Social media spawn distorted identities
By Prof Dr Sohail Ansari ““Surely Allah commands justice and the doing of
good (to others), and giving to the kindred, and He forbids indecency and evil
and rebellion. He admonishes you that you may be mindful. And fulfill the
covenant of Allah, when you have made a covenant, and break not your oaths
after confirming them; and you have indeed made Allah your surety. Surely Allah
knows what you do.” Holy Qur'an (16:90-91)
Social media and our lost true self
· Actor walks into a character and actor is left
behind; and writer walks into a character so that each character can speak for
itself. Ghost writer or speech writer sublimates himself to people they work for; the art of theirs
lies in creating words those must seem belonging to others; words must seem the
natural and spontaneous expressions of others’ feelings: fake people
have to produce genuine feelings peculiar to people knowing that these are not
theirs. Abandoning oneself is a conscious choice; the deliberate attempt to
fulfill the needs of genres; but every writer has his own identity and every
actor has his own individuality; each possesses his own personality: they are
simply compartmentalized between professional and personal lives.
Social media poses the grave danger for our identity. We create versions of
ourselves in the twitter, face book, and other digital platforms. This
disconnect interferes our relationships with ourselves and add turmoil to our
lives. We wear various masks, and wear them so long that our
faces ultimately grow to them; we have then many faces but no face.
The fluidityof ourselves has turned us into the amorphous
mass with no identity at all. The one on line is in conflict with the
one at the dinner table, creating the split-personality; but the problems grows
graver and more intractable when the ‘various ones on line’ are
in conflict with each others, and each part has its own identity and each fake
part produces genuine feelings believing that these feelings genuinely belong
to it.
Modern societies have people of distorted identities; individual with no
individuality and persons with no personalities. Connectivity has improved a
great deal and barriers of time and space have fallen because of social media;
social media has, no doubt, changed human interaction but sadly it has changed
humans as well.
Grice's Maxims
1.
The
maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as
informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed,
and no more.
2.
The
maxim of quality, where one tries to be
truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported
by evidence.
3.
The
maxim of relation, where one tries to be
relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion.
4.
The
maxim of manner, when one tries to be as
clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one
avoids obscurity and ambiguity.
As
the maxims stand, there may be an overlap, as regards the length of what one
says, between the maxims of quantity and manner; this overlap can be explained
(partially if not entirely) by thinking of the maxim of quantity (artificial
though this approach may be) in terms of units of information. In other words,
if the listener needs, let us say, five units of information from the speaker,
but gets less, or more than the expected number, then the speaker is breaking
the maxim of quantity. However, if the speaker gives the five required units of
information, but is either too curt or long-winded in conveying them to the
listener, then the maxim of manner is broken. The dividing line however, may be
rather thin or unclear, and there are times when we may say that both the
maxims of quantity and quality are broken by the same factors.
Flouting the maxims[edit]
Without cooperation, human interaction would be far more difficult
and counterproductive. Therefore, the cooperative principle and the Gricean
maxims are not specific to conversation but to verbal interactions in general.
For example, it would not make sense to reply to a question about the weather
with an answer about groceries because it would violate the maxim of relevance.
Likewise, responding to a simple yes/no question with a long monologue would
violate the maxim of quantity.
However, it is possible to flout a maxim intentionally or
unconsciously and thereby convey a different meaning than what is literally spoken.
Many times in conversation, this flouting is manipulated by a speaker to
produce a negative pragmatic effect, as with sarcasm or irony. One can flout the maxim of quality to tell a
clumsy friend who has just taken a bad fall that her gracefulness is impressive
and obviously intend to mean the complete opposite. Likewise, flouting the
maxim of quantity may result in ironic understatement, the maxim of relevance
in blame by irrelevant praise, and the maxim of manner in ironic ambiguity.[6] The Gricean maxims are therefore often purposefully flouted by comedians and writers, who may hide the complete truth and manipulate their
words for the effect of the story and the sake of the reader's experience.[7]
Speakers who deliberately flout the maxims usually intend for their
listener to understand their underlying implication. In the case of the clumsy
friend, she will most likely understand that the speaker is not truly offering
a compliment. Therefore, cooperation is still taking place, but no longer on
the literal level. Conversationalists can assume that when speakers
intentionally flout a maxim, they still do so with the aim of expressing some
thought. Thus, the Gricean maxims serve a purpose both when they are followed
and when they are flouted.
