In our house, blaming the internet for a host of ills is a competitive sport and The Northern Light and I are rather good at it Privacy and freedom, or the erosion of them, are the main accusations we make of the world wide web and it does seem sometimes that the whole thing was created to make us anxious. What’s the nature of that anxiety, aside from having unseen eyes knowing where you are all the time, what you’re doing, buying, watching, listening to? And with whom?
My own particular gripes with the internet are more trivial. I mourn the amount of time I spend, either online or on the phone, communicating with people I would never speak to if the internet didn’t exist. Add that to the time spent setting right the technology with which to waste time and you could be talking about hours of your life. Who hasn’t spent time at the end of a line that informs you ‘we’re experiencing an unusually high number of calls…’? Or simply going down a website’s rabbit holes and meeting dead ends. Today, for example, I spent an hour and half setting up mobile banking and I’m just coming down off the ceiling because of it.
And apart from the misinformation you drink in like kool-aid, or getting fifty different answers to a question, there’s downright damage being caused. Physical, social and mental. Will we all end up with absurdly muscular thumbs, stooped shoulders, tumours in our ears, short sight? And will our children be unable to talk, face to face with real human beings? I could, and often do, go on…
At the moment my overriding complaint probably stems from being a writer. The internet has reduced language being spoken or written in sentences, and replaced them with short, often meaningless phrases. And punctuation seems to have died a death. And that’s what I’ve homed in on. It may sound daft but I blame the demise of puctuation for the simply dreadful way tv news pundits, experts, reporters and presenters speak on television. One wonders if they know what full stops, commas, colons, semi-colons really are. No sentence ever has a discernible end or break in it, let alone a pause for breath. The verbiage just piles up at breakneck speed and whatever’s being said loses meaning in the rush. And pity the poor voice recognition subtitles trying to keep up with it! I should say at this point that I have a son who’s a TV news reporter and he can be understood because he not only writes a good script but he talks in what used to be called ‘proper sentences’. To that extent he’s like the main character in The Nathan Hawk Murder Mysteries. The latest is this story set partly in China.
Like all good investigators, Hawk also knows the value of a pause between questions. He learns more from these shortn silences simply because of most people’s need to fill theam. If you read any one of his stories, from Haggard Hawk to White Crane you’ll see what I mean. And the family in The Occasional Jonas Kemble are high powered actors who wouldn’t have survived in the theatre without being articulate. So for my money, bring back the full stop!
People, let’s respect each other … I think that the writer is right, well, it could have been softer. P. S. I congratulate you on the last Christmas!
I like your posts, it makes me think)
Very good thought