On-line, I rant less at people about how wonderful technology is, but I’ve been coming to an odd conclusion lately that I want to share; that language just might be devolving through the internet. I don’t mean so much words like WOOT coming into parlance, but that vocabulary is homogenizing. Meeting international friends has only added credence to this idea. No matter where in the world they are from, we are all speaking the same language.
I’m talking about expression through memetics, hyperbolic emphasis.
It’s like somehow we’re managing to slim down language to something that’s almost electronic gesture based, so non-specific that we’re reaching a plateau of zen communication that’s partially worrisome. The inflections that span oceans because we read the same news stories and know each other almost purely by interest have not been complex ideas. The common denominators are almost startlingly like a severe Californian infection once they’re noticed. Berkley as patient zero. Home culture barely impacts. We all say “like” and “yeah” smattered with the occasional “I win” acknowledgment of clever. We seem to be erasing language with porous words, as meaningless as the most commonly known word in the world, “okay”.