subject: Language And Intelligence In The Digital Age [print this page] Language And Intelligence In The Digital Age
The Inverse Relationship of Language and Intelligence in the Digital Age Despite the antics of young people with all their computerized widgets and gizmos you are seeing around you, the digital age will not turn us into a mega-mass of plugged in morons, sheepishly following the latest gadgets and fads.
The digital age is stolidly here and it is going to make us smarter- much smarter if you ask me. Ironically though, our language is going to decline because of the brave new world of digital technology, and it may decline surprisingly rabidly. In fact, it already is.
Now, every generation of old fogeys has complained about and lamented the poor use of grammar and language of young people as compared to their generation. But this time it's for real: we are becoming less oral/aural and more visual/cerebral. When you use your computer today for instance, you mainly navigate through your programs by icon, not words. And the first thing you probably notice about files is what program they belong to, and only secondly their content. What is happening is that we are beginning to understand information more and more symbolically.
Now, a word is of course a kind of symbol. But it is not a picture (though there is the view that Chinese characters are). But the written word, including Chinese, evokes sounds in your head. An icon for a program on your computer is a picture. It does not by itself evoke a sound in your head but rather triggers a memory-complex of how you interact with that program. It evokes a feeling.
So in one sense, our reactions to digital imagery are rapidly becoming more complex. On the other hand, our understanding towards visual iconography is becoming more abstract and intuitive. This is leading to greater widespread intelligence, not less.
