Abstract
I wanted to continue part of the conversation we started in class and do it in a blogging format. I use ideas and facts we talked about in class as well as outside sources which discuss networking and, what I’m most interested in, language and communication. Anil Dash highlights things I’m really interested in when he discusses tools and networking. Since the idea that new technology expedites our communicative processes is not a new idea, I’ll try to stick to how it affects our language and ability to communicate. I am coming into the middle of a conversation that we’ve all been having centered on the fear people have of language changing and the implications of our transforming language, whether it is good, bad, indifferent, etc. I try to point things out about our language implicitly by using the language of today and briefly mentioning it rather than bore you with lists of words and ways of communicating that are different and new.
Introduction
In my video, you can see a non-linear progression in Montanans’ ability to network and then, with the introduction of the internet and cellular phones, the world was included in Montanans’ network. It is as important to know where we come from as it is to know where we are going because ignorance is fear, not bliss, and the fear of communication through technology is overwhelmingly present on college campuses, especially the arts or humanities fields.
Let’s face it: As far as language and communication are concerned, we’re all doing pretty alright. Looking at that sentence, I know you all know what I mean and I also know that in an academic, proper “English” sense, it doesn’t say anything. We are doing “pretty” (as in beautiful?) “alright” (as in, “Alright, already, Mom, I’ll clean my room”?) and, “let’s face it”? “Face” is a noun, not a verb, but I definitely verbed that noun (Shakespeare, anyone?). So, what’s all the fuss about?
People are really, really, afraid of change; admittedly, I am in the same camp: show me something new and I will show you why I hate it. The interesting thing about this phenomena is, in my life, once I figure out how to use cool new technologies, they actually make my life much easier and better. But, it is scary to think that kids growing up in Indiana will cease to learn the ability to handwrite things (for those of us that grew up after the 1980’s, this means “write in cursive” and for those of us who grew up after the invention of the typewriter this means, “writing”, not “print” – which now means “Ctrl+p”), but is it really scary? The fear of this is, “it presages a further hollowing out of the real human personality, a further colonization of the human mind by the virtual at the expense of the real” (Darlymple 2). It is hard for me to read this and related thoughts and not laugh. But this is the question: How degraded are we willing to allow our language to become before we do something about it? My question is: Is our language actually degrading? And, how has humanity’s ability to network changed the position of language and communication in our lives? And, what is so bad about efficient communication?
1.) Is our language actually degrading?
No. Our language is changing but if it wasn’t changing, that would be the first time in all of history and that would be cause for concern. Since the time when we have evidence of written language as communication, we can track the different influences in that language: romance languages, the Cyrillic alphabet, etc. There are classifications for everything and the lines are incredibly blurred. When I say, “that’s good” and someone in Germany says, “Das ist gut” (Das ist goot) it means the same thing, believe it or not, and sounds very similar – even the spelling is relatively close. My point is that I don’t speak German and don’t understand it but what I do know is that we English speakers speak a, partly, Germanic language and it is more than a little evident. If language had never evolved, though, we’d either be speaking German, Old English, or, with any luck, Mandarin. Since language is always evolving, and it is clear that the written word has also followed this path, it would follow that with the increase of technology, people would rather do the more convenient things: read the news on their smart phones, text short messages and tweet all day to, with people instead of calling and having one long conversation – texting can be a part of multi-tasking while talking on the phone cannot, reading emails and responding to them as the recipients’ convenience. Because of these things, we have, as a society, become much more efficient communicators. We have learned how to write sentences packed with meaning while sending the correct tone that would otherwise be lost without face-to-face conversation through word choice, sentence structure and emoticons in email and texting.
2.) How has humanity’s ability to network changed the position of language and communication in our lives?
This is a picture of our niece through Skype. She lives in Wyoming and I live in Montana. My husband recently taught her older sister, our 4 year old niece, how to spell “poop” through Skype chat.
