Death of a Language

I’m no writer. I do, on occasion, put one word after another in a semi-coherent manner and then post them for other people to read. I’m just no writer.

Fortunately for me, this blog doesn’t really have to contain a plot. This blog doesn’t have to have a deep meaning behind it. It’s a dialog. If you were to ask me about these topics that I’ve posted about, you’d probably end up hearing many of the same things. 

I have to blame one of my friends for this (and they shall remain nameless), but I recently started watching “Californication”. An interesting point was made by the show about blogs in general, mainly how they are adding to a technological dumb-down of our society. 

I’m not sure I quite agree with that view point, but at the same time see the validity in it. In a cyber world of “lol”, “brb”, and the death of capital letters, the tweet, the text, and the IM seem to be in command. I’m not a pillar of perfection, I fall into this category as well, but I’m not sure how I feel about it.

My last semester in school I took a course called “Survey of Forms: Fiction”, where we looked at short stories, collections of writings, and wrote our own. I never wrote the next great story. I didn’t write something that was going to be completely riveting and that nobody could put down. What I found I was best at was writing dialog. I could write a conversation that would feel like it was actually something people would be saying. 

Is the world of the sound bite giving way to the world of the tweet? We are already a society with such a short attention span we can’t listen to one thing for more than 30 seconds. Are we now becoming a society that can’t read more than 140 characters at a time? Are we becoming a society so lazy that we can’t take the extra nanosecond it takes to type “you” as opposed to “u”? 

I regularly come across posts where people are mixing “to”, “too” and “two”, or “there”, “they’re” and “their”. With this change in mindset we may as well just have one version of the word that fits all three uses, since nobody seems to care which one they use. For that matter instead of letters we could just use “2” for all three forms and just start to phase letters out altogether. 

As I said before, I’m not a perfect writer. I am well aware that my grammar isn’t the best at times and my spelling is horrible (thank you spellchecker). However, I really fear for the day when I go to write a dialog and find myself typing a non ironic “LOL”, instead of having the character actually laugh.