Fast forward to gobbledygook
Don’t for one minute suspect me of being a Luddite. But there are times when it seems technology is hampering humanity’s progress instead of accelerating it.
I spent my childhood in various parts of Africa several decades before the advent of television on that continent, and I was an adult before I got to watch TV. At the time, it seemed like a miracle. Maybe programmes were better in those days. Having grown up with the written word, I still prefer it to watching TV – though I often use a Franklin eBook when reading in bed at night (in case anyone thinks I’m a technophobe).
In the Africa of my childhood, entertainment meant radio and books. TV did not exist and the cinema, for many, entailed a 200-mile round trip on dirt tracks which during the rainy season were frequently impassable for weeks. If your water-pump broke you were on your own, with no AA rescue service and no phones with which to call for help. Walking out of such a situation through lion country, as my father once had to do, was an intimidating experience.
Reading in that media-sparse environment was for us a pastime and a joy, as well as a necessary life-skill. It was a craft we learnt thoroughly, not least because spelling and grammar rules were thrashed into us by our sometimes brutal educators.
Times have changed. Recent UN figures show that 20% of British adults are functionally illiterate, meaning they cannot perform basic tasks such as following written instructions on, say, a food label, reading a newspaper or understanding a bus timetable.
One in five people! In an advanced, modern state! That’s appalling. However, those figures fail to show an even grimmer picture (at least to someone whose career is in written communication). This is the rising number of people emerging from our schools and universities with what I would call seriously impaired fluency. Yes, they can read newspapers, but ask them to write a coherent paragraph, correctly punctuated and with proper grammar, and the result is frequently a mess. I have seen young editors, when asked to process copy prior to publication, turn a perfectly lucid piece of text into an incomprehensible morass – to the chagrin of the author. We see myriad examples of such incompetence among the millions of blogs swamping the Internet.
I see the results of declining literacy standards daily in garbled press releases – written by people, bless ’em, who make a living in the so-called communication industry. Some of this output needs a third reading before its intended meaning becomes discernible. Purged of buzzwords and marketing mumbo-jumbo, such press releases regularly shrink to a quarter of their original size – with no loss of message – by the time they get into print. I have worked with university graduates who don’t even know what to call a semi-colon (“that comma with a dot on it,” as one described it). Far less do they know its function and when to use one. Not surprisingly, the semi-colon is an endangered species, and is even banished to extinction in some publishing organisations.
Apostrophes? Colons? Do these small squiggles matter? Ask a musician about annotation. Is syntax important? Ask a computer programmer.
There are two culprits behind the erosion of literacy: TV and an inadequate education system. Both could be fixed, given a sense of direction in one and an injection of cash to the other. The television industry missed a wonderful opportunity to spread culture and an appetite for education; instead, it dumbed down in order to win mass appeal, turning out huge amounts of junk and very little edifying material for viewers who deserved better. I’m a grammarian; get me out of here!
The image is ubiquitous, and there has recently been a rise in the use of video content as a way to get the message across on websites. This is fine for some messages that cannot be easily assimilated via the written word – though images generally lack the nuance of thoughtfully composed writing.
Many of these online video clips are mere video for technology’s sake; we can do it, so let’s do it regardless of whether the medium is appropriate to the message.
Thus we far too often find ourselves presented with a semi-articulate company exec – often visibly uncomfortable on-camera – being asked tedious questions by an unimaginative interviewer. Yawn. Video demands movement and focal interest – attributes which a droning suit is unlikely to provide. The other problem with video is that it is expensive, both in money and in the number of man-hours required to produce just a few minutes of footage. The suspicion is that the gradual migration to the moving picture as the internet’s new carrier pigeon is driven not by a desire to use a superior messaging medium but, rather, that it is motivated simply by the fact that competitors are using it. They have video, therefore we must use it too. Welcome to the technology trap!
Yes, the visual message has its place. But if it should supplant the written word as a means of mass communication, mankind will have taken a retrograde step, lurching backward into a clumsier age. Our troglodyte ancestors used pictures as a medium of communication. Their cave daubings tell us they shared a world with woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed carnivores. But, being crude and lacking nuance, their cave graffiti is today unable to tell us much about our ancestors’ lifestyle.
For that level of finesse we must rely on palaeontologists – people adept at reading bones and fluent in the language of their science. To them, a nick on a femur, like an exclamation mark, may add clarity of meaning to a bundle of dry bones.
Unless we are more thoughtful in the way we use – or abuse – technology, some of our higher communication skills could end up being fossilised.
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