During the recent presidential campaign, Bob Dole summed up his position on drug use in four words: “Just don’t do it.” No white papers were necessary. No 10-point programs. No panel of experts. Just the shorthand. “Just don’t do it” was a sound bite made for TV. It was familiar, a takeoff on the Nike slogan. And it made a point on a hot-button issue without making Dole explain-or defend-it.
Dole communicated his campaign messages almost entirely in shorthand: “experience,” “leadership,” “trust” and the catchall of the ’90s-“whatever.” Bill Clinton used his own shorthand: “change,” “family,” “opportunity,” “responsibility.”
But if the candidates sounded like 30-second TV spots, they merely mimicked their audience. More than ever, Americans speak in shorthand, using buzzwords and code. Shorthand comes in both words and images. It commits the speaker to nothing while letting the listener connect the dots. Shorthand evokes without declaring, allows for spin and deniability. It’s both valid and vaporous. It is language made for an era of 80-channel TV and cyberspace, for a society accustomed to receiving information quickly through images and compressed text.
Shorthand is designed for an audience that is “screen literate,” comfortable absorbing information in video snippets and 30-second sound bites. It is encoded information that comes with a wink, like the “smiley” symbols that Internet users employ to tip off their unseen viewers.
“Code used to be the language of the insider,” says Sven Birkerts, an author who has taught expository writing at Harvard. “That notion has changed. Now, code is general.”
That makes America a society of encoders and decoders, sending and receiving signals that appeal to the eye and ear as much as to the brain. A great deal of the shorthand is conveyed by television and computers, media that operate in “real time” and favor images and phrases over complex speech.
The shorthand that Americans are using is also more cryptic and more colloquial than ever.
“We spend even less time unpacking the vocabulary now,” says Wayne Fields, an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who is an expert on political rhetoric. “You use a word, and nothing else has to follow. It’s shorthand for a whole argument. You say ‘character,’ and you don’t even have to mention Clinton’s (alleged) love affairs.”
But just as their shorthand becomes more visual and less verbal, more emotional and less intellectual, Americans are struggling to deal with increasingly complex or delicate issues.
“Using symbols instead of arguments, assertions instead of proof, doesn’t work very well,” Fields says.
One problem is that, even if shorthand is efficient, it’s so condensed and encrypted that it can be misunderstood. Another problem is that, as the language of immediacy, shorthand values not only simplicity over complexity but reaction over reflection.
“We’re using the spoken word, the 3,000 to 5,000 words that come to you quickly,” says Tom Shachtman, author of “The Inarticulate Society” (Free Press). “The larger language is what we use on reflection. But if something flies by you quickly, you don’t have much time to reflect.” Furthermore, shorthand splinters audiences and creates walls between those who do and don’t understand the code-especially the code of cyberspace.
The more Americans rely on “real time” media, such as the Internet, for communication, the more they’re using what Birkerts calls plainspeak, a “linguistic prefab” devoid of ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety and wit.
Birkerts remembers talking recently to undergraduates at a small Ohio college.
“I was struck by their verbal lack, knowing there was an idea they wanted to express and not having the tools in the toolbox,” he says. “They had a thought that needed a subordinate clause, and they couldn’t subordinate.”
Kathleen Welch, an English professor at the University of Oklahoma, calls them the “point-and-click generation.” They were born in the ’70s and ’80s, when typewriter-makers were closing up shop; these individuals grew up with video games and cable and the Macintosh. They are “screen literate.” They point a mouse at computer screens and a remote at TV screens, and they process information as quickly as their eyes and ears can take it in.
“Screen literacy is a kind of consciousness that is highly visual and aural,” says Welch. “It’s a merger of the visual and the written and the heard.”
Television and cyberspace are merely the latest phases of a communications revolution that began with the invention of movable type in the 15th Century. More recently, there was the telegraph, the first literally encoded medium. When Samuel Morse strung up the first telegraph wire in 1844, he launched a language that, according to New York University professor Neil Postman, author of “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (Viking Penguin) was the language of headlines-sensational, fragmented, impersonal.
