Guns don’t kill people, computers do
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Gadgets, Blog, hardware on
Excuse that headline, it’s almost as daft as the press release behind this blog entry which suggests that adults are forgetting how to write and spell due to using too many gadgets.
Under the title of ‘Gadget obsessed Britons need a lesson in writing’ the press release, ironically marketing a computer in a pen that digitally captures and syncs handwriting and audio together, it states that the results of a new survey is “sure to send shockwaves throughout English departments across the country”. Perhaps, but only if those departments are being run by five year olds as I doubt anyone older would be fooled by the old computers are evil argument no matter how it is wrapped up this time.
I’ve heard it all before, many times during the last 20 years or so I’ve spent as a professional journalist and author in fact: email is killing letter writing, social networking is killing relationships, computers are killing our ability to think. All of these arguments are equally absurd, no matter what the ’science’ being spouted to try and convince us otherwise.
Email has reinvented the art of letter writing, albeit in a new medium. Thing is that medium is so much better than the messenger pigeons, blokes on horseback and snail mail services that went before. Why is an email of less value simply because it is not written in ink on paper and does not take a week to arrive? This argument has always seemed arse about face to me. The arguments against social networking and computing in general fall apart just as quickly when exposed to even the flimsiest of serious examinations.
Which brings me nicely back to the Livescribe release and that claim that because only 16 percent of those asked write ‘by hand’ once a week or less we, as a nation, are forgetting how to write properly and spell for that matter. “80 percent of respondents agreed that the quality of Britons’ English skills had suffered due to the rise and popularity of gadgets such as smartphones over the last five years” it stated, matter of fact. The YouGov survey also revealed that 34 percent admitted to “inadvertently writing in ‘text speak’ in handwritten situations”.
“This survey points to a worrying precedent that suggests standards in writing and spelling in British adults are deteriorating in later life due to an over-reliance on technology programmes such as predictive texting. It implies that in the absence of these devices people are going to struggle to remember how to spell” said Dr Bernard Lamb, President of the Queen’s English Society.
Does it really? I don’t think so.
Let’s look at the 16 percent who write by hand only once a week at the most. What are they using when they send an email via their netbook or smartphone, their feet perhaps? I imagine they are using their fingers to be honest, so that’s a statistic you can safely flush into oblivion. I hardly ever use a pen these days, other than to sign my son’s homework book, does that signal my slow demise as a professional writer? Erm, nope.
OK, what about the 34 percent who, shock horror, used ‘text speak’ in a handwritten letter. Erm, so bleedin’ what? The thing about text speak, like it or loathe it, is that is has become a de facto part of the language now. So of course we are going to be finding ourselves writing it down out of habit. That is really not such a bad thing, upon reflection. If language did not change and evolve over time our correspondence would resemble some Shakespearian sonnet.
And as for the notion that without a gadget we will forget to spell, I’d like to see the scientific double blind trials operated over a period of time to back that statement up otherwise I’ll treat it as conjecture. A word I managed to spell without recourse to the spoil chicken on this here netbook oddly enough.
Finally, does it not strike anyone as strange that folk trying to sell you a gadget, albeit a pen shaped one, would resort to using a survey that suggests gadgets are creating a nation of retards in order so to do?
ROFL, LMAO etc…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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