Writing in the twenty-first century

This may sound strange coming from someone who is a technical writer, but the greatest thing about the English language is its ability to be ambiguous. I can't speak for other languages, such as Chinese, because I am not fluent in any other language. Although it may seem like I'm speaking a foreign language in this blog, I'll try to be as "un-ambiguous" as possible.

Let me start by saying that I fell in love with English because of its ambiguity. For example: If you read a novel, the author may give very good descriptions of setting, character, and action, but it's up to your imagination to supply the images the text represents. The protagonist in the novel develops as a picture in your mind and you feel a connection because the image in your mind is one you created. But what if the author described the protagonist in perfect detail and you had a picture of someone like Mel Gibson , but instead the author provided an actual picture of his or her vision and it looked more like Rodney Dangerfield? This sort of creates a disconnect or a conundrum because it would be hard to believe that someone who looks like Dangerfield could be a great lover of young women, totes a shotgun, and saves the world from all the evil people who look like fashion models--pictures supplied by the author. Unless this novel is meant to be a comedy it really ruins it because the pictures are supplied. I'm no longer left with the intimacy that the text could provide through my own imagination.

So what's my point? I find that there is a pendulum that swings in extreme directions in writing with technology. On one hand, we have graphics, sound, animation, and video feeds that leave very little room for an intimate imagination. On the other hand, we have email, text messaging, Twitter etc. that allows us to be so ambiguous that we can only guess at the tone, context, and spirit of the message the author intended. For the latter, if our imagination runs awry we can be caught in a serious violation of misinterpretation that was never intended by the author.

Through the history of the written word there was a certain amount of ambiguity that was built in. The ambiguity is what makes poets so interesting and can lead scholars to a lifetime of effort at interpretation based on their values and what they bring to the text. But this does not necessarily mean that they are right. A well crafted poem will often explicitly defy meaning on anything but an individual level. I can imagine Walt Whitman with his words, "what I assume, you shall assume" conveying his message on Facebook complete with pictures and diagrams of what he is exactly talking about. It would leave little to the imagination and good old Walt would soon find himself being listed as a "cyber pervert." Think about all of the creative texts that you have ever read and then think about how ruinous it would be for you if the author had supplied graphics and sound. The authors allow us the creative discretion to formulate mental images and interpretations on our own.

There is something to be said about ambiguity: It often creates a greater understanding about ourselves and the world around us than anything that can be explicitly shown. The type of ambiguity I'm talking about cannot even start to take shape within 140 characters. Imagine how chaotic the world would be if we talked in acronyms or limited each sentence that we spoke to 140 characters. What kind of discourse can we have when we are so transparent that we include pictures of our thoughts or we are limited to talking in acronyms?

I see the use of writing with computers, but I'm sorry; I am a traditionalist. We can gain a lot by learning how to use technology in a writing classroom, but I don't think we will ever have a canon of writers like we have had in the past; at least not in the sense that we view the canon of great literary works now. Being "wired" is either making us too vague or too transparent How we find a middle ground in the sea of technology to create the next great canon is the key. My only hope is that the next great canon does not contain LOL, OMG, or clips from YouTube.