Am I kidding myself or are we not going through as monumental a change with the advances in electronic communication over the last 50 years, and accelerated by computers over the past ten or so years? * Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it. John Keats, poet I totally agree with you, tabsey, about the change in communication due to electronic means. It's like NOBODY uses pen and paper anymore. And while I love texting/emailing/and such, to me nothing means more than a handwritten note. Pretty soon we'll be sending messages telepathically or something. I had read an article a while back about how teachers were seeing students using "text lingo" in their papers! Kids come out of the womb with a computer these days. Kimble, ouch! I have seen a lot of txtspk in so-called academic work. It is disturbing - not that I object to it in its place, 150 characters for an sms is a real limitation. I think language is changing with things like tagging, too. People are using words in ways they didn't in the past, and making up more and more portmanteau words to deal with the amount of ideas they want to express in a shorthand way, such as folksonomy (the taxonomy produced by the folk who tag things). But we were musing the other day about how seldom new alphabets seem to be generated. Tolkien was about the only person we could think of (plus whoever invented the Klingon alphabet and shorthand, of course) wh... I didn't mean to sound like an old fogey, or so critical Pat. My bad, lol! See...I'm using the lingo!  "Humans had been speaking for a couple hundred thousand years before they got the inspiration or nerve to mark their ideas down for posterity."Although this simplifying statement is, of course, not completely wrong, I can't fall into its eulogizing line promptly. Writing has pristinely and primarily two motives: an economic one and a law sanctifying one. Writing solidified civilisations in the word's double meaning: stabilizing as well as petrifying. Most of the history of writing has been and is characterized by copying and transcribing. Only a few people got really any "inspiration to mark their ideas down". This applies to the eras of carving knives and wood, chisels and... When our planet is a burned out cinder what proofs will there be that we even existed? Voyager will potentially be our greatest and most long-lasting achievement. As to the move to electronic media, there is a very real concern that even 10 years out much electronic data may be unusable for lack of ability to access it as changing technologies of data storage overtake existing ones. This is a real problem for librarians/archivists. I'm sure many reading this are aware of the issue, but it seemed like a good spot to throw it in for those who aren't. |
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