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Stupefying technology | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4847 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 17 of 30 17 December 2011 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Very astute observation. Most people were very much into songs and other popular activities before anything digital ever existed, those activities and that entertainment just didn't have the audacity of being digital. Nevertheless pundits and intellectuals have been brooding over people's dislike of the scientific, the intellectual, the challenging for centuries before computers, or probably even the abacus.
Allow me to suggest that most of the time technology is not "the cause of anything" (no more than you having legs is cause for you to want to compete in a marathon) so much as it is a medium. Of course, in some cases, technology might be and sometimes is a cause or even a goal of something, but much less frequently that people seem to attribute to it.
And not because technology made you read, never a cause to learn to read, rather a medium that allows to educate more people, faster, better, more conveniently.
Another good observation. Culture in some sense always is, but the medium is always changing -- from Socratic circles, to Jesuit convents, to reading, to film and music, to digital media, to web. The point is not that you read, or go to a convent. The point is that you learn, you become more educated, more cultured, and if you want that, if you want to become a better person it can be achieved by watching TV, or reading wikipedia on a smartphone, not just by reading a heavy tome in a library. Technology mostly just made things faster, more convenient. You still have to make the effort to want to be a better person, what that means and whether to choose to use _any_ means, digital or not, towards such goals is for you to decide.
Most people don't end up using text-speak much beyond those context. There's been studies, if i'm not mistaken. But think about this, when you drive and you see a stop sign, would you rather it was punctuated? Would you rather it was a sentence, "dear sir or madam, please stop." Would you rather have a paragraph from the government on the importance of rules and signs and the significance of a stop sign at this particular intersection? Probably not. Text speak is very much the same way, "brb" is short and to the point if used in the appropriate context. Just the fact that it's used instead of something else, should tell you that it's likely a better solution for the task at hand, which is communication. It's a somewhat different matter, when technology hinders you in your optimal or preferred manner of going about your business (let's say communicating). For example, when your software or hardware doesn't allow you to type punctuation, UPPERCASE, limits message length (ex.: sms), use your preferred language, wrongly autocorrects your input, or whatever else, then it's a problem that needs and usually is quickly addressed.
People made spelling mistakes before technology to correct mistakes ever existed. Spelling mistakes tend to correlate to how much people read (visual memory of words) and time invested in writing, not so much technology. Although technology can in rare cases introduce small problems like incorrect spellchecking or overcorrecting the correct usages, something likely to vanish with tech improvements. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4847 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 18 of 30 17 December 2011 at 3:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Very true, but all too often this is taken to the extreme: technology is ruining everything or technology will solve everything. Will it do either? Probably not. Can it do either? Maybe.
It takes hard work to learn to think critically, and education is highly correlated with the ability to think critically. Having information available for you to learn from is a crucial step of education. Thinking critically is a skill that requires practice and a choice that requires making. To think critically about something also requires you to have all the pertinent information, so it's back to that. Also, the level of education has never been higher: more people are educated and those who are educated know more than ever before. All too often people tend to compare professors of 50 years ago to soccer moms or factory workers of today, why? Compare professors of 50 years ago to today's professors, and ditto for the soccer moms or factory workers. I also realize you might've been referring to information overload, which is a completely different phenomena and would warrant a separate discussion.
People did that 100 years ago, just took longer. So if it took you 2 hours before to do by hand, what it takes 10 minutes to do now (including reading and changing your name on an encyclopedia article): how's that not better. Anyway, cheating is a kind of educational tool -- it's incredibly valuable ex.: K-12 at least, with decreasing efficiency with increasing knowledge. And it tends to go away as you go higher and higher in your level of learning anyway.
It's already possible and in place in many institutions. It's also in place in Google actually, moreover even on massive scale that ranks pages that are "copies" of other pages as lower in rank, for all the billions and billions of pages that Google indexes. This is why (well a small part of the reason why) all the blog copy pastes are not ranked as high as your honest-to-Flying-Spaghetti news articles.
Very true and very false. Very false because one could argue then that you could just as well learn the proper knowledge if you were bothered. The problem is "could". Not could, should. Everyone should be bothered and should learn both the knowledge and the tools. If you are an old timer that has the knowledge, it's on you to learn and use the new tools for all they're worth, ask your kids to help. And if you're a kid who's already in the know on the tools, you should seek advice of parents and teachers and peers and get the knowledge to go with it. So, very true and very false. Very true, because it's just as simple as that: be bothered, just do it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4847 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 19 of 30 17 December 2011 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I thought I'd bring up another interesting notion to consider about culture and technology.
This is an interesting article about Third Culture written by Kevin Kelly who writes a lot about technology, culture, books, education and a variety of other topics and well, I might add. To sum it up, there used to be two widely recognized cultures, first the "high" culture of literature, cinematography, arts, etc, the second culture -- culture of science and knowledge, the two somewhat at odds with each other. It seems there's an emergent third culture brought about in the recent decades and it's a culture of technology -- in many ways it's bridging the sciences with arts, but in many ways it's an entirely new culture of note in and of itself. Most people on this forum are probably already ardent members of this third culture, and people who come from older generations, even if they don't plan to jump the bandwagon, should definitely be at least aware of the phenomenon. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6398 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 20 of 30 18 December 2011 at 1:55am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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| espejismo Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4852 days ago 498 posts - 905 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish, Greek, Azerbaijani | Message 21 of 30 18 December 2011 at 6:10am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
In my high school, we had to submit almost all of our assignments on turnitin.com. The system would look for matches between your work and the submissions of all other students. It would also check if any part of it came from the internet. Edited by espejismo on 18 December 2011 at 6:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5027 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 22 of 30 18 December 2011 at 9:47am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Forgot to mention this. In addition, in 'introduction to programming' we had to hand in assignments such and such day in person because in that moment we had to explain the code to the lecturer (why you choose to do this or that way, what every variable was for, etc.). I don't know if someone ever tried to copy, but you'd need luck trying to explain somebody else's code and get away with it... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4847 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 23 of 30 18 December 2011 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
That's very much true, visual memory does not discriminate, so by extension all those essays you and I wrote by hand in school helped us develop writing abilities, but also helped "memorize" the mistakes we made more in much the same way as sms or online speak. Of course it goes without saying that online speak would have a bigger impact due to much greater popularity and the consistency of those mistakes, but mostly the impact of technology here, I think, is not as a primary cause of illiteracy rather than just a faster way, and again it depends especially on what you read online NYT or chatrooms. In fact I was very surprise first time around at how much more "proofread" this forum feels compared to a lot of other ones even ones dedicated to languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6398 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 24 of 30 18 December 2011 at 7:10pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
as for this forum, i think that's partly due to the language profiles system. when you claim advanced fluency in English you just can't afford to mix up "your" and "you're" :) (sadly, when you're a native speaker with native fluency, you suddenly can ;_; but i love how this forum promotes respect to those who've learned English as a second language, along the lines of "even non-natives can write well, shame on you if you don't do your best") 1 person has voted this message useful |
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