We are now able to send every important piece of information via the Internet. Something I find particularly useful is that I can use Skype to talk or chat with my best friend, who is currently living and working in Korea, when it is 11 o’clock at night for her and 8 in the morning for me, face-to-face through my smart phone while I’m at school. I found out that her grandmother, who lives in my hometown (a three hour drive from where I live now), was very sick from “Skyping” her (another instance of evolving language, a verbed noun, a noun that has only recently been developed), half a day’s time zone away from me. Because of these advances in technology, everything but physical things are sent instantly across the world and to almost every part of the world. Commerce has increased, medicine has advanced, science and technology have increased rapidly and the results are astounding. We have access to all information we need at any point in the day or night; if we want to be involved in the conversation, all we have to do is “Google” it.
3.) And, what is so bad about efficient communication?
When things are efficient and, like the internet, “free” (or very cheap and affordable), several things happen: Quality of life improves for everyone, even the small and obscure business owner. Everyone has access to more, rather than everyone having access to less. This makes things like special books increase even more in value because instead of selling to everyone who may be interested in one small concentrated area (like one or two blocks in New York City), you can sell to everyone in the world who is most interested and willing to pay the most for that one book with hand-tipped illustrations. This illustrates the difference in the words "cost" and "worth". Is the cost of constantly being connected worth the extreme benefits we get from it? What are the costs of our technology? Many would claim that it is costing us our language and ability to communicate effectively. Now, a person doesn't have to be a published author, in the sense of a publishing company and printed copies. All someone needs to do to be heard and spread throughout the web is to "songify" their life, or otherwise make themselves marketable and the cost is low for the enjoyment of a viral video or a good idea and that is the new authorship -- the new writership and the new audience.
This is the same for everything, though, not just books. Medicine and medical practices become more available to doctors and patients around the world. Tutorials online can teach you how to make your own gourmet meals, fix your own sink, start fires in the snow, so you don’t have to waste your time taking a class or waste money paying someone else to do it for you – unless, of course, you want to. The point is that all of the information is available to you, if you need it. Could it be bad? Sure, we could become too dependent on the free services of the World Wide Web and we clearly take it for granted now that it is available to us all the time but I maintain our ability to communicate what we want, need and how that must be facilitated is increasing drastically.
What happens when we lose our ability to use our language? I have to admit, it kills me when people use the wrong “their, there, they’re” and use commas in the wrong place and don’t use apostrophes and flat out misspell and misuse words. This could be blamed on texting (txting) and tweeting and it is.
Technology has always been a scary thing for people to adapt to but the thing is that we create the technology we live with and it is because of the things we write and record now that make these advancements possible. I am not afraid of technology and certainly not afraid of algorithms taking over our world and making decisions for us and I don't think anyone else should be afraid of that either. People are the authors of algorithms, as we have been the authors of our history and this only gives us more power over it than less. Our language is a fantastic phenomena that has always been changing and the cause of great concern over the years:
“The managements of thought and expression has more to do with them. These gargantuan technologies are more and more the products not just of writing and print but of computerized technologizing of the word. Through the computer, the technologized word is reaching deeper and deeper into the heart of our ordinary lives. That is to say, today the alliance of thought and expression with technology that began with writing is becoming more and more intense. What does this say about human responsibility? Plato had Socrates protest that writing is destructive of human values – and then went ahead to put this ovservation into writing. Writing did not destroy human values, but it made it necessary to handle them on a different basis – in terms of more abstract principles. Print brought new problems of value management. And computers bring still more. Somehow, we must find a way to interiorize the resources of the computer, to humanize them as we have humanized writing and print” (Ong379).
These are letters from the 1800s. Above, they have been typed and set into a book; on the right, the letter was scanned into a computer. The letters of condolence on the left show a very interesting aspect of letters deliverable by hand: your condolences may not reach the intended party until weeks, or months, after the person had passed away because it would take as long for a person out of town to hear about the death as it would for them to respond to the family members. As far as I can tell, we, as a society and as humanity, have done really well at communicating with each other and the idea that our language, even in a concise and/or non-grammatically correct way, can communicate perfectly well within our new technological bounds, using our new tools and creating new, faster ways to spread ideas.
