For years, his comedic creations have been making us laugh, but Mike Judge may have unknowingly generated a unnervingly realistic view of our future in the 2006 movie Idiocracy. I realized after reading this article that we are much closer to achieving this scenario than I care to admit and I just wanted to drop out of the human race.
With the utilization of the internet and cell phones rising faster than morning wood at an all boys school, the use of made up and abbreviated words is becoming more prolific on a daily bases. You can’t fart these days without exposing your noxious gasses to somebody texting, emailing, listening to music, taking pictures or surfing the web on their phones. The digital hub is infecting our daily lives to the point where we feel the need to share every photo, video and moment of our lives on services such as FaceBook and Nexopia. Sites like YouTube spew user generated trash at millions of users a day, masquerading as entertainment, while sites like Twitter give people the ability to post mini messages from their cellular phones allowing you to monitor every facet their lives 24/7 if you/they wish. While these services increase communication, are they reducing human contact and interaction?
Over the past few years, I have noticed that many of the most well known atrocities (LOL/OMG) have started creeping their way into peoples daily vocabulary. The younger generation spend more time texting and IMing than they do interacting with other kids, and it is destroying the dynamics of interaction. My little cousin for example, who is now the condescending age of 14, goes to her friends house to interact with her other friends on MSN and Nex, she spends more time reading than she does talking! The problem is not that they are communicating, it’s HOW they are communicating.
Kids these days use so many acronyms, deliberate misspellings and ‘LOL’ Speak that some parents require decoders to understand what their children are saying! Now, while many people think that this problem is limited only to minors, it is a widespread issue among college and university grads as well.
So what happens when these kids get older and start going for jobs in the real world where you actually need to know real words and real writing? In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Doris Lessing said the internet has “seduced a whole generation into its inanities”, and I think she is right. Ask anybody you know under the age of 25 how they communicate, how many books they read and how many times they have been to a library in the past 5 years and I bet you are astounded by the answers. This would explain the large amount of 20 somethings working in low level jobs who are barely able to do their jobs. The National Commission on Writing did a study with large corporations and found that ‘writing can be your ticket to professional jobs’.
If we continue with the current trends, we will find a lot more kids growing up unable to properly read and write, and communicating with each other at the same level as 4 year olds. While there are many people who avoid the plague of internet-speak and actually believe in proper communication, as long as there are there people actively adding to the problem, society will continue it’s downward spiral into the pits of drooling and nut shots.
As Forrest Gump once said “Stupid is as Stupid Does”.
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