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Post by Deleted on Sept 12, 2009 5:35:31 GMT
Pretty good article showing us that there's no going back, now that the internet has changed us.
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Post by nic on Sept 12, 2009 7:14:55 GMT
Pretty good article showing us that there's no going back, now that the internet has changed us. #12 perpetually bothers me. As somebody who still writes everything by hand, the reliance on email for communication is disturbing. While not as bad as, say, Twitter, it's helping to butcher the English language. |
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 12, 2009 22:13:36 GMT
I think the article is nothing but a list of poorly reasoned peeves with no attempt at corroboration.
How would writing everything out by hand make a person a better writer? Email is hardly "helping to butcher the English language." Before there was such a thing as email, I routinely wrote all my letters on an electric typewriter. People who'd been subjected to my handwriting thanked me for this. Typing, particularly on a computer keyboard, allows ones thoughts to be recorded as quickly as they occur. Instead of wasting time wondering if that R looks funny, I proofread for content and clarity.
For someone who lives in a different country than all her relatives -- a different country, with a crappy postal system -- the internet and email were godsends.
Saying that the reliance on email for communication is disturbing is a total affectation. Being able to communicate almost in real time, to have a written conversation, can bring people closer.
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Post by lagatta on Sept 12, 2009 22:35:49 GMT
The other problem is that a lot of people DIDN'T write (especially men, due to social roles). Remember their major form of long-distance communication as being drunken phone calls. Oh, women can do those too, but they were more likely to write. Now more people are in the e-mail habit.
This is especially significant for parents of young adults who are travelling or studying far away. For my uncle, it was a great relief that my cousin, temporarily living in Australia and visiting nearby countries, was NOT in Bali when the terror bombing occurred.
Though this was also true for me on 9/11, as a friend of mine in NYC was a freelance journalist with Bloomberg News, and frequently went to the WTC.
The postal system in Italy a couple of decades ago was unspeakably ghastly, and it cost a FORTUNE to make phone calls to other countries (not just to Canada, even to France). When I was last in Perugia in 2006 I was able to stay in touch with everyone via Internet, for a very reasonable cost.
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Post by traveler63 on Sept 15, 2009 0:05:55 GMT
I think that the Internet has both improved and diminished life. It has certainly improved communication, given people who may not be mobile a way of seeing and communicating with the world and exploded information gathering to greater heights. When it is used in a wise and intelligent way it is really an asset. However, there is a dark side to it. Too many people, become a slave of it, believe everything they read on it, use it for terrible, dark reasons and use it as a foil not to have regular face to face dialogue.
The greatest task for one using the Internet is to determine how to balance the time spent sitting in a room away from the family with actively connecting with the real world.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 15, 2009 0:42:00 GMT
I believe that most people used to think more before putting their thoughts down in writing. That is both an advantage and a disadvantage.
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