Recent events in Oxford, and their coverage in the media, have shown the power of words, both in presenting the truth in a certain way, or even ignore it entirely. With the advent of online social media and instant news, now more than ever it is true that the pen is mightier than the sword.
In Eminem’s ‘Sing for the Moment’, he remarks “words are a motherfucker, they can be great/Or they can degrade, or even worse, they can teach hate”. With these lines, he recognizes what any writer should be aware of: the divergent potential of words.
Words shape our entire being: they form the method through which we describe our experience of life, navigate our daily existence and interact with the ones we love. Words are all around us, defining us, shaping us, enchanting us.
One of the first significant moments in any person’s life is their first word. I’m rather unreliably told that my first word was “cake”. While this would certainly provide a nice preface to my later obsession with baked goods, one might prefer a slightly more dignified and mainstream “mama”. Still, from this moment, every human being becomes enamoured with the word.
We learn from a young age that we can use words to our advantage; trying to get things we want using flattery or demands. Many people spend all their lives using words to try and get things from other people, or get into positions of power. Lawyers, politicians, news anchors, spokespeople, lecturers, religious leaders and many more actively use the spoken word in their everyday life in the pursuit of some goal or achievement. Many universities now offer ‘Public Speaking’ as a degree, and some public speaking courses can cost in excess of £100 a week.
This is nothing new.
The art of rhetoric has been valued since ancient times, with lawyer and rhetorician Marcus Tullius Cicero becoming one of the most powerful men of his day thanks to his exploitation of the power of the spoken word. These days, rhetoric has something of a sinister reputation. We are suspicious of people who we think can change the way we think with their voice alone.
However, in essence, all words fundamentally have the power to change the way we think. They are extremely powerful, especially in capable hands. It is for this reason that we need to be responsible with them. In the ancient Roman law courts, the explicit truth didn’t matter as much as it does today. Cicero claimed that “shame, no less than fear, keeps the citizen from doing wrong”. The law courts operated under a sort of ‘no smoke without fire’ policy, so that if a lawyer could show that someone was guilty of one crime, they were probably guilty of another.
This shows the extreme power of words in the form of rumour. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he talks about a “house of rumour”, a great tower “from which everything the world over can be seen, however far away”.
Here, so the tale goes, Rumour lives. The sounds of voices fly in from all over the world and resound and echo off the brass that makes up the structure. The sounds fly off again in a different direction like magical Chinese whispers, spreading half-formed stories and confused murmurs.
In Jake Arnott’s 2013 book The House of Rumour, he describes this image as an ancient representation of the Internet. Sure enough, technology has made it possible for our words to reach out over a greater distance than ever before.
Since our range has expanded, it seems to follow that we need to adapt to our changing environment. The power of our very own house of rumour has been shown time and time again, organizing revolutionaries during the Arab Spring, challenging for information control in the form of WikiLeaks, co-ordinating aid efforts after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
It is not uncommon for people to be irresponsible with the power that social media affords them. Joey Barton joked that giving him Twitter was like “giving an arsonist a box of matches”, and it seems a little ridiculous that a man famous for being good at kicking a ball should be afforded an audience of 2.5 million people.
Of course, freedom of speech is very commonly cited in response to arguments like this. The key thing here to remember is that ‘freedom of speech’ is a legal term, and legal terms are not necessarily applicable in everyday life. Just because one can legally say something, doesn’t mean one should.
When the things we say in certain circumstances, or the things we write in certain media, can have such a great effect, it would be severely remiss of us not to consider this effect, and try to use judgement and compassion.