“News took the form of slogans, to be noted with excitement, to be forgotten with dispatch,” Postman writes. “Its language was also entirely discontinuous.”
Each subsequent breakthrough-film, radio, TV, computers-has enabled encoders to transmit information to decoders more widely, more quickly, and more simply while engaging more of the senses.
“Marshall McLuhan said that whenever you have a new means of communication, you have a reorganization of the sensorium in the brain,” says Welch.
Unlike their predecessors, members of the point-and-click generation have grown up in an audio-visual era. They can read print, but it’s usually terse print superimposed on an image or arranged on a World Wide Web page.
Their grandparents’ sensorium was reorganized by the radio, which appealed both to the imagination and to the emotions. The Nazis, who broadcast the Nuremberg rallies in the ’30s, understood that radio was far superior to print for stirring an audience. Newspapers could not convey the roar of “Sieg Heil” from hundreds of thousands of voices, the crashing of boots on pavement, the sound of cymbals and drums, Adolf Hitler’s spellbinding shriek-what Ward Rutherford, author of “Hitler’s Propaganda Machine,” called the “vast agglomeration of rhythms which assailed the senses.” You did not have to understand German to receive the Nazi message. You did not have to know how to read at all.
The point-and-click generation’s parents, born in the ’40s and ’50s, grew up with television, which was both a visual and an aural medium that could bypass the decoder’s imagination and appeal directly to his emotions with images and sound. Members of the current generation have grown up not only with TV but with dozens of cable channels and with computers that allow them to connect with millions of people around the world in a nanosecond.
They are the “digerati,” comfortable zapping through 80 channels in 30 seconds, absorbing hundreds of images in a three-minute MTV video and reading “Webzines” on-line.
“The people reading Wired magazine,” the futurist Alvin Toffler has said, “are an entirely new civilization that is still in its infancy.”
If the digerati can seem restless, cryptic and inarticulate, it may be because the media they rely upon are much the same. Both television and computers deal in time-compressed messages that depend as much on quickly changing images and icons as on text.
“There’s a tremendous amount of instantaneous, disembodied communication,” says Welch, who is immediate past president of the Rhetoric Society of America.
If the digerati are impatient with complex forms of exposition, it may be because TV and the Internet don’t allow for them. Those mediums are designed for “surfing” and “browsing” and for communicating in shorthand.
“TV and the Internet are both levelers of linguistic complexity,” says Birkerts, whose book “The Gutenberg Elegies” (Faber & Faber and Fawcett) explores the fate of reading in an electronic age. “In TV sitcoms, which are a barometer of how we live at the moment, messages can be sent by a pregnant pause or a raised eyebrow.” So when Bob Dole said, “Just don’t do it,” it might have been because his audience wouldn’t sit still for a 30-minute policy discussion on drug abuse.
Elizabeth Dole did the Oprah walk at the Republican convention, rapping about her husband. The Democrats put “Superman” (Christopher Reeve) onstage in a wheelchair. As party pols on both sides gave tightly scripted speeches, videos played behind them on a huge screen.
“Hillary Clinton mentions family values,” says Adam Dubitsky, media-relations director of the American Association of Political Consultants, in Washington, D.C., “and right away there’s an image of Chelsea on the screen.”
Last summer’s conventions were a metaphor for how American politicians now talk about the vital issues-from the family to crime to jobs to race to gender-in shorthand.
“They throw out terms that are so broad,” says Dubitsky, “that they can apply to anyone.” The audience-tens of millions of voters who have decoded hundreds of thousands of televised advertisements-is left to flesh out the meaning of the shorthand terms.
“The iconography is strong,” says Northern Michigan University dean Michael Marsden, who studies popular culture. “What the candidates (were) looking for (were) powerful words, words that carry overtones.”
The videos-a smiling Chelsea Clinton, Ronald and Nancy Reagan cavorting-reinforced the messages, just as TV ads do.
“There were scenes, amber waves of grain,” says Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., who is executive secretary of the American Dialect Society. “Instead of a speaker just giving a speech, you got almost a narrative against these lovely images.”
