Did go to the last class? Do you intend to reply?

At the start of my last English 203 period, a statement that I feel inclined to mention will become void at 1PM on January the 26th, the professor, or, rather, the man who changes the lighting in the room when appropriate, decided to initiate discussion by being orally silent. Instead of his usual pacing to and fro, his hand to chin and his chin to his chest, he sat at the table in front of the class and communicated through the use of plurk, a Twitter like website derived from the contraction of "people" and "lurk". It was befitting that it was not Twitter, but the tool called plurk, because indeed his point "lurked" about in the shadows for us to jump, point, snatch and pontificate at as we saw fit.

Though one might come to the conclusion that, given 20+ individuals were faced with this unprecedented procedure of opening class discussion, there could be potentially 20+ different reactions. However, to put it briefly, there were only two main varieties of reactions: the silent and the eager. Though the "silent" may have been as silent as the man with the mac, they, like the man with the mac, most likely were not silent in their thoughts. A key difference, however, was that they did not utilize an external tool to voice their opinions. But whatever for? Surely a university class, for which one is paying, would call for the participation by all those present. Thoughts are free to give and to receive and to express them requires little more than lowering the bottom jaw, rounding the lips, and exhaling strategically. Mechanically it is simple, and I can say with confidence everyone in the class, myself included, had mastered at one point in their life the skill of human verbal communication. The catch is those belonging to the silent group were either not comfortable or not enthusiastic. I am of the opinion that if the class had been reduced in its numbers, say one by one removing those belonging to the “eager” category, those belonging to the silent group would have been altered. It might have driven some to speak because of the inevitable vacuum of silence the depleted eager would leave, and for others it may have been that a smaller audience meant an increased bravado for expressing one’s ideas. Whatever may have happened is rather a mute point now, since whatever would have been said indeed never was said and so the thoughts of the silent don’t exist as far as our concerning the 22nd of January.

And of the thoughts of the “eager”? The thoughts of the eager, those which were expressed either verbally or over plurk, may have existed, but will soon fade from memory. Even some of the alphabetic representations of ideas as posted on plurk only came to the attention of all at the mercy of the man with the mac (the very one who normally switches the lights on or off as the situation requires), so that even some of those wishing to play the game may not have been heard (that is, read, through the aid of a costly projector). With the silent having nonexistent ideas and the eager projecting ideas that may never see the light of day or producing sounds to be carried off by the breeze, what really comes from such a social experiment of conducting a discussion both visually and orally? In the opinion of the writer, ideas are powerful things that can act as seeds growing into mighty redwoods while simultaneously instigating countless ripples in the mind. Though much may not have been said or read, chances are the entire class will remember the day that the professor communicated exclusively for a short period through a social networking site.

What this writer is truly trying to get at is that words have the capacity to be very much superfluous, but ideas not so much. Words are thrown around everyday, mostly on the internet where it might be seen by the largest audience, in an attempt to create oneself as oneself wants to be seen in the mind’s eye of others. In class there has been a fair amount of pontificating, but legitimate ideas have been mixed in as well, both serving as an anchor for the speaker to lodge his or herself in the listener’s brain, while at the same time giving his or her idea wings. The ideas that may have been sparked by the professor’s antics are very much real to the individuals who conceived them, and the ideas expressed thereafter may have ignited other flames as well. Most of the class was silent, but their minds probably were not. Though it seemed at the time that only a few people spoke and “played along”, the only thing lost are the exact words that were spoken, and perhaps the people by whom they were spoken by. Words, after all, are only representations of ideas, just as letters represent sound. Ideas, of course, are parasites, and so belong very much to English 203.