To Listen, to Speak, to Encounter

  Although I can hardly argue that deficiencies in encounter (meeting someone beyond the bounds of self, necessitating an other) have only sprung up in the modern day, I see a particular pain point in the age of information.

Recent studies have suggested that our brains can store between 2 and 2.5 petabytes of information, if we translate into the binary system that computers use. This is, in its own regard, an extraordinary number. Most of the video games I play take up around 500MB, which is .00005% of my brain’s total capacity. The largest tech companies pay millions to maintain data stores just tens of times the size of my (and your) mind.

And yet there are far, far more than 2 petabytes being sent and received across the internet daily. They’re just not stored. News stories. Text messages. Memes and emojis. On and on.

Every day, we are offered the ability to drown ourselves in data that is separate from us.

In regards to encounter, taking the role of the intent listener with no voice is no better than someone who takes the role of the vocal speaker with no ears. Encounter is about mutual discovery, and that goes to die both when someone refuses to shut up and when someone refuses to open up. I feel that, with so much information flitting by constantly, it is in many ways more lucrative to do the latter and annihilate the presence of self than the former (although there are many who still do, in fact, refuse to shut up).

Encounter is still hard to find. This serves as a reflective, cautionary tale of the fact that while there is such thing as too much self, there is also such thing as too little.