Unsaid things.

That's a favorite tag of mine and I've even blogged about the tag.

In 2014, I said: "I feel that I've found the psychic key to my favorite tag: 'unsaid things.'... Did you know that before I started blogging I believed myself to be a person without political opinions? I used to read the New York Times every day and feel that I had no opinion. It was such a distinctive feeling — no opinion was my opinion — that for a while, to counteract it, I challenged myself, upon reading at least one article a day, to arrive at an opinion. What do I think of that? In blogging, early on, I had to tell myself to stop before moving to the next item and write one more sentence. You have to say something about that. I had to make it a discipline: To write one more thing...."

And in another 2014 post, I wrote: "Unsaid things is one of my favorite topics, and things that fall into this category are things that, aptly enough, most people would leave unsaid. There's a convention in human society not to outline the secret motives of others. As long as someone hasn't actually said something, you ought not to act as though you know what that thing is. But I'm here to transgress on that convention. I think I can and should do it...." (7 reasons why are said at the link but I will leave them unrepeated here.)

So naturally, I'm powerfully drawn to this article by Ariana Eunjung Cha in The Washington Post: "The 'Gen Z stare' — and the decline of saying things out loud/We’re speaking fewer words every year. Scientists worry what that’s doing to our brains" (gift link).

First, I don't like the focus on the number of words. What matters is the number (and substance) of thoughts expressed. If young people are staring before speaking, maybe they are collecting their thoughts and deciding what is worth saying. Maybe they are choosing their words and achieving concision, dispensing with blabby intros and weasel words and insincere pleasantries. That takes more brain work than just saying more words. 

But the article pretty quickly moves on to the old "Bowling Alone" topic: We're spending less time in the physical presence of other humans. "The Gen Z stare" entails face-to-face conversation, but I think what is happening is that a person who mostly communicates through texting feels normal staring blankly while thinking of what to type. If they haven't worked on presenting a sociable face to the world and they display the same facial behavior out in public, they have the distinctive look that's insultingly called "the Gen Z stare."

But is that a symptom of low cognitive development?  The article says: "A live conversation places particular demands on working memory and attention. You have to keep track of what another person has said, decide how to respond and listen as you formulate what comes next. Texting and email relieve some of that pressure. A message can be considered, revised and re-revised before it is sent; the conversation itself remains on the screen, eliminating much of the need to remember what came before."

I thought this article was going to be about the way people are self-censoring and making themselves bland. The headline refers to "the decline of saying things out loud." But if it only means people are writing instead of talking, it's an entirely different question. It's a very old question. It's Plato, in "Phaedrus," quoting Socrates:

You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.

That's the ultimate in unsaid things: a book.