Infocalypse

You never fully appreciate language until you find youself in a place where they don't speak yours. It seems a fundament human truth that when you're walking around town you'll be able to read all of the signs you see, open a rental account at Blockbuster without breaking a sweat, tell somebody you'd like your Big Mac without pickles, please, ask directions with the assurance that you'll be able to understand the answer, and generally live amidst a coherent stream of more than one out of every five words. There so many words, so many words and it's sometimes amazing to me that we as humans have constructed the sort of complex social frameworks that need so many words to hold them up. It's pretty badass that we live in societies that require words like "contract," "monthly fee," "unlimited text package," and "comprehensive service agreement" in order to run smoothly. I bought a cell-phone today, and the dude at Yamada Denki threw so many words at me I didn't understand that I can't even guess what they might have been. I set out trying to test myself, to see if I could sign up for a cell-phone plan in a foreign country without any help from anybody else, and I was pretty sure I could handle it. How hard could it be? I've studied Japanese for like eight years, I can do it. Well, turns out that there are some undertakings in these societies we live in that a working knowledge of the language of basic likes and dislikes, foods, drinks, menus and personality traits, in other words the tangible words of tangible objects, won't help you with. I can tell the man behind the counter which phone I like, how much I'm willing to pay for it, even compare its size, shape, color, functionality or popularity among pre-teens with another phone, but when he tries to tell me something about something else about it, all I hear is a big expanse of white noise punctuated here and there with a word or two I can say "hai" to and look like I know what the hell is going on. It's pretty spectacular in a way, and puts the power of language and communication in a different light. I've tried to debate with biology nerds about what's more important, biology or language, but somehow whenever I try to bring in the effect of public discourse upon the construction of identity, they counter with some stuff about cells and blood and molecules and amino acids that doesn't really make sense to me but amounts to something I can understand: without all that shit we'd all be dead. Well, in that case I guess it doesn't really matter too much how Fox News portrays Barack Obama, now does it?

But check it out, in the case of the infocalypse, moving across the world to a world of people you can only barely understand, then biology becomes pretty irrelevant too, because if I can't convey anything to anybody else, then the vast complicated body of cytosine, kinase kinase kinase, and mitochondria that we are all falls down; language is the bridge between biology and epistemology (sorry I fucking love that word) that makes it all make sense, and it is on those strangely steady cobbles of interlinked words and shared concepts that society walks and our systems run. I seriously can't remember anything that guy at the cell phone place said to me, because much to my surprise it was mostly meaningless, full of words I've never learned, up until now never knew I had never learned, and it's a good thing I studied the Soft Bank (my new service provider) booklet really thoroughly and knew exactly what I wanted so I could just interject a few "hais" in the right empty silences, because hell yeah I walked out of there with a phone, even though I'm not entirely sure how much I paid for it. Boy I hope this nation is honest.