Raising Questions about How Digital Technology is Impacting Our Humanity

 Our Language Gene: How the Cyber Era is Changing Our Humanity by Dan Appleton

Our Language Gene book cover

I definitely did not expect that ending, especially since I chose to read this book because I thought it would be about language and technology. Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced copy of Dan Appleton’s book Our Language Gene: How the Cyber Era is Changing Our Humanity. In many ways, the book is about technology, but rather a dark kind of position about the negative implications of technology, especially the internet. However, the book’s position on language is much more speculative, and I found it rather challenging to follow what the author was trying to accomplish. Towards the end of the book he writes “My aim is to explain what makes us who we are and how that is changing what we are. Some will receive my messages as information and others as noise. I leave it to you, my reader, to decide if my story of the human paradigm is fiction or nonfiction. I, for one, do not know.” I agree, that it really didn’t seem if there was a clear position taken. For me, this book was mostly noise, and even before reaching the end of this book and reading these lines, I was thinking that this books seemed more like a speculative science book and not any kind of thesis rooted in facts or research. Thinking back, it is rather hard for me to try to summarize the points made in the book since it speculates widely and moves from various topics and ideas without really connecting them or trying to unify the points.

The book is divided into two main parts. In the first part, Appleton presents the development of language, but rather than looking at say linguistics or physiology, he examines physics mostly as the means through which language developed. There is some biology thrown in there, as he mentions genetics and DNA, but it seemed like the focus was on photons and atoms, and how our perception of light creates edges that we need to smooth out and give name to. It’s interesting to consider, but Appleton does not really provide much evidence to support these ideas. Some scientists and authors are mentioned, but there are really no citations or data in the book at all. I was expecting more evidence to support the points. Furthermore, I found it rather strange that a book about the development of language doesn’t really mention anything about socialization, education, or even really get into how written forms of language helped to preserve and codify rules that were transmitted along different generations. Although my background in education may predispose me to think about how significant education is in fostering language development, I was really shocked that this was not mentioned at all in the book. In addition, some of Appleton’s claims about language development in humans are questionable as well. He mentioned that in utero babies do not think :”While human babies may exhibit rudimentary thought events, they do not reason in the womb. They have nothing to reason with. They have no language. One can only assume that the cellular structure of language is chemical reactions to external electromagnetic stimuli. These external stimuli are actually the edges of photon wavelengths …” However, there is evidence that in utero babies recognize their mother’s heartbeats and voice when they are born (Brown Wright, 2014). I was surprised by Appleton’s claims that children have no reasoning at all, and that photons and wavelengths are what help to bring about their reasoning. In addition, his claim that expressive language, which for Appleton is what makes humans unique, is predicated on sound “humans need to create sound. We do this by moving air through the larynx. Then we need to shape sounds into vowels or consonants in our mouth… Articulation, moving thoughts into precise speech sounds, is the fuel of reasoning and the creation of “rational thoughts.” However, it made me wonder about people who do not make sounds. There are plenty of people who are incapable of making sounds yet have the capacity for expressive language. I’m not sure that this claim holds up.

In addition to speculative science, the writing for the book was hard to follow. Appleton takes ideas and “paradigms” (to borrow a word he borrowed) from other writers and thinkers and recasts them in his own meaning or renames them for his own purposes. This makes the reading difficult to follow. Other sections contain difficult sentences: “Relationships further elaborated the Sea’s language, because it told sapiens that one tree could be many trees, many could one, and many could be many”. What? I struggled to make meaning of some of these sections, and as a result, this part came of much like noise to me—Appleton’s binary designations of language messages—either information or noise, which is incongruous and painful to our understanding.

However, the second section focuses more on technology’s role in forcing us to receive noise, but also altering our perceptions to make us enjoy the noise. I also found some disagreements with this section as well. Appleton’s main argument is that the internet has evolved from a means of communication to an information database, which is controlled largely by “rich nodes” who seek to change our ways of thinking. They do this largely through altering information, taking noise and making it into information. That is, he seems to say that much of what we encounter online is contrary to what we think or believe, or are our realities, and as a result of this constant barrage of “noise”, we end up shifting our mindsets/perspectives to accommodate the difference. In some ways, I can see how this is like cognitive dissonance, and that often when we encounter dissonance, we might tend to latch onto our beliefs. However, as Solomon Ash’s studies of conformity show, when there are large numbers pushing against us or when there are also social forces, like peer pressure, we may sometimes give into the dissonance and accept what we do not always believe or agree with. I think that this is what Appleton is saying with the internet. The forces are so large and pervasive that there is like no escape from the messaging, and we tend to make the noise more accessible and amenable to our senses because as humans, we want to make meaning and gain information. However, I don’t think that we have to merely accept everything we encounter online, nor do I think that everything online is always noise or information. There is entertainment, there is art, there is communication. The internet has brought about positive changes beyond merely information. Furthermore, I think that the ease of access to information can be helpful, but we must also better prepare younger generations to be more selective and cautious in accepting the information they encounter online. That is why information literacy is so important, and again, why the roles of schools and education are necessary to promote better understanding of information and internet use. In addition, Appleton presents the scope and reach of the internet as one of its biggest threats, frequently mentioning that the 8 million people on the planet will have their minds controlled by the forces that control the internet. However, not everyone has access to the internet, and even those who use the internet may not have regular or reliable access to it. A quick check of the data suggests that a little less than 70% of the world’s population (nearly 6 billion people) use the internet, and even fewer than that number are users of social media. Thus, I think it is necessary to remember that while most industrialized countries will use the internet to advance their standing since digital technology and communication seem to be the future, it is also important to remember that even within these countries, there still remains a divide where people will be left out. Although I think that Appleton raises some important concerns about our reliance on digital technology and our use (or overuse) of it, it is also important to remember that not everyone is using it in the same way, and not everyone is impacted negatively by it. Like other tools (or drugs, as Appleton mentions several times), digital technology like the internet can have benefits and drawbacks. It is not necessarily inherently good or bad, but really the outcomes are based in how we use it. While I’m sure the internet is impacting our language to a certain extent, this book doesn’t really get into the linguistic implications of the internet, considering whether we are communicating less or more, or whether our vocabulary use and grammar have changed as a result of things like texts or emails. I thought that might have been the focus of this book, but it was not. Alas, Appleton suggests that there are implications, but it is more about mind control and the disintegration of an “I” individual at the hands of several power brokers who seek to control the internet. I’m not sure that I am there. I do recognize that corporations and other influential groups do manage much influence over our information, but hasn’t this always been the case? I credit Appleton for some unique and thought provoking ideas that I would never have considered; however, I also question his capitalistic-centric and industrialized-centric mindset, assuming that the entire world is always online and passively accepting whatever information they encounter. If anything, Appleton’s ideas are a reminder that we must continue to push for more information literacy in schools and continue to push students to question and evaluate the information (and noise) they encounter online and elsewhere.