B.B.C. News Magazine
[url]A Point of View: Mourning the loss of the written word[/url]

"The modernist writer Virginia Woolf called letter writing "the human art, which owes its origins in the love of friends". In our frenetic world of electronic communication, we must remember to write with thought and consideration, says historian Lisa Jardine."

Firstly, I think this is good advice for anyone who uses the net. Its so instant we sometimes forget to think.

One thing that has always botherd me is the lack of perminance in our modern age. The communications of the past are still with us, the letters and museings of history still exist, even in partialy lost form. Nowadays as most of our correspondance is electronic, one good EMP burst, devistating war or natural disaster and our civilisation just goes. Not with a bang so much as with an error message. Do you think the archiologists of the future will be piecing together hard-drives as the ones today glue together Helenistic vases?

Having said that, I still concider the"Cloud" to be the work of magic and goblins.

DougC wrote:B.B.C. News Magazine
[url]A Point of View: Mourning the loss of the written word[/url]

"The modernist writer Virginia Woolf called letter writing "the human art, which owes its origins in the love of friends". In our frenetic world of electronic communication, we must remember to write with thought and consideration, says historian Lisa Jardine."

Firstly, I think this is good advice for anyone who uses the net. Its so instant we sometimes forget to think.

One thing that has always botherd me is the lack of perminance in our modern age. The communications of the past are still with us, the letters and museings of history still exist, even in partialy lost form. Nowadays as most of our correspondance is electronic, one good EMP burst, devistating war or natural disaster and our civilisation just goes. Not with a bang so much as with an error message. Do you think the archiologists of the future will be piecing together hard-drives as the ones today glue together Helenistic vases?

Having said that, I still concider the"Cloud" to be the work of magic and goblins.

Well, I've put enough thought and consideration into words that I can spot your myriad spelling errors.

The more a technology specialises, the more dependent we become on the infrastructure which supports it. In the same way a specialised animal depends ever more on the status quo which it exploits.

hoopy frood wrote:

DougC wrote:B.B.C. News Magazine
[url]A Point of View: Mourning the loss of the written word[/url]

"The modernist writer Virginia Woolf called letter writing "the human art, which owes its origins in the love of friends". In our frenetic world of electronic communication, we must remember to write with thought and consideration, says historian Lisa Jardine."

Firstly, I think this is good advice for anyone who uses the net. Its so instant we sometimes forget to think.

One thing that has always botherd me is the lack of perminance in our modern age. The communications of the past are still with us, the letters and museings of history still exist, even in partialy lost form. Nowadays as most of our correspondance is electronic, one good EMP burst, devistating war or natural disaster and our civilisation just goes. Not with a bang so much as with an error message. Do you think the archiologists of the future will be piecing together hard-drives as the ones today glue together Helenistic vases?

Having said that, I still concider the"Cloud" to be the work of magic and goblins.

Well, I've put enough thought and consideration into words that I can spot your myriad spelling errors.

The more a technology specialises, the more dependent we become on the infrastructure which supports it. In the same way a specialised animal depends ever more on the status quo which it exploits.

You and every English teacher I ever knew, Try for the message rather than the means.

^No worries.



Of course, we are and will continue to be recording pretty much everything and anything on paper for a long time to come yet. Technology could crumble but we would still have all data on paper somewhere. The impermanence of communications with technology at the moment is more to do with personal email correspondence etc.

You might find these interesting:

http://www.george-orwell.org/Politics_a ... age/0.html





Edit to add:

Lets hope one or two moderators is printing this as we go along, would hate to think this ark of reason will be lost forever.

(Still dont get the "Cloud" though.)

On the broad topic of technology and writing, there is a growing awareness in Japan of the detrimental effects of keyboarding and texting on people's handwriting skills.

It has happened a bit with me in my English writing ability. When I was at university, way back, I regularly used to write 3,000 word papers by hand. And I hand wrote a 12,000 word dissertation. I can barely keep going for one side of A5 paper now before my handwriting just gets all spidery and my arm aches. I hardly ever write more than a couple of sentences by hand these days.

