sometimes it throws up barriers and one thing I was hearing about from Michelle McSweeney who is now a research fellow at Columbia you will hear her name now she's looked at texting among bilingual Spanish English speakers in New York and what's fascinating about that is texting does not really encourage what bilingual speakers would normally be doing code switching very easily back and forth between Spanish and English that kind of trans-languaging that people do on the fly all the time if they are bilingual speakers or multilingual speakers becomes more difficult currently at least with texting because you are using a particular dictionary or word list that's associated with whatever messaging app or device you're using will use a particular dictionary for one language a monolingual dictionary so all of the auto-complete and auto-suggest and so forth that we are used to only works in that kind of monolingual environment and then you have to switch to another switch consciously switch from English to Spanish or else just disable that entirely and so bilingual speakers from this study are actually not doing as much code switching by far that they would just in their regular speech and so that's an interesting way that because of the way the technology is created not really taking into account bilingual or multilingual speakers as their use cases it's something that I think that will continue to be a challenge as the world becomes more globalized and multilingual in order to accommodate that kind of linguistic diversity in a serious way when too often I think our technology is made by people who have this kind of monolingual American English view of things we can see that too obviously with digital assistants having trouble with even just other accents other dialectal variation in English let alone dealing with other languages you know I would add to that that modern technology makes it easier than it's ever been to learn a foreign language there was a time when you had to use books and records and cassettes in your house when I left my house my 10 year old son was learning French on Duolingo just for the heck of it see that couldn't be 10, 15 years ago but I'm going to say the wrong thing it's not the wrong thing if you just hear me out on the one hand we in this room can say now we can learn Mandarin and you can I'm trying to teach myself and I've got it all sorts of stuff in my phone but you know the truth is no matter how much you listen to it if you're over about the age of 13 and you're an English speaker Mandarin is hard even if you do manage to be able to say anything other than hello and the book is read then you have to learn to read it and learning to read it is impossible so on the other hand given that there is a universal language in this world and it's not fair but we're using it it's English English took it that's not going to change it's not going to be Mandarin even if more people speak Mandarin than English everybody uses it's going to be English it's easier now with this technology it will be easier for people to have access to that language who need it and I think that's a good thing too it's not that I think that English is a mighty wonderful tongue that has you know distridden the world because it was better than the others but you know we're here we are and so if somebody is a rural third worlder and English would help them to make a living now they can learn it on their phone instead of having to buy DVDs of movies and watch them over and over again in their house etc I think that's a great thing the world needs a universal language it kind of has one and with this technology everybody will have more access to it and we can all teach ourselves Danish but more to the point more people will learn Esperanto except it's English alright thank you so much for coming everyone this is great thank you guys it's really a matter of what the technology allows and Trump happened to come along at a time when he could do that and when you could see him online speaking with his one sentence thoughts and with his savory ways of putting things little Marco believe me all of that appealed not to a uniquely insensate electorate it was ordinary that's the way people have always been but there was a time when you would never hear a presidential candidate speaking that way the smoke filled room tended to filter people like that out and so it seemed as if things had improved but really all it was going to take was the invention of something like Twitter for someone like Trump who's not interested in oratory I don't find him extremely inarticulate he's normal but for someone like that he doesn't even have to try and yeah he can become president we will see more of that it's going to be a very interesting 50 years but if I understand your concern just really quickly it's not even just that he is not engaging in long ideas but you're saying that the way that we talk now sort of favors the talker over the listener and that there is not really a way to respond and I actually I take issue with that I think it's a compelling vision but maybe not an accurate one and that actually we have more opportunity to talk back to respond to like bring more voices into the conversation than we ever have before and so that might be another reason for hope just you know yes we tweet into the abyss but then the abyss tweets back and if you ever check your mentions after you published a piece about Trump for instance hypothetically you will see that the void is tweeting very loudly so I do think that actually we haven't become less less interested in dialogue actually dialogue seems to be elevated in a way that it didn't used to be in the era of smoke filled rooms and that's something that at least encourages me yeah go ahead John very quickly it's that usually in my experience they're not an hour they're relatively short and listening through the ear takes less concentration than taking something in through the eye especially for most people and my intuition is that most people listen to podcasts while doing something else they're going to work or they're doing the laundry and so I think of it as demanding less of the attention span for most listeners than reading a book to be perfectly honest I do a podcast but I don't listen to them because I'm kind of a readaholic and so I don't know but from the feedback that I get from my listeners all three or four I get the feeling that it's a very good podcast well thank you they are listening in a way that takes less strenuous effort than curling up with non-fiction pages Ben what do you yeah I mean the beauty of