The Word

T-Bone Burnett has a fun album called The Talking Animals which is us.

“Naming” is one great gift given humanity by their Creator. In the Old Testament Creation myth the animals were brought to Adam and he named them. Even God went by the names given (or at least publically). Whether you take this myth as historical or not (myths can be either), the fact remains that naming is our core gift.

Even our “imaging” is an attempt to name.

It looked for awhile as if new media would simply drown us in image. I suppose that is the source of the bumper stickers that use to say “Shoot your television”. In either event, the “Humiliation of the Word” (Ellul) seemed inevitable in the eye-glazing blitz that is modern imaging.

Many lecturers (my myself included) marked how we had, culturally, moved from a word-based epistemology (way of knowing) to an image-based one.

Thank God for two things. One, I am not going to now rattle on about all the implications or examples of this (drive into any business section or turn on your tv and the point is made); and two, the Internet has reversed the tide back towards Word, while not vilifying Image.

You see, we recently added typing and near-immediate personal correspondence with others around the world to our specially-packed resume. In my book, it is one of the best moves we have made since deciding to add “Green” as a category…but then you see we did that first via Word.

Of course I have more to type on this, but for now please keep typing and hit “send” often. You might just be reclaiming a core gift that will help save the planet.

I am not kidding.

~ by bakdon on April 9, 2008.