“Blaming this evolution on the internet feels misguided.” — elizabeth tobey

I didn’t blame the evolution of language on the internet. To quote myself, I said the evolution of language is, “a wonderful thing.” What I blamed on the internet was the dissolution of language…. or the de-evolution of language.

To further expatiate, I must say that it is not just the internet that has contributed to the dissolution, de-evolution and demolition of language but it has also been the technology that the internet has guided humans into.

Back in the early days of the internet people communicated by using their 10 fingers to type on a keyboard. Many people found that extremely difficult. I didn’t. Why? Because I took a typing class in high school long, long before the internet even existed. My family and friends all considered me to be queer for taking a typing class and to them I explained that my life goal was to be a writer so it only made sense that I took a typing class. To those who continued to look at me as though I were queer, I explained that of the 35 students in my typing class I was the only male. What true male would not want to take a class that was full of girls?

There were around 170 students in the 5 typing classes at my high school. (I went to a high school with over 4,000 students.) Almost all of those 170 students were girls. On the final exam at the end of the year I scored the second highest of all those students. I had a perfect score in that I made no errors and I typed at 126 words per minute. There was only one girl who also typed without any errors who typed faster than me. She typed 128 words per minute. I ended up asking her out but she declined, explaining that she wouldn’t date a boy who typed slower than she did.

But I digress…..

Since that typing class a couple of hundred years ago my typing has significantly improved. When I place my fingers over my laptop keyboard I’m like Ray Charles sitting down at the piano. I used to freak my daughter out by typing out stories with my eyes closed. “How the hell do you do that?” she would ask. I replied, “Because I learned how to type.”

Of course, nowadays typing isn’t even taught in schools anymore. Most Americans under the age of 30 don’t even know what a typewriter is (unless they happened to have seen one in a museum).

One of the main obstacles to the internet in the early days was that no one knew how to type. Your basic keyboard was like an indecipherable puzzle that pissed people off. This led to flagrant abbreviation, ubiquitous misspelling, abhorrent grammar, misuse of capitalization, and the rise of decadent emoticons. It was the beginning of the demise of language. Instead of the flowering of language, a de-evolution began.

Then came the smart phone (a misnomer in that they actually serve to further dumb down communication). Unlike a keyboard on which an experienced typist could create symphonies much like a pianist does on a piano keyboard, the smart phone user was restricted to only using one’s thumbs, much like a chimpanzee in the forest. I dare anyone to type 126+ words a minute with their thumbs on their freaking cellphone!

This was considered an advancement, though, despite the fact that it further degraded language; increasing indecipherable abbreviation, ubiquitous misspelling, abhorrent grammar, misuse of (or complete lack of) capitalization, and the further rise of animal-like grunt communication.

But soon these so-called smart phones will become obsolete. Soon we will have no need for a keyboard. We will simply grunt into our smart wrist-watches or our smart eye-glass ware and those grunts will be communicated across the web. All communication will have de-evolved into grunts and emojies and language will be something only used by anarchists meeting secretly in dank cellars or hideaways out in nature.

Please forgive this horrible dystopian world-view. I actually have more faith in language than this, although I acknowledge that I may be mistaken. While it is painfully obvious that the internet and its inherent technologies are eroding the beauty and sanctity of language, it is, at the same time, enabling communication on a global scale. It may very well prove that language is unnecessary for communication. It may very well be something that shoves us beyond the vicissitudes of life. It may very well lead us to a point in our collective spiritual evolution where language is no longer necessary. This, of course, will bring us full-circle to where we were before the advent of language; a time when we communicated with our innate psychic ability. If this is the case then the internet and its various technological modalities are an unintentional form of planned obsolescence. It may show us in the physical realms what we already possess in the non-physical realms. It may lead us to the realization of our true abilities and our true greatness. It may lead us to true, pure communication. And in the process we will eventually no longer need it.

But I digress…..

P. S. As an aside, I want to point out that the British did not give us our language. We took it. Etymologists have since proven that in the subsequent hundreds of years it was actually British English that changed more so than the American usage of English. (Not that it matters.)