…technology was so much more exciting when i was growing up. mainly cos it was not yet ubiquitous. it was esoteric. it remained the realm of pointy-headed science geeks; many-degree holding engineers in starched white lab coats, brandishing clipboards with intent. nowadays technology is so…humdrum, so routine. every eight-year old north of sub-saharan africa knows that you save data onto a hard disk, has heard of ipods and ipads, and is gathering enough information to be able to intelligently discuss, in the not too distant future, the status of bandwidth or the relative benefits of accelerometers and infrared detectors. would mister turing revise turing test criteria if he were alive today?
our kids are jaded before they’ve heard of puberty. we inundate them with psp’s, and wii-wii’s, and mobile phones with 2” x 4” colour screens and more computing power than the sum total of all the univacs i have ever dreamed of (23,476 at last count). they are growing up peering out into the world through a two-by-four-inch window of missed opportunity.
today’s kids hardly ever speak to each other, except through enabling (disabling?) videotech like msn and skype. when physically face to face with another human bean they resort to sending shorthand txt msgs wch lk lk gbrsh 2 d rst f us.
emotion is no longer expressed, but communicated through abbreviations like :-) and lol and crbt. in such an emotionless world the increasing use of botox no longer seems so scary; with nothing to express, facial expressions are gradually becoming redundant (lol), as are those of us over the age of 27.
given my age, being described as a dinosaur by the youngest generation would be a goddam compliment!
5 comments:
I hate txting language, and especially now people are starting to talk in that language.
"...starting to talk in that language"
i know.
the death of language? or the natural development of it with time?
i don't like the idea of it, but one way or another language IS going to move on. has always moved on. otherwise we'd be speaking the english of chaucer's time...
"the firste vertu, sone, if thou wolt leere,
is to restreyne and kepe wel thy tonge"
...or urdu & hindi like dilip k and prithviraj k in mughal-e-azam.
i think it's just that the process of language development and change has speeded up significantly as the promise of universal communication, held out by today's pointy-headed geeks, starts to look like it could become a reality.
well, certainly, for my generation(and yours) it was an improvement over Chaucer's period :), but the rate at which it's going now, we might be reduced to bird speak and what not.
seems like we are going the full circle. it would have been nice to have stopped at the half point.
it's called progress, madamoiselle
(or so i'm told)
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