All of these new-fangled technologies—texting,
emojis, email, social networking and the like—are destroying our
ability to communicate. They're making it impossible for young people to
concentrate, to speak and write grammatically, and to communicate effectively;
in the end, they're doing serious harm to the very language itself.

Jacquie Ream, a
former teacher and the author of K.I.S.S.: Keep
It Short and Simple, noted, “We have a whole generation being raised
without communication skills.” She and others contend that texting is destroying the way young people think and write.
And yet, the
destruction seems awfully . . . slow.
Technology has apparently been ruining the language for quite a while now—many
dozens or hundreds or even thousands of years. And yet here we (and it) still
are. You would think that, by now, technology would
have succeeded in destroying the language. Perhaps it needs to work harder;
apparently, destroying a language—or our ability to use a language—is
not as easy as it looks.
There have always been
plenty of critics ready to point out the dangers that new technologies pose to
our ability to communicate and to think. And they have been ready for a very long time, beginning with the most
foundational technologies—ones that predate the iPhone and texting and
Facebook not by years, but by centuries.
Writing itself, for instance. In his Phaedrus,
Plato has Socrates recounting a story in which the inventor of writing
seeks a king's praise. But instead of praising him, the king says, “You have
invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils
the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things
without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are
for the most part ignorant.”
So, at
least for some people, even the invention of writing
horrified the older generation. It was, after all, a new technology, and one
which completely altered the acquisition, storage, and dissemination of
information. Talk about a game-changer—and you know how we old people hate
change.
And
that's always how it goes; the younger generation adopts new tools, while the
older generation looks on aghast, certain that what they're witnessing
presages the end of our ability to think, to work, to communicate.
These
days we're fine with writing. In fact, it's the demise
of writing we're worried about.
In another recent development, it turns out that the use of
pictures (such as emoticons and emojis) to replace words confuses—and
perhaps angers—some people. British journalist and
actress Maria McErlane told The New York Times that she was “deeply offended" by emoticons. "If
anybody on Facebook sends me a message with a little smiley-frowny face ... I
will de-friend them ... I find it lazy. Are your words not enough?” Ms.
McErlane apparently has a very short temper and way too much time on her hands.
Invented
in 1982 by Scott E. Fahlman, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon,
the first emoticon was a sideways smiley face made up of a colon, a hyphen, and
a right-parenthesis. It was created explicitly to add information to plain text
messages, the underlying context of which might otherwise be misunderstood.
(Was that a joke? Is he serious? Should I be angry? WHAT DID HE MEAN BY THAT?!
OMG!)
And thus began the
end of the world as we know it. I mean, not counting Socrates and such.
John
McWhorter, with whom I traded emails while researching Leveling the
Playing Field, is a linguistics
professor at Columbia University. He has studied texting and writing—and
communication in general—and he says that we're looking at this whole texting
thing all wrong. Texting, says Dr. McWhorter, isn't writing at all, and thus has little or no effect on writing.
Texting, says McWhorter, is actually "fingered speech."
In
McWhorter's view, rather than being a bastardized form of writing, texting is
more akin to—and follows fairly closely the rules of—spoken language, complete with its shortcuts, telegraphic
delivery, fragmented utterances, and the use of "body language" (in
this case, emoticons, emojis, and the like) to clarify and add context to an
otherwise potentially ambiguous communication.
Many of us seem to
think of texting as something less than
writing, something that represents some sort of communicative decline, but
McWhorter insists that this is not so. “We think something has gone wrong, but
what is going on is a kind of emergent complexity.” (Check out Dr. McWhorter's
TED address here.)
Which may be a way of saying that my granddaughter was right. During a discussion of this topic, she
suggested that perhaps what we're seeing is not the death of one language, but
the birth of a new one.
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