Implicature (the action of implying a meaning beyond
the literal sense of what is explicitly stated, for example saying the frame is nice and implying I don't like the picture in it).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Implicature is a technical term in the pragmatics sub-field of linguistics, coined by H. P. Grice, which refers to what is suggested in an utterance, even though neither expressed nor strictly implied (that is, entailed) by the utterance.[1] As an example, the sentence "Mary
had a baby and got married" strongly suggests that Mary had the baby
before the wedding, but the sentence would still be strictly true if Mary had her baby after she got
married. Further, if we append the qualification "not necessarily in that
order" to the original sentence, then the implicature is now cancelled
even though the meaning of the original sentence is not altered.
"Implicature" is an
alternative to "implication," which has additional meanings in logic and informal language.[2]
Types of implicature[edit]
Conversational implicature[edit]
1. The
speaker deliberately flouts a conversational
maxim to
convey an additional meaning not expressed literally. For instance, a speaker
responds to the question "How did you like the guest lecturer?" with
the following utterance:
Well, I’m sure he was
speaking English.
If the
speaker is assumed to be following the cooperative principle,[3] in spite of flouting the maxim of relevance, then the utterance must have an additional nonliteral
meaning, such as: "The content of the lecturer's speech was
confusing."
2. The
speaker’s desire to fulfill two conflicting maxims results in his or her
flouting one maxim to invoke the other. For instance, a speaker responds to the
question "Where is John?" with the following utterance:
He’s either in the
cafeteria or in his office.
In this
case, the maxim of quantity and the maxim of quality are in conflict. A cooperative speaker
does not want to be ambiguous but also does not want to give false information
by giving a specific answer in spite of his uncertainty. By flouting the maxim
of quantity, the speaker invokes the maxim of quality, leading to the
implicature that the speaker does not have the evidence to give a specific
location where he believes John is.
3. The
speaker invokes a maxim as a basis for interpreting the utterance. In the
following exchange:
Do you know where I
can get some gas?
There’s a gas station
around the corner.
The
second speaker invokes the maxim of relevance, resulting in the implicature that “the gas station is
open and one can probably get gas there”.
Scalar implicature[edit]
According
to Grice (1975), another form of conversational implicature is also known as a scalar implicature. This concerns the conventional uses of
words like "all" or "some" in conversation.
I ate some of the
pie.
This
sentence implies "I did not eat all of the pie." While the statement
"I ate some pie" is still true if the entire pie was eaten, the
conventional meaning of the word "some" and the implicature generated
by the statement is "not all".
Conventional implicature[edit]
Conventional
implicature is independent of the cooperative principle and its four maxims. A
statement always carries its conventional implicature.
Donovan is poor but
happy.
This
sentence implies poverty and happiness are not compatible but in spite of this
Donovan is still happy. The conventional interpretation of the word
"but" will always create the implicature of a sense of contrast. So Donovan is poor but happy will always necessarily imply
"Surprisingly Donovan is happy in spite of being poor".
Implicature vs entailment[edit]
This can
be contrasted with cases of entailment. The statement "the President was
assassinated", for example, not only suggests that "the President is
dead" is true, but requires this to be so. The first sentence
could not be true if the second were not true; if the President were not dead,
then whatever it is that happened to him would not have counted as a
(successful) assassination. Similarly, unlike implicatures, entailments cannot
be cancelled; there is no qualification that one could add to "the
president was assassinated" which would cause it to cease entailing
"the president is dead" while also preserving the meaning of the
first sentence.
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