It's even worse for the Japanese. The writing system has three components. Two syllabaries of 50 odd characters each, usually two or three strokes per character, and the Kanji system, borrowed from Chinese. There are approximately 2,000 of these in daily use. They can be relatively simple ones with 4 strokes like 木 'KI' meaning 'tree', to more complex ones like 嘘　meaning 'lie' (untruth).
The problem is that unless you write them by hand frequently you simply forget how to write them, even though you can still read them. Most young people do most of their writing by keyboard, so they can do the input OK, for example just type in 'K' and 'I' to give the syllable 'KI' and then select from a menu 気、希、木、期，来、機、希.....　(my menu is giving me about 50 choices, so if I want the meaning 'tree' I would select number three from that list.)
There seems to be some evidence that the keyboard, search/select method is having a very real effect on the handwriting abilities of many Japanese. I know from experience that the Kanji I can read outnumbers the ones I can write by hundreds.

Many Japanese I know freely admit to having lost the ability to write vast amounts of Kanji by hand, but they can type on their phones at phenomenal pace.
Maybe there will have to be new definitions of literacy to describe the reading and writing skills of the keyboarding/texting generation

This is a very real problem. The Royal Library in Stockholm is one of the few places in Sweden with hard- and software capable of reading data stored in format used in the 1970's. Personal, written exchanges between people are becoming rare. Many billions of photos are taken, but just a tiny fraction is printed and kept. It doesn't take an EMP - it just takes a few changes in hardware to make a medium obsolete, and don't get me started on data loss. How many home movies on VHS are unwatchable now? As for the written word, my handwriting has suffered and it has been ages since I sent a handwritten letter to someone. If a future historian would take an interest in my contacts with my friends, they would find that I apparently ended most of those relationships in the mid-90's.

Your right Spearthrower, the technology allows us to engage in ways of communication that were simply not possible in the past.
It always seemed perverse to me that the written word is/was somehow elevated over the spoken word, and held up as a standard to be emulated, if possible, in speaking, whilst the spoken word was in many ways seen as a degraded form of the language, dismissed as somehow 'thoughtless', 'careless' or 'casual'.

In actual fact, in my opinion, it is the other way round. The ponderous task of crafting a carefully worded messages stands in stark contrast to the high order, quicksilver, thought processes that go into sustaining real-time interaction with a human interlocutor. Even the most hasty one-line E-mail still passes the Turing test.

Varangian, yeah, my future biographers (ha!) will notice that I 'went dark' (as they would term it in '24' or The Bourne Identity') sometime in the late 90's.

I am one of the last generation who has grown up alongside our technology advancements

I remember the first personal computers, the first mobile phones, the first electronic gaming consoles and everything that has come since.

We already have the generations who wont have experienced those points in history.


You say a biographer would conclude you went dark in the 90's, well they would conclude i was always dark as i have never wrote personal letters and recently have gone as far as to not even send special occasion cards.

My handwriting is still pretty good though, as i understand its significance. Though i really wish i could have an electronic tablet so i didnt have so much dam paper everywhere (im a physicist and so i have shit tons of paper floating about with equations n such on them).

Joe09 wrote:I am one of the last generation who has grown up alongside our technology advancements

I remember the first personal computers, the first mobile phones, the first electronic gaming consoles and everything that has come since.

You're only 22! ?

well maybe not the exact first, but development was so slow back then i was essentially there from the start

campermon wrote:

Joe09 wrote:I am one of the last generation who has grown up alongside our technology advancements

I remember the first personal computers, the first mobile phones, the first electronic gaming consoles and everything that has come since.

You're only 22! ?

I remember writing letters

Joe09 wrote:well maybe not the exact first, but development was so slow back then i was essentially there from the start

lol!

cavarka9 wrote:

campermon wrote:

Joe09 wrote:I am one of the last generation who has grown up alongside our technology advancements

I remember the first personal computers, the first mobile phones, the first electronic gaming consoles and everything that has come since.

You're only 22! ?

I remember writing letters

When I was a student I used to write nearly every day to MrsC! I always used a nice fountain pen and quality writing paper. MrsC still has them bound up.

...and that's one of the points here - your letters will probably be around for decades, while your emails to her will be lost sooner or later.