I think maybe that the whole explosion for naming generation should really be an opportunity for people to try and influence how peers view themselves. Someone once said we are generation WWW. Not X or Y or even the loathsome Z, but WWW like three paper dolls holding hands. I wonder if people in the past using abbreviations thought about the effect they were having. Those holding onto Latin's Et Cetera thinking someday everyone will know ect... or even . . . I mean the evolution of language is strange. I think about it as a way people are judged, how people say "he sounds like an idiot" not he is an idiot but he sounds like it, that somehow his use of language was the signifier of his intelligence. But what if the point of language was just to communicate, not to impress. When does shorthand degrade the actual use of words, of course when going for detail for visual recreation through words it is almost alway better to pick and choose carefully, but in daily discourse does it really matter if you tell someone BRB rather then be right back, or if you save seconds or minutes on your text message by using shorthand aren't you the more efficient and in some cases intelligent one? I wonder what stenographers think of text messages? are they good at them, or even faster at texting then at writing shorthand for courts. But who knows they could loose their jobs to a computer. Fall victim to the horrors of Automation. But maybe the generation of WWW will level the playing field that mastery of language won't matter so much as communication of ideas. Really it's all 0's and 1's anyways, all of it even as you read this.
December 8, 2007
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