January 2022
That’s how your parents walked to school. Now all this generation does is loaf around in their pajama pants (because those are fashionable now, as bemoaned by your grandmother in her Sunday best), motionless save for their thumbs. Yet within their seeming laziness, their sedentary degeneration into a “screenager”, thousands of texts– predictably inane, probably offensive– are being shot around, bouncing off multiple topics at a time and carrying a strange nuance that older people are baffled by. Quote my father: what does “pound sign blessed” even mean? Dad, it’s called a hashtag now.
Change seems to accelerate with the proximity of social media, the ability to comment and leave scathing criticism of social issues at the tap of a finger. Even so, as one tweet by a Gen Z tongue-in-cheek quotes, “Gen Z’ers will get on social media to flame a racist but [they’d] be scared to call and set up a doctor’s appointment.” Digital intelligence sharpens our social skills, at the expense of our ability to articulate our thoughts in a traditionally “intelligent” way such as a classroom presentation or a workplace speech. Unfortunately, the time for a metaverse is still far off, so it seems we must– pardon my teenage slang– suck it up and learn to talk to people.
Proper punctuation is out of the question. Capitalization is out the window. Grammar is nonexistent (although I still believe being flamed for improper usage of “your” and “you’re” is perfectly acceptable). Traits of a social media post, a Twitter rant, even digital menus and billboards, include butchered grammar and unintentionally fabulously misfired messages. Read the comments under any online apology ever– let’s take James Charles, a Youtube makeup guru who came under fire for grooming underage boys and also promoting vitamins that his fellow Youtuber friend did not endorse (this is a real story.). Comments toss around the terms “gaslight”, “cringe”, “fauxpology,” and bring up screenshots from as far back as 2014 to deflect his tearful and admittedly very insincere video. Terms on the internet that five years ago would have only been brought up in a psychology lecture are being introduced into the slew of Internet slang, and it has dangerous implications. Most chiefly, the misuse of words in context. Would you really comment “gaslighting” to Beauty and the Beast if you knew the full meaning of the word and where it’s used in the outside world?
This isn’t a phenomenon we couldn’t see coming, but it has arrived with startling speed. Just in the last five years, how we talk online has totally morphed into something unrecognizable and impossible to navigate. What’s the difference between underrated and underappreciated? How do we draw the line between appreciation and appropriation? Is it annoying to use too many exclamations in casual messaging? Questions like these have popped up with increasing frequency over the last ten years as people are– pardon my own extreme language– indoctrinated into the modern world of technology beyond what 90s kids could ever imagine. Take it from Neil Postman, giving his speech “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change” in 1998. While discussing human intelligence in the throes of digitalization, he hits upon one very important point: “the computer person values information, not knowledge, certainly not wisdom.” That is to say that learning, even beyond an academic setting, has become surface level. The convenience of wisdom has thickened our skulls. For the vast majority of us (admittedly, me included), there is no value in actively seeking information beyond what Google can tell me. Thus, we as a collective become slothlike. Lugubrious though it may seem, we have lined up to sacrifice our material knowledge, what makes us human and grounded, in favor of shiny new technology that promises innovative social thought… but not much else.
But for now, back to words. The misuse of words having dangerous implications for communication, especially government and corporate press releases, is an already-trod argument. Of course you can glean that misused words, improper grammar, and careless communication lead to bad communication. What I also argue is that the meaning of these words will change over time and actually spread. Slang is created and retired in every Internet cycle. For perspective, “litty” lasted about two months in 2017 and is now considered “cringe”, which seems to be a word with more permanence on the Internet and its boatload of trolls. The book definition of “cringe” is to physically recoil and is technically a verb, but when heard verbally, it’s understood that “cringe” is an adjective meant to describe someone who gives you intense secondhand embarrassment. Similarly, and in a more official setting, “selfie” was infamously added to Merriam Webster’s dictionary. It wasn’t a “real word”, according to everyone over the age of 30, but what’s real in the virtual world? No one decides what makes a lasting impression on the Internet except for everyone.