podcasts is I think there's so many different kinds now and so that part of the appeal is you can find your niche just like so much in kind of online culture whatever you're interested in you're going to find other people who are interested if you want to hear you know stand up comics talk about their troubled upbringing or something like that then you can hear plenty of that podcast for that several ten every stand up comic but or if you want to learn about something interesting about language then you can listen to a half hour or so about that I think it is true that it helps that it's something that you can consume while commuting or doing something else and so that that allows it to sort of override our short attention spans but I think it also shows especially in ones that are sort of set up more as a kind of a conversation you know we still have you know we still have that you know real desire for insights that you can only get after you know really sort of feeling comfortable with another person and sort of digging deep and so yeah I mean I would say that goes against whatever trend we might be talking about in terms of sort of the superficiality of discourse I think that there still is very much people do want to sort of find out things in more depth in more detail get caught up in a story get caught up in you know the details of an interesting person's life or get caught up in just the details of some interesting linguistic issue just as an example random example yeah so you know that's a good sign but I think yeah it's perhaps yeah it is easier to do that through the year these days than then devoting the time to read a long piece in the New Yorker or something like that because it can accompany other activities and it can just sort of seep into your consciousness as you're going retro day I think we have time for one more question you look so eager in the glasses emoji is a Japanese word but ok touche point taken and I would just say that a lot of what's happening that's very exciting these days in the field of natural language processing has to do with automatic translation the strides that have been made in the sort of more statistical methods that have allowed things like Google Translate to get pretty darn good in a lot of different languages beyond the expectations of a lot of people who thought that it would always be limited to just sort of figuring out the gist of something in another language what also interests me when we're talking about sort of crossing that linguistic divide trans-languaging as some people call it is that sometimes technology can certainly facilitate that in you know automatic translation is a great example of that but it's interesting too how sometimes it throws up barriers and you know one thing I was just I was hearing about from Michelle McSweeney who is now a research fellow at Columbia you will hear her name yes now she's looked at texting among bilingual Spanish English speakers in New York and what's fascinating about that is that texting does not really encourage what bilingual speakers would normally be doing code switching switching very easily back and forth between Spanish and English that kind of trans-languaging that people do on the fly all the time if they are bilingual speakers or multilingual speakers becomes more difficult currently at least with texting because you are using a particular dictionary or word list that's associated with whatever messaging app or device you're using will use a particular dictionary for one language a monolingual dictionary so all of the auto-complete and auto-suggest and so forth that we are used to only works in that kind of monolingual environment and then you have to switch to another consciously switch from English to Spanish or else just disable that entirely and so bilingual speakers from this study are actually not doing as much code switching by far that they would just in their regular speech and so that's an interesting way that because of the way the technology is created not really taking into account bilingual or multilingual speakers as their use cases it's something that I think will continue to be a challenge as the world becomes more globalized and multilingual in order to accommodate that kind of linguistic diversity in a serious way when too often I think our technology is made by people who have this kind of monolingual American English view of things we can see that too obviously with digital assistants having trouble with even just other accents other dialectal variation in English let alone dealing with other languages I would add to that that modern technology makes it easier than it's ever been to learn foreign language and there was a time when you had to use books and records and cassettes in your house when I left my house my 10 year old son was learning French on Duolingo just for the heck of it see that couldn't be 10, 15 years ago but I'm going to say the wrong thing but it's not the wrong thing if you just hear me out on the one hand we in this room can say now we can learn Mandarin and you can I'm trying to teach myself and I've got it all sorts of stuff in my phone but you know the truth is no matter how much you listen to it if you're over about the age of 13 and you're an English speaker Mandarin is hard and even if you do manage to be able to say anything other than hello and the book is read then you have to learn to read it and learning to read it is impossible so on the other hand given that there is a universal language in this world and it's not fair but we're using it it's English English took it that's not going to change it's not going to be Mandarin even if more people speak Mandarin than English the language that everybody uses is going to be English it's easier now with this technology it will be easier for people to have access to that language who need it and I think that's a good thing too it's not that I think that English is a mighty wonderful tongue because you know this strid in the world because it was better than the others but you know here we are and so if somebody is a rural third-worlder and English would help them to make a living now they can learn it on their phone instead of having to buy DVDs of movies and watch them over and over again in their house etc I think that's a great thing the world needs a universal language it kind of has one and with this technology everybody will have more access to it and we can all teach ourselves Danish but more to the point more people will learn Esperanto except it's English alright thank you so much for coming everyone this is great thank you guys