From the Blog. The Medium is the Message

As a leading Digital Media Agency we’re obviously techno addicts: Macs, iPhones, Facebook and Blogs are our daily bread and without them we would surely starve! But shouldn’t we occasionally try to take a critical look at ourselves and the world we are creating? Whose running this brave new digital era - us or the technology that we’re developing? Here’s an alternative vision of the future for those of us who are currently in need of caffeine so on a bit of a downer.

After all, Technology; what’s it done for us? Sure, it may have saved a few million lives and advanced our civilisation in the short term, but has it been worth it for what we’ve turned us in to? We’re slaves to gadgets, worshipping at the altar of Blackberry, pawning vital organs for 3D televisions; it’s only a matter of time before we begin sacrificing virgins to Apple, lest they not release the next iPhone.

Now technology demands we speak its language, distilling the most powerful of human emotions to a parade of dreadful abbreviations and phrases. I know, I know, it saves you the arduous task of meticulously spelling out exactly what you’re doing with your Saturday afternoon, but it bugs me that we’ve been blessed with the rich and diverse English language, and we choose to mutilate it in the most uncouth ways. It’s not right, it’s not English and it’s not fair.

‘Web 2.0’ is officially the one millionth word in the Oxford English Dictionary. While some balk at this kind of grammatical sacrilege, Jonathon Green embraces the change. The so-called slang lexicographer believes that ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ will be dead in fifty years – presumably by which point we’ll communicate entirely in numbers and misplaced punctuation.

Text speak is, apparently, nothing new according to Green; a poem called An Essay to Miss Catherine Jay, dating back to the 1840s, reads;

He says he loves U 2 X S, 

U R virtuous and Y’s,

In X 
 U X L,
All others in his I’s.

David Crystal is the honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, and walking lexical deity. The common noun made flesh, he believes that ‘Language itself changes slowly but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.’ This might explain why Mr. Green’s latest edition of the Slang Dictionary lists 110,000 different words and phrases over three volumes.

So as Green’s tome-come-occasional-bathroom-read-come-glorified-doorstop will testify, functional language change is normal, in the sense that gangrene is normal, but does this mean we ought to accept it? ‘LOL’ and ‘OMG’ are just a superficial collection of letters with no real emotion behind them; all they represent is stony-faced keyboard smashing in front of a glowing monitor. It’ll be a sad day once the hearty belly laugh has hypothetically bitten the metaphorical dust, replaced by a cold, unloving ‘LMAO’ (‘laughing my arse off’ for any techno virgins reading this). Good grief, it pains me to type LMAO. Each letter is a swift steel toe-capped boot to the kneecaps. L. M. A. Oh dear.

It’s the same language change that’s made lovely vintage words like ‘vinyl’ and ‘groovy’ redundant. Not when you can cram all your ‘awesome’ nasty pop anthems onto an iPod without lugging around dozens of cumbersome cassettes that need to be rewound. Rewound. Young whippersnappers today don’t know they’re born. Today’s children have the entire entirety of the glorious English language at their feet, and they squander it so ignorantly in favour of half-baked colloquialisms and imbecilic Americanisms. Just once, I’d like to hear some louts at the back of the bus involved in heated debate on post-structuralism in the writings of Jean Baudrillard in between quaffs of cheap cider and the odd happy-slap directed at a pensioner.

An entire subculture is lurking deep in that wretched hive, the Internet. A race of bedroom-dwelling, hunch-backed underlings, many of whom have never seen the sun, opting to retreat to message boards to broadcast their thoughts in their unintelligible runes. Are they trying to be unique, or one of the crowd? Are they systematically breaking down the language to rebuild it for this brave-new-social media-hive-mind-world?

In his 2001 book Language and the Internet, our friend David Crystal says that “Has English become a different language as a result of the Internet? The answer has to be no.” What we have is not destruction, but expansion of the language. Crystal says “The main effect of the Internet on language has been to increase the expressive richness of language, providing the language with a new set of communicative dimensions that haven’t existed in the past.” But are these words really enriching the language?

Erin Jansen, founder of Internet dictionary Netlingo, concurs with Crystal; “If you say just because I’m using abbreviated forms… and change my punctuation… when I’m sending email, that it’s affecting the rest of my written language, that, I’m afraid, simply doesn’t happen,” he says. That may well be the case for Jansen, a graduate of the London School of Economics and the University of Malibu. But she isn’t considering the state of affairs beyond her own little academic elite.

A 2004 report by the National Endowment of the Arts reported that less than fifty percent of the adult American population read any literature, with only a measly fifty-six percent claiming to have read ‘any book’ in the last year. ‘Any book’. What does ‘any book’ even mean? A pamphlet from the local chiropractor on good posture? A catalogue for the nearest discount boutique? A coupon book? We could pin it down to a quirky idiosyncrasy of the American psyche, so hell-bent on cleaning their mitts of any colonial heritage.

But we’re hardly doing any better on the other side of the Atlantic. British teenagers are the 25th most literate in the world, behind Estonia and Poland. A study from the University of Dundee found that the top read for fourteen to sixteen year old girls is The Very Hungry Caterpillar, one of the few books that one could read, re-read and pen a post-feminist dissertation about on a quiet Sunday afternoon without the use of higher brain functioning.

So email, text messaging and social networking are the only exposure some children are getting to the written form – and a corrupted iteration of the written form at that. Reading is such a chore to these snot-nosed insolent brats when they could just park themselves in front of the television for a few turns of the hourglass. Schools are increasingly using reading as a structure to teach children the conventions of grammar rather than something that can be enjoyed. Even the charming and whimsical The Very Hungry Caterpillar becomes intolerable if it’s being used to relentlessly drill the rules of adverbial clauses into your skull.

The late, great communication theorist Marshall McLuhan suggested that a medium of communication is an extension of ourselves. If so, what does ‘ROFLMAO’ (‘rolling on floor etc…’) say about us, as a people? How will we be remembered by the coming generations? Is technology irrevocably demolishing English for the future? Will the next generation’s opus be written in the vulgar glyphs currently leaking from the copper threads of the World Wide Web and ruining the English language’s damask upholstery?

We can return to our buddy David Crystal for an answer. In his 2008 book Txtng: the Gr8 Db8, he found that less than 10% of words in text messages are abbreviated, and such abbreviations do not appear prevalently in the written work of students. Quite the opposite, in fact; text speak requires the user to know how to spell before they send their message.

So any apocalyptic visions you had, of ragged denizens foraging through wheelie bins for scraps of KFC, clambering over the rubble of the nearest leisure centre and communicating through chirps and barks are greatly exaggerated, at least for now. Until then, we’ll just have to accept the odd obnoxious fourteen year old girl interjecting her feeble-minded yammering about infected lip piercings with the sporadic ‘LOL’.  But then again, perhaps the linguistic cataclysm has already arrived? LOL.