Language for when the body is broken

On the flip side to Terry Godier’s recent post about the (body) language of communication, where the time is on the creation. People need time on receipt to understand, contemplate, and act. If the outcome is to act and the action is to reply, then the clock restarts.

For people with ME and other similar brain fog inducing conditions. The speed of communications is doubled, tripled, or worse, as the time taken to process and understand on receipt of a message can be excruciatingly difficult, stressful and frustrating.

Does AI help here? I don’t know, maybe. If the AI can summarise, extract, and simplify, the intent of the writer can be lost, but if it is lost anyway if the reader is no longer able to understand, so the ~better~ or different outcome is for the receiver to understand.

A written letter is no use to the blind, a telephone call is no use to the deaf.

AI could be helpful in this way, the conduit.

A letter, hand-written, sealed, carried by horse or ship, might take weeks to arrive. The writer knew this. They wrote with that delay in mind, which meant they wrote with a kind of weight. You didn’t waste a letter. You composed it. You considered what the reader would need to know by the time it arrived, what context might have shifted, what they might have already heard. The delay was a constraint, and constraints produce thought.

• Letter ─────────── days to weeks
• Telegram ────────── hours
• Telephone ───────── instant (bounded)
• Email ───────────── minutes
• Text ────────────── seconds
• AI reply ────────── before you’ve finished thinking

The delay was never just a limitation. It was where the thinking happened. When communication takes days, you have days to think. When it takes seconds, you have seconds. When a machine drafts your reply before you’ve formed your own thought, you have no time at all. The thinking doesn’t happen faster. It stops happening.

»Terry Godier →