Casualties of the Internet.
Technology has brought great benefits to humanity. However, like the concept of “creative destruction” in Economics, technological progress has left many casualties on the fields of culture.
Zork’s post
Zork Hun is a retired IT professional like me.
His essay speaks ‘my language’. I too have expressed my concerns about the cesspool of meaning that has become attached to terms used casually by many people.
Too often, words and phrases are expressed by people who appear to have only a superficial understanding of their original meaning. Language has been high-jacked and misused for political and other purposes by many social media and special interest communities which abound in modern society. My comment to his post:
Language, and the personal interpretation of words, is “spaghetti-code” much like a 20-year-old COBOL program after thousands of “fixes” that ran on IBM mainframes in the 1980s.
I think the greatest casualty in civilized societies since the Internet began is the watered-down meaning of language: verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives.
Confusion about the meaning of words was rare in the pre-Internet era.
Language abuse increased as social media became dominant in our culture. I still remember my daughters using an early social media app called ICQ about twenty years ago. I was amazed at how fast their little fingers could type out messages on keyboards.
Today, of course, it’s rare to see anyone under the age of forty without an Apple or Android device on their person.
If so much change to language, ideas and culture could occur in a single human generation who grew up with the first generation of digital technology, how much change can I expect for my grandson (age 1) as he grows up with future generations of technology?
This question intrigues me. Evolutions in technology are occurring over virtually every domain of life, not just interpersonal communication. I don’t know whether my grandson will have a better life than I have had, or worse.
Time will tell.
These times are very interesting for sure. The advances in AI and the data being collected on every single human being in variuous avenues is astounding. Noone knows how we will be affected by this, and I can bet that there are many nefarious uses of AI that we are not privy to. I am retired and choose not to take my phone with me a lot of the time now and I choose to keep it turned off most of the time as there is a microphone always collecting information and recording without my consent. I have read a few articles regarding this very issue. So much is being done without our consent and I do feel as though people are detached and not present even while in the presence of friends, family, spouses. There is a constant distraction of checking their phones, and various social media accounts (I believe we are all someone's pet science project and we are being monitored constantly when we comment on YouTube videos, or for clicking "likes". No doubt our social credit scores are being developed at this point). I yearn for the days I grew up in, where people looked each other in the eyes, when speaking to each other, or sitting at a table engaged in real conversations instead of sharing information on their "smart" phones.
I don't know what is in store for your beautiful grandson, but I bet you will do everything to help educate him and steer him in the right direction and protect him from many of the evils we are facing with the technology of today. I really enjoy your Substacks Gene!