|
 |
Stupefying technology | ||
Tags: Gadget | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5145 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes  Speaks: Spanish* | Message 1 of 30 09 December 2011 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
I could not resist posting the following piece appearing in a Colombian newspaper today. It is in Spanish.
Razones de un profesor para renunciar porque alumnos no escriben bien And an interview with Mario Vargas Llosa: Vargas Llosa: "Temo que Internet frivolice la literatura" My own opinion is that you can roughly guess somebody's culture by an inverse relationship with the number of gadgets that they own. Edited by Juаn on 09 December 2011 at 4:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5062 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 2 of 30 09 December 2011 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sorry, my opinion is that it is not the number of "gadgets" that one owns but what one does with them. I read more now that I have an e-reader than I did before and have more available to me to read. The internet is a godsend to me as regards to the limited cultural offerings available here on this tiny island in the Caribbean. Portable devices with facility and ease of use make culture more accessible to me, not less. Yes, if you're primarily using your smartphone to play "angry birds", your tablet to update your facebook status and your e-reader to read the latest Harlequin romance, then I agree. Edited by iguanamon on 09 December 2011 at 4:57pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chris Ford Groupie United States Joined 4543 days ago 65 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese | Message 3 of 30 09 December 2011 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
I agree with Iguanamon on this one. I think it's telling that without the internet I would probably never have heard of Mario Vargas Llosa, let alone learned Spanish and read one of his books. Edited by Chris Ford on 09 December 2011 at 7:29pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6239 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 30 09 December 2011 at 7:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
I must be incredibly uncultured: while I try to avoid gadgets to some degree, and own a lot less than many of my friends who are more gadget-inclined, more than a dozen years of being a computer geek has taken a toll: I have a fair number of gadgets, some of which haven't seen the light of day in years. On the other hand, this forum represents a large majority of my 'social networking', and I use the internet to read classical literature. I don't think my English orthography has suffered too greatly... And without the internet, it's extremely unlikely that I'd read Spanish of that register nearly as easily as English. I really take exception to some things written in the first article.
I spend quite a lot of time alone, my concentration seems to be ok, and I'm no stranger to introspection or silence. And, by any reasonably definition, I'm as much a digital native as anyone. This article strikes me as poorly-thought-out grumblings by someone who is working from far too little data, at best. The second article is more reasonable, although I don't share the author's taste in literature - his favourite authors are ones I find incredibly tedious. He's right to fear banality. I don't think that the internet, gadgets, or social networking are responsible for the popularity of songs like La Gorda - and it and its ilk seemed to be what was getting all the airplay when I was in a Spanish-speaking country this summer. Edited by Volte on 09 December 2011 at 7:47pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5026 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 5 of 30 15 December 2011 at 5:47am | IP Logged | |||||
|
I'm disappointed of Llosa, who is generally much more sensible in his reflections.
WRT the professor (mind you, not just some lecturer), neither do I agree with his causal analysis of the poor linguistic abilities of his students. Technology is only one among many causes, and maybe a magnifier for the others, but not the cause in itself. I've gone over this at least in another two threads so I'll spare you the pain. Anyway I can understand his desperation to the point of resignation, because I see the same all around me here. The focus on bilingualism when they can't put two words together in their own language. You don't need to know anything, because everything is in the Internet. Oh, the panaceas, oh the horror. It'd be laughable but in the immortal words of a certain genius, these things make me feel so bad I wish everyone else died. Edited by mrwarper on 15 December 2011 at 5:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Leurre Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5225 days ago 219 posts - 372 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Korean, Haitian Creole, SpanishC2 Studies: Japanese | Message 6 of 30 15 December 2011 at 12:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
Someone's culture? As in how cultured one is? I hope that there are better ways of measuring things, however 'roughly'. Sorry to be the one to get into this, but what are you understanding by 'cultured'? Let's think this one through a little more yeah? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6350 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 7 of 30 15 December 2011 at 3:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
Let's not. What a surprise - people here think obsession with technology isn't bad. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6503 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 30 15 December 2011 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
We have actually two tendencies, one long-term, the other fairly new.
The longterm tendency is that ever more people have learnt to read. The short term development is that they now have an alternative, namely to look at films and and pictures and listen to music through the electronic media - and the time used there is obviously subtracted from the time they could have used on reading. But the electronic media also present an opportunity to find things to read which never would have been available without them, and for me as a language learner this is more important than the temptation to consume pictures and films and music videos instead of reading. I do deplore that TV stations nowadays have music and other kinds of noise running behind almost everything they send, I hate the jingles and the commercials, I'm sick and tired of people playing their MP3 players so loud that I can hear them, and I do think that there is an unwarranted tendency to applaud the ability to sustain aggressive meaningless confusion instead of the ability to survive short moments of silence - but I would still not want to give up the internet and my TV to get the old world back. Edited by Iversen on 15 December 2011 at 5:34pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
