While our intentions can be misinterpreted without face-to-face contact, there is also the broader danger that our over-reliance on technologies will have a negative impact on language itself.
Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor at American University in Washington, argues in her book Always On that instant messaging, mobile phones and blogs are magnifying the casual “whatever” attitude towards formal writing among the younger generation.
Examination boards routinely report that “text speak” has crept into school test papers. Whereas biographers or historians can draw upon a wealth of written archive material from previous centuries, there will be substantially less preserved for the future because so much of our cyberspace chatter is transient.
“By its very nature, e-mail or text is not a convivial medium of communication,” said Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the Idler magazine and author of How To Be Idle. “Something about it makes people communicate in an unsatisfactory way with bad grammar, bad spelling and bad punctuation, in mostly terse sentences. It makes you hurry.”
Hodgkinson attempted to give up e-mail two years ago, but his resolve lasted just two weeks.
“It was just impossible when I was trying to edit a magazine,” he said, “but I have started writing my books first in longhand, with an ink pen, and then transferring it to a computer. I find that my thoughts flow much better that way.”
“Offices used to be very noisy and full of clatter. Now everybody sits in their own horrible bubble on Facebook instead of actually talking to each other,” he said.
Still, it is not all bad. Freeman acknowledges that there are “enormous benefits” to modern forms of communication.
“It’s made all kinds of work more convenient ... people have a desperate need to be in touch. I’m just arguing that it needn’t always have to be at the speed that e-mail travels,” he said.
But Yoram Kalman sounds a cautionary note against using technology as a scapegoat.
“Usually, if you look behind the technology, you find culture, social behavior and you find people,” Kalman said. “Technology is neutral, it depends what you use it for.”
So perhaps, in the end, most of us want to be tyrannized.
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