Is