A psychology study I read many years ago had the thesis that rooms with low ceilings constrained both the thoughts and vocabulary of people who occupied the room. Goals were smaller in rooms with lower ceilings, and less often achieved, thoughts about the future were less inclined to dream big, and the language used was, overall, more pessimistic.
I also read a study, where the central thesis was that text messages on mobile phones constrained people’s thoughts, due to the size of the screen and the ability to express themselves easily.
And I read many more papers on the effects of walking and cognition, and they found that walking helps with cognition, but there is a multiplier effect when people walk outside (where there are far horizons and tall skies) that improves cognition and expressiveness far more than walking alone.
And yet another study found that people who live in cities with tall buildings thought in shorter timeframes than those who lived in more “human sized” settlements.
Conclusion: When you want to restrict someone’s thoughts, dreams about the future and their ability to plan, restrict their vocabulary, restrict their ability to express those thoughts, and restrict their ability to see a far horizon.
Which is pretty much what Orwell stated with his Newspeak and Doublespeak ideas and Huxley with his removal of words like “revolution” – remove words from the language to express an idea and you remove the ability to even think that idea.
If you only give people a little set of emojis to express themselves, then those are the emotions and expressions they can make, and it takes great mental effort to communicate outside of the prescribed dictionary.
I observe this effect in programming languages all the time, where different programming languages, with their differing grammar and/or crypticness, or good and poor choice of keywords can dictate how a programmer will tackle a problem, or not. You will often hear programmers talk about how “expressive” a particular language is, or how “opinionated” a framework can be. This isn’t simply engineering geek speak, it’s psychology.
I still write, on a daily basis, in longhand, on paper, with my dyslexia, and my dysgraphia and my barely legible doctor’s scrawl. And I try to do it whilst sat near a window, or on the front step, or at a coffee shop whilst people watching, or on the train during the commute; all expressive locations.
I don’t write a lot in longhand. I only need to capture the big thoughts. The details can be filled in by the usual word processor.
I find this interesting because I truly believe that the majority of the world is made of small-minded people.
And a lot of social media, and Twitter especially, is a medium designed for expressing small thoughts.
Which explains why Twitter is so popular amongst a lot of small minded people.
To express big thoughts, you need a big canvas.