So we know that digital innovation lessens our traditional sense of efficient communication but creates new ways. Also nothing new. But what it culminates in is our slow descent towards a metaverse where Lang essays are not dependent on the proper usage of grammar and traditional words rather than slang. The proliferation of technology and the real world examples I provided show that informal, hackneyed communication is becoming the norm. If you haven’t heard any new slang in the past year, if you haven’t been baffled by a new Tiktok trend lately, you’d better catch up. Everyone around you is, after all. The internet is ubiquitous now, transforming how we think on a worldwide scale. It will work to the advantage of those mysterious corporate entities as our minds are reprogrammed. In “The Illusion of Knowledge,” Adrian Ward even says that technology is “hijacking preexisting cognitive tendencies and creating novel outcomes.” It’s a succinct summary of where technology has taken us. Faced with an all-you-can-eat buffet of information, we sit, bovine, fattening with every bite of information we consume– and it’s only gotten streamlined over the years. How many results does Google pull up in 0.2 seconds? We should do something about that, right?
But don’t get up from your armchair yet. The key word in my declaration that we’re slowly transitioning to a virtual universe is “slowly.” Metaverses are decades away, and still have real world ramifications that limit it. Privacy is given up in favor of corporations reading your behavior, probing your brain for every thought, every need, every arbitrary desire. In fact the main goal of social media is to “peck at [you] like ducks.” Then, it’s going to end up “colonizing much of your day.” What Clive Thompson doesn’t mention, but certainly implies in his interview with Michael Agger, is that technology can end up monopolizing your entire life before you’ve even realized it. When social media caters to exactly what you want, it’s hard to resist the lure of checking just one more time. It’s hard to click away from targeted ads; they work for a reason. It’s a strong argument in Meta’s favor that it’s all for you, the consumer– which gives companies leeway to lovably stalk you in the name of recommending your favorites, and eventually, deciding them. Unfortunately for Big Brother Meta, this is an uphill battle given that with digitalization comes even stronger desires for privacy. Namely, a safe space where your information won’t be leaked so corporations can use it to pad their mattresses with targeted advertisement money. Too bad for Mr. Zuck.
And too bad for the digital generation, because it means there’s no escape from grammar pundits and beleaguered English teachers. The real world still necessitates efficient, formal, and clear communication. Even though the Internet obviously doesn’t prioritize them, class presentations, workplace meetings, and political speeches are still crucial in the spread of information today. This is not necessarily saying that we should all start texting and tweeting Shakespearean style, but that we need to recognize that our digital words still have weight in the real world, and even if you can’t articulate your thoughts on Twitter, you still need to have the ability to organize your thoughts on paper, to argue a point, to write a good essay. Your bytes have bite.
Certainly you can conjure a host of opposing arguments. I would encourage you to; issues aren’t black and white. Opposition is the soul of thought. But proponents of technology too often fail to consider the consequences of what they argue. While going on the defensive, they lose objective reasoning, falling into black and white patterns: technology isn’t all bad all the time. Think of what it’s done for us! This is not an attack on proponents of technology– certainly we all reap the benefits of a modernized society. Rather, it attacks the thinking that technological convenience espouses: the idea that innovation has no consequences, that it has no possible detriment, that even its creators can’t twist it beyond its original intent. Look at Facebook and its information-selling scandal. We are certainly capable of bastardizing anything we introduce into our habitat, because we are human. What matters is that we acknowledge it. We need to be able to recognize the bad in the good to improve. The problem, of course, is that technology like the Internet inherently opposes this aim. Dr. Anthony Wagner, in Jacqueline Howard’s “This Is How The Internet Is Rewiring Your Brain,” even says “‘That failure to filter means [we’re] slowed down by that irrelevant information.’” Look no further for proof than the opposing argument: technology is good because it makes things convenient. Never mind that there is unspoken fallout from tech’s transformatory nature. That we cannot verbalize it because technology has robbed us of the power to know how. But it can be rectified– by thinking about what we say, how we say it, and how our words have more impact than we realize.
This is an uphill battle– the return of my introductory sentence! How’s that for connecting ideas in essays? – but it needs to be addressed before our inability to speak on the Internet eclipses our words in real life. For better or worse, we stand at a crossroads. One leads to a world where government communication is muddled and biased, corporations are able to baffle us with disgustingly long contracts, and no one can protest because they have never thought about how. We are on that path. The other path, where we learn to write, where we can reach to our roots in clearly communicating our ideas and articulating why we back them, is the path we might not realize we need, but the one that will create a better world. Both on the screen you read this on and where “your” lying on “you’re” couch.