Not this again...

I've written some of what I'm about to write before. I make no apologies. Piano composition used to be my stress relief valve (and still is, for values of emotional stress that defy easy articulation)...but in most cases nowadays my first impulse is to write it out of my system. And the same little irritants keep happening over and over and over until they exert enough cranial pressure that I simply must blog. Either that or explode.

Most of my little irritants are in some way connected with communication--which would be one of my Ten Commandments were it not already implied in the first two. You can't empathize or question without communication.

We are far from the only species on this planet that communicates with others of our kind. But we are the only species entrusting our communication to machines. In so doing, we are gradually losing the ability to effectively communicate at all. (He says, snarkily, using a machine to communicate his points.)

Okay, back up a little.

The Internet is the best tool we've yet evolved for mass communication. It enables me to broadcast this point of view worldwide pretty much instantaneously, and that's a good thing, potentially the best thing. But I'm writing about individual communication, which used to be all about face time and is now a lot more about Facebook.

Seriously--or perhaps that should be 'srsly'--people, many of us, particularly our young, would rather talk on a phone than see someone in person, and would much rather text than talk on a phone. This baffles me. Aside from being dramatically slower (there isn't a person alive who can text as fast as they can talk), it's utterly dehumanizing. There's nothing of "you" or "me" in a text message. Not even a disembodied voice. Just words on a screen. And many of them aren't even words. I've written before about some of the text shorthand I've run across. "Ily" is, for me, the last straw. It saves all of five keystrokes and turns "I love you"--surely the most potent three words in the English language--into gibberish. It says "I love you, but not enough to waste time seeing you, saying it to you, or even typing out the whole phrase." That's not love. That's not even like.

I am very ambivalent about technology. I appreciate it, sometimes I adore it, but often I hate what it has done to our society. I read E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" back in grade five and marvelled that a man writing in 1909 could see this coming. We've gone beyond even his bleak vision, however, because Forster's Machine was essentially a videophone, and text messages have neither video nor voice.
And the speed. In an effort to make texting even half as efficient as talking, words are truncated, vowels are omitted, and an endless series of acronyms are employed, often obfuscating meaning and robbing the communication of its depth.

We've become a shallow society, content to "tweet" like birdbrains. Actually, that's probably an insult to birds: their songs are lovely, and they make a point of singing them to each other, face to bird-face.

There are books of correspondence from and between some of humanity's greatest thinkers and writers, and how many people bother to read such things anymore? They're longer than a couple of screens. I see the acronym "TL; DR" constantly. "Too Long; Didn't Read". I'd counter it with TS; DT. "Too Short; Didn't Think."

Human beings, social animals all, have constructed something called "social media" that is antisocial in the extreme. There's nothing "social" about being alone and bathed in the light of one's monitor, no matter what the Zuckerbergs of the world may believe.

And while we're butchering the English language, chopping it up and feeding it piecemeal into our texting-machines-that-are-still-quaintly-called-"phones", would it kill us to employ the grammar we were taught in second and third grade? There is a difference between you're and your; between to, too, and two; between its and it's; and between there, their and they're. Every day, despite myself, I find I'm in the virtual company of people who evidently never passed grade three. If I routinely made mistakes like these, I'd be ashamed of myself and take corrective measures immediately. But my attitude is antiquated and offensive, I'm told. Ah, well. If it can't quack using the accepted syntax of quackery, it's a stupid duck.