What the Republicans and Democrats offered was a blend of infomercial and soap opera to a country that has learned from TV how to decode emotional shorthand. What was said was less important than what was transmitted. “The image of ‘Superman’ in a wheelchair,” says Welch, “overpowered everything else.”
While the networks were showing a Democratic convention that was deliberately served up in brief video morsels, C-SPAN broadcast Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 acceptance speech. The difference in rhetoric, in complexity, in length, was stunning.
“Think of the speeches that Abraham Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan gave in the 19th Century,” says Phyllis Franklin, executive director of the Modern Language Association in New York City. “They had fully developed paragraphs and presented elaborate arguments. And people listened to them standing up at an outdoor gathering.”
Americans don’t need fully developed paragraphs from their politicians these days-or demand complete sentences. Dole was satirized for his “been there, done that” discourse, but the digerati understood it. It’s what they’re used to from TV, where ads use phrases or single words, and from the Internet, with its condensed hypertext designed to fit around images. Says author Shachtman: “We’re communicating things that are less complex, so we’re using foreshortened words.”
Bryan’s eloquent “cross of gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic convention-in which he opposed the gold standard and argued for increasing the money supply through more extensive use of silver-won him the nomination. Unless he could have given the speech in sound bites, it probably wouldn’t have made prime time this summer.
“Our sensitivity to the context has changed,” says Shachtman. “One used to understand that something took two hours. But if you have an MTV-besotted generation which is used to three-minute videos with hundreds of images . . .”
The Clinton-Dole campaign was the natural evolution of what began in 1952, when the Republicans hired a Manhattan advertising firm and sold Dwight Eisenhower as a war hero in a blizzard of short TV spots. “Feeling sluggish, feeling sick? Take a dose of Ike and Dick,” Marya Mannes wrote in a mock jingle parodying the ads. “Philip Morris, Lucky Strike, Alka-Seltzer, I like Ike.”
Adlai Stevenson, who refused to do TV spots (“Selling the presidency like cereal,” he called them), was beaten twice by Eisenhower. In 1960, John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in their first TV debate largely because he looked better-tanned and dusted with makeup.
Ronald Reagan (“The Great Communicator”) won reelection in 1984 with a “Morning in America” theme, which said little but evoked a hazy sense of contentment and optimism even while the national debt was soaring. George Bush’s 1988 spot, showing him picnicking with his grandchildren at his Kennebunkport, Me., summer home, sent a powerfully coded message about family values and upper-class traditions and style.
“Get ready for the Ralph Lauren presidency,” Alessandra Stanley wrote in The New Republic.
Americans have become so used to receiving everything from news to ads to sitcoms to panel shows through the same medium that they are already cross-wired. So they will accept the political convention as infomercial, Bill Clinton (“I feel your pain”) as talk-show host, Superman as a keynote speaker. The most memorable line that former Vice President Walter Mondale ever uttered (“Where’s the beef?”) came from a Wendy’s hamburger commercial. Nobody thought it odd. Why did Bob Dole use an ad slogan to address one of America’s most intractable problems? Because it was already embedded in the culture. Because it made him seem younger and hipper. Because it echoed Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” campaign of the ’80s. And because the word “it” was shorthand for drugs. This year’s campaign buzzwords sounded like ads because they dealt in euphemism, just as ads do.
“Character” is a euphemism for fidelity.
“Family values” is a euphemism for married parents and heterosexuality.
“Experience” is a euphemism for age.
“Responsibility” is a euphemism for getting off welfare or paying child support. Americans use euphemisms to deal with everything from war to race to the economy.
“We tend to invent terms to hide reality, not to describe it,” says Marsden. “We do it for things that make us uncomfortable. Reality is being tamed and made palatable through language. Americans are used to euphemisms. We expect them. We don’t say that one company swallows another, even though we know that’s what’s happening. We say they merge. I don’t hunt, for example. I harvest game.”
Euphemisms, the author Hugh Rawson says, are themselves a kind of code.
