An Interesting Quote I Heard

[Paolo]

"We've become a nation of smart phones and stupid people."

Discuss.

[Riverwind (imported)]

But we know how to text while flying, driving a train, driving down the highway, its those sudden stops that's the killer.

And I love your new avatar, Darth Micky

River

[Paolo]

Thanks. Glad you liked it.

[considering (imported)]

In a new book, "Alone Together" the author discusses how our almost pathological dependence on technology has caused us to lose the ability to communicate. Also, and this is not from the book, in 1960 the average high school graduate had a working vocabulary of just under 50,000 words. In 2005 that number was below 20,000. What's important here is that it's not just the words we know but our basic ability to understand and, increasingly, that's dropping. As we've all noticed at various moments we've seen people side by each but talking to each other on their phones. Many people do not know the word "castrate". To say I've been castrated draws looks of confusion. I can clear that up by using a looser term such as "denutted" or "cut", why should I substitute a perfectly accurate word for a less specific phrase?

When I was a visiting professor and had to face a class less than interested I would start at the back of the room, try and exude confidence and happiness, race to the podium and, smiling like a person possessed would say, "Show of hands!! Who has Anthrax?". You'd be amazed at the number of university level students who have anthrax, I was.

[moi621 (imported)]

"We've become a nation of smart phones and stupid people."

Discuss.

Can we just "text" ?

[fhunter]

Can we just "text" ? You'll go bankrupt. Texting costs too much per byte. That was the reason for "Text speak".

In Russia it was even more interesting: the length of SMS is 160 bytes. When you use Cyrillic, it is a "multi-byte encoding", and you can not get more than 70 symbols. So it was either transliteration (as a consequence, T9, the great limiter of vocabulary, does not work) or some other techniques. Adding to that, that it was cheaper to call and speak a minute, than to send two texts (initially), the usual answer on the texts "call, it would be cheaper."

I think, that there are two great limiters of vocabulary with texting: length of message and T9 (or other predictive text input systems). It is simpler to surrender to it, than to teach it your vocabulary (and some phones just can not be teached. Philips, damn it).

[Riverwind (imported)]

Yep everybody texts, nobody just talks to each other anymore. I don't text, I try not to use my phone at all. There is something to be said for face to face conversation, USE SKYPE w/camera.

River

[Dave (imported)]

Two Quotes:

Harmony: Well, for starters, she's been fucked more times than she's had a hot meal.

Harry: Yeah, I heard about that. It was neck-and-neck and then she skipped lunch.

Someone (I forget who): it's, "My uncle put his ping-ping in my papa!"... and then they all come out here!

kiss, kiss, bang, bang