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Generation Speechless: On the First Thought
A Newsweek article with a provocative title –It’s The End Of The Word As We Know It– caught my small-span attention. It said that according to researches conducted in a number of elementary schools, there is a major decline of students’ reading comprehension. With the birth – and flash growth- of digital gaming technology, students read lesser books, and spend limitless more time on gaming both offline and online. That means more people associate Tolkien’s Lord Of The Ring to Electronic Arts’ LOTR: Battle Of Middle Earth (both PC and console versions) rather than the beautiful text versions. More and more kids learned about Sherlock Holmes from Ubisoft’s Sherlock Holmes: Silver Earring, than from what Sir Doyle originally wrote. And this is likely to continue on. If I got that correctly, it actually said that digital game consoles will hit every single bedroom, gaming CDs will replace what was once books in our shelves, and books will hit museum.
I for one am never at any time against digital technology. With a mp3 player constantly in my pocket, being 24/7 conscious of my loyal laptop’s whereabouts (and completely forgetting my wallet most of the time), subscribing three digital magazines a year, and a blog to rant in, it is definitely too late for me to detest digital culture. A friend of mine found that there are approximately five cables standing by inside my backpack. He described me as literally ‘wired’ and suspected that I have already in me something that no man in our civilization does: a digital self. But I cannot imagine my civilization turned into a book-blind environment. As digitized as I am, I still read e-books as much as I read paper books.
Reading has been not only habits, but adventures, to me. I would recommend stories to a friend like a guy pushing great cannabis to his bud. You should try this, man. This is good shit. Stories, of any sorts, are my tickets to any people’s head I choose –like in Being John Malkovich. If I choose to explicitly pretend I was the writer, I would pick an autobiography. If I choose to be an outside observer, and make out what’s inside the writers’ heads, I’d go with essays or novels. If someone asks me what’s it like reading all those books, I would say: Like being Quantum Leap’s Sam Beckett. Leaping from life to life, fixing right what once went wrong. The only different is, it is my life that I may have the chance to fix.
A Newsweek article with a provocative title –It’s The End Of The Word As We Know It– caught my small-span attention. It said that according to researches conducted in a number of elementary schools, there is a major decline of students’ reading comprehension. With the birth – and flash growth- of digital gaming technology, students read lesser books, and spend limitless more time on gaming both offline and online. That means more people associate Tolkien’s Lord Of The Ring to Electronic Arts’ LOTR: Battle Of Middle Earth (both PC and console versions) rather than the beautiful text versions. More and more kids learned about Sherlock Holmes from Ubisoft’s Sherlock Holmes: Silver Earring, than from what Sir Doyle originally wrote. And this is likely to continue on. If I got that correctly, it actually said that digital game consoles will hit every single bedroom, gaming CDs will replace what was once books in our shelves, and books will hit museum.
I for one am never at any time against digital technology. With a mp3 player constantly in my pocket, being 24/7 conscious of my loyal laptop’s whereabouts (and completely forgetting my wallet most of the time), subscribing three digital magazines a year, and a blog to rant in, it is definitely too late for me to detest digital culture. A friend of mine found that there are approximately five cables standing by inside my backpack. He described me as literally ‘wired’ and suspected that I have already in me something that no man in our civilization does: a digital self. But I cannot imagine my civilization turned into a book-blind environment. As digitized as I am, I still read e-books as much as I read paper books.
Reading has been not only habits, but adventures, to me. I would recommend stories to a friend like a guy pushing great cannabis to his bud. You should try this, man. This is good shit. Stories, of any sorts, are my tickets to any people’s head I choose –like in Being John Malkovich. If I choose to explicitly pretend I was the writer, I would pick an autobiography. If I choose to be an outside observer, and make out what’s inside the writers’ heads, I’d go with essays or novels. If someone asks me what’s it like reading all those books, I would say: Like being Quantum Leap’s Sam Beckett. Leaping from life to life, fixing right what once went wrong. The only different is, it is my life that I may have the chance to fix.
It is only through words that I can experience their lives, although only in pseudo fashion. I would be devastated if I know that no one reads what I've read and feels what I’ve felt anymore.
Generation X: On the Second Thought
But the history of language is a funny thing. We evolved from illiterate to a literate civilization. There was a period, I suppose, when language is a technology as fresh and magical as cell phones. Short after the introduction of language to our race, human brain capacity evolved in an amazing way and speed. We have now a brain with a volume bigger than Neanderthal’s (and significantly better looking, too, thank God). Society works unimaginably better because we are equipped with a tool to transfer our brain files to other people –and as an added bonus, we do it wirelessly, too. Great people of all time –Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hitler, Malaka, Soekarno, Shakespeare–, through language (read: their books), managed to survive the greatest human fear of all: being forgotten. And now, a digital species is looking for a way to kill the very strength of our survival.
Generation X: On the Second Thought
But the history of language is a funny thing. We evolved from illiterate to a literate civilization. There was a period, I suppose, when language is a technology as fresh and magical as cell phones. Short after the introduction of language to our race, human brain capacity evolved in an amazing way and speed. We have now a brain with a volume bigger than Neanderthal’s (and significantly better looking, too, thank God). Society works unimaginably better because we are equipped with a tool to transfer our brain files to other people –and as an added bonus, we do it wirelessly, too. Great people of all time –Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hitler, Malaka, Soekarno, Shakespeare–, through language (read: their books), managed to survive the greatest human fear of all: being forgotten. And now, a digital species is looking for a way to kill the very strength of our survival.
But maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. After all, video did kill radio stars, and there’s no limiting that we someday shift from language to something else more frighteningly ‘cool’. Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh –one of the article’s source– said that language invention was accidental, and that it was an artifact, not the nature of man [1] and that in two hundred years from now we won’t need it to transmit knowledge. We once ditched hieroglyph to alphabet because we know knowledge transfer works better that way. I guess when we someday do ditch alphabets, it would most definitely for the same reason. What Just described would probably look like that scene in the Mission To Mars [2]. That (!) would be killer-cool and I wish to be part of it [3]. All that digital gaming is doing is probably a necessary favor for us to evolve. But if Just is right about it still being two hundred years away from now, that would be a problem. 73,000 days of waiting is no way compatible with my short-fused patience.
In the meantime, I would just have to put up with this just-say-no-to-literature generation pre-x, letting them keep their digital guns blazing, and let myself proceed daydreaming our post-linguistic civilization.
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[1] I bet my precious iPod that Vygotsky would go nuts when he hears this.
[2] A Holywood movie about a team of astronauts from NASA bearing mission to explore Mars, but accidentally finding out instead that human species evolved from a single cell inherited by Martian. The revelation was presented in a cool 3-D hologram (the above picture would say it all).
[3] And that’s enough to distract me from my first objection about digital gaming :-)
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