“The euphemism stands for ‘something else,’ ” he writes in “A Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk,” “and everyone pretends that the ‘something else’ doesn’t exist.” The more difficult or divisive the issue, the more likely Americans are to deal with it in code. “Diversity” and “inclusive” are code for affirmative action, which is code for preferences for people of color. “Hollywood” is code for violence and sex and schlock. Taxes are “revenue enhancements” or “contributions.” Nobody, it seems, is for or against abortion. They are “pro-life” or “pro-choice.”
The phenomenon isn’t new: Even Abraham Lincoln spoke in code.
“What does ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ really mean?” asks Marsden. “The Gettysburg Address is full of vaguenesses.” Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political observer, noted in 1835 that Americans were “addicted to generic terms and abstract expressions.”
During the Civil War, Northerners labeled Southerners “our erring brethren.” “Manifest destiny,” the concept of an American nation that stretched from coast to coast, didn’t mention Indian and Mexican lands that would have to be seized along the way.
“Back in the ’50s, people in Little Rock talked about states’ rights,” says Dubitsky, the political consultant. “What they were saying was: We don’t want black kids in our schools, and we’ll use the 10th Amendment to keep them out.”
Advertisers, using magazine pictures and TV, don’t even have to use language to send code. In a society where the visual is displacing the verbal, images are all they need. “Watch the Coke ads,” says MacMurray College’s Metcalf. “They don’t even describe the flavor of the beverage. It’s this gorgeous art with scenes of a happy world community and haunting music. Coca-Cola is leading the way for politicians.”
Selling Coke isn’t quite the same as selling government reform. The problem with using advertising shorthand to address difficult or delicate issues is that ads rely on emotion and impulse to sell a simple product. They do not require logic, an explanation of alternatives, or pleas for compromise and long-term commitment.
Patrick Buchanan, who rode to the front of the pack of Republican presidential contenders by urging voters to mount up and join his revolution, ended up learning the limits of shorthand, to his dismay.
“The Reagan revolution was modified by having (Reagan’s) name in front of it,” says Fields of Washington University. “People figured it would be easygoing and good-humored. But when Buchanan talked about a revolution with peasants and pitchforks, people decided that he really was out to get someone-and it might be them. That’s when Buchanan went under.”
Sending Morse code to 300 million people can fail for other reasons. For one thing, shorthand can sometimes be incomprehensible: It creates subgroups of coders and decoders who may have trouble communicating. “We’ve become defined by which shorthand we’re using,” says Shachtman.
Translation becomes trickier when there is less to translate and when the decoders are left to connect the dots on their own. After Clinton won the presidency in 1992 by campaigning on a vague mantra of “change,” and voters went on to give the Republicans control of Congress in the next election, House Speaker Newt Gingrich inferred that Americans wanted to balance the budget by reforming Medicare and cutting spending. But his “Contract with America” bogged down when voters realized that “change” actually would be applied to them. Observes Fields: “You can say something most people agree with, until it turns out you’re talking about their grandmother.”
Shorthand is also better at providing slogans than solutions.
“Language is symbol, and symbol becomes intensified,” says Ray Browne, a professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, who is secretary of the Popular Culture Association, based in Bowling Green. “You get down to the bones. But eventually the bones become devoid of life and meaning.”
And there is a point at which shorthand bumps up against the limits of the medium.
“There’s a lot you can’t say in 30 seconds on TV,” says Dubitsky. “You have to figure out those six or seven words that sum up a whole issue. It took the Republicans a long time to come up with ‘midnight basketball,’ which summed up their opposition to the crime bill.”
With cable TV offering dozens (and potentially hundreds) of channels, and viewers armed with remote clickers that can zip through the entire spectrum in less than a minute, even 30-second spots can tax the attention span.
“The problem with the new encoding and decoding,” says the University of Oklahoma’s Welch, “is speed and amount.”
Americans are on the receiving end of so much rapid-fire shorthand that they have learned to communicate the same way-both for better and for worse.
“If you’re on the Net in a chat room, you’ve got to get things across in real time,” says Shachtman. “So you get quicker, more emotional. It’s forced upon you by the nature of the medium.”
The shorthand is especially stripped down in cyberspace, where people communicate with phantoms who have no facial expressions and no body language; miscommunication is frequent.
