Some years back I taught a middle school English class. One
of my 13-year-old students stated without embarrassment that she didn’t see the
point in learning to spell well, since her laptop spell-checked her writing and
her smart phone auto-corrected her texting. The other students generally were
of the same mindset.
New technology changes our relationship to the written word
and to language itself. William Caxton, who himself introduced the
world-transforming printing press to England in the 15th century,
complained that “our language now used varyeth ferre from that whiche was used
and spoken whan I was borne.” It’s futile trying to preserve a language in
amber; the only language that isn’t in flux is a dead one. But the technology accelerated
the change, just as today’s technology has exponentially accelerated greater
change.
But in his 1994 book The
Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, Sven Birkerts
was already growing anxious about the downside: electronic media eroding
literary culture. He lamented the displacement of the “slow conventions of
narrative” by “the rush of impulses [through] the innumerable affiliated webs” of
the internet.
For impatient younger generations, the digital age may not
only be democratizing writing but degrading it. Their ability to communicate thoughtfully
and precisely is diminishing, as the rules and standards of language are willingly
sacrificed to the character limitations of tweeting and texting, the
proliferation of acronyms like lol and imho, and the easy visual shortcuts of
emoticons. For them, it’s pedantic and archaic to insist on abiding by those
rules and standards anymore – do so and you’re a Grammar Nazi.
But from the personal to the political, mastery of language
is paramount. Once we lose the ability and desire to convey an emotion in our own words, not with a
one-size-fits-all lol or plug-in emoticon, then we no longer express ourselves
truly and clearly and beautifully. My middle school students didn’t see the
value in the demanding mental exercise of meditation, organization, and
precision of language that good writing requires. In the long run, their apathy
and fascination with the rapid-fire ephemera of the digital realm will surely erode
their ability to express themselves fully as individuals, even to think deeply.
The late John Updike claimed to write his nonfiction on a
typewriter but his fiction with a pencil because it provided the intimacy necessary
to bring his characters to life. Surely this must seem inexplicable and
comically quaint to today’s youth. But they’d be better off unplugging occasionally
and connecting with those “slow conventions of narrative” of the pre-digital
era.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 8/22/12)
