Word World

                In his article “Protocol: How Control exists after Decentralization” Alexander Galloway offers some interesting ways of thinking about conversations when he compares certain aspects of digital information networks to the protocols we use when beginning and ending a telephone call. Although I agree with Galloway’s description of conversational indicators for “let’s begin talking” and “let’s stop talking” as things such as “hello” and “I better get going”, but I think he misses something in highlighting only the indicative quality of these signifiers. In other words, it seems that although the phrase “hello how are you” could certainly act as an indicator for the start of a conversation it is still functioning within a language system of “differance” and ambiguity. I guess my concern for the move that Galloway makes in this section of the article is any attempt to pinpoint a function of language considering how language is contingent (as Galloway says) on a “science of meaning” which is always subject to perception. 

                In thinking through my difficulty with attempting to pinpoint particular functions of language I find this children’s TV show somewhat helpful (or at least amusing). In this video, language and object (signifier and signified) are intrinsically unified. An object’s “Thingly character” (as Heidegger would put it) now finds direct correlation with its name. In this show, one can see how the two worlds of communication that Galloway describes as distinctly separate (the digital and the human) now collide to the point that the “science of meaning” has become irrelevant. In this Derridean nightmare (or fantasy), a “tree” is a tree and a “truck” is a truck; language and essence are one and the same thing.

                How then does this help me think about language as a social indicator? I believe that this video illustrates the impossibility of even being able to conceive of language having a single or direct correspondence to the world or a system similar to Galloway’s centralized and decentralized networks. I think it is in this way that Galloway’s depiction of language as a conversational indicator bothered me because this is only one thing that the phrases are doing when spoken and received. The minute nuances in an introductory phrase may affect the entire tone of the conversation or they might even end the conversation before it has even begun. I believe these issues also serve to bolster Galloway’s delineation between the two modes of communication and the difficulty in comparing human language to computer networking and information storage and retrieval.