“The ‘Net’ is a funny medium,” says Barry Shein, president of Software Tool & Die, a Brookline, Mass., firm that links users to the Internet. “It conveys words differently. Sarcasm almost never works unless you label it as sarcasm. The tone is not there, the context is not there. Things tend to be taken literally.”
That’s why “smileys” were invented-to give tone and body language to vapor. Smileys, also called emoticons, are combinations of colons and hyphens and parentheses and brackets that convey a facial expression when you look at them from a 90-degree angle. On the Internet, 🙂 means “I’m happy.” 🙁 means “I’m angry.” 😉 means “I’m winking.” The digerati know dozens of smileys. They also know abbreviations. BRB means “Be right back.” IMHO means “In my humble opinion.” ROTFL means “Rolling on the floor laughing.”
The Internet, with its cyberlingo of “sysops” and “URLs” and “hosts” and “nodes,” can be a daunting place to communicate, particularly for the print generation.
“I’m sitting in front of my Microsoft,” says Marshall Fishwick, a professor of humanities and communications at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, “and unless I have someone to translate . . .”
Phyllis Franklin remembers the confusion that resulted when she and some colleagues at the Modern Language Association created an e-mail bulletin board.
“I said, ‘What are the protocols?’ ” Franklin says.
” `Do you answer these right away? What are the rules?’
“And everyone in the room just stared at me. They really hadn’t thought about it.”
Soon the barrier between those who are on-line and those who are not may be as significant as that between those who could read and those who could not in Gutenberg’s day. Says Browne of Bowling Green: “This is the first time an absolutely new language has been created and forced on us. Unless you were there at the creation, it’s terrifying as hell. And that form of communication ultimately will be more dangerous, because it becomes meaningless to the rest of us.”
What happens to a country that communicates in shorthand, sound bites and code? It becomes an inarticulate society, Shachtman says. Not mute, but full of noise. Short on reflection, long on chatter. Words will be everywhere, he predicts, but mostly as graphic elements on TV and computer screens. Vocabularies will be condensed, spelling phonetic, punctuation voluntary.
That’s what the Internet is already sounding like, cybernauts say. Fragments of sentences, people “shouting” in capital letters, and reactions passing for thought.
“For a long time, the ‘Net’ was a college-professional medium,” says Shein of Software Tool & Die, who has been on line for two decades. “Now you can see people giving their emotional impressions. It’s not irrational. It’s pre-rational. That’s why you have a lot of ‘flame wars’ in discussion groups. They don’t understand what they’re reading, and they don’t know how to make themselves understood.”
Expressing oneself in a compressed medium has been a challenge ever since the invention of the telegraph. Now, media transmit at the speed of light, and Americans are struggling to find language that lets them understand one another in a complex world.
More elusive than the language of these new media is the feeling of shared communication that once came with reading the same newspaper or watching the same television program. American audiences are now split dozens of ways by cable TV and hundreds of ways on the Internet, with its byzantine network of specialized chat rooms.
“There’s no place now,” says author Birkerts, “where everyone meets at the end of the day and says, ‘Well, there we were.’ “
At one time, Walter Cronkite served that function. Now, Cronkite would be merely one blurred face along a continuum of zapped channels. Or he would have his own Web page, as thousands of Americans do. The Internet has been touted as the greatest communications medium in history, but it is made up of audiences of one who both encode and decode and frequently confuse and annoy one another.
“I know people who used to be on-line a lot but have dropped out because they’re frustrated with the ever decreasing signal-to-noise ratio,” says David Sanderson, an information-processing consultant at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
The irony is that communicating effectively in an instant medium may take more facility with the language than it did in William Jennings Bryan’s day.
“Mark Twain once apologized for writing a long letter to a friend because he didn’t have time to write a short one,” says Sanderson. “Writing something tersely can take more time.”
Shorthand works only if everybody can understand-and agree on-what it means. “Smileys can help only so much,” says Sanderson, who has cataloged more than 2,400, but says most folks use only half a dozen. “There’s no substitute for saying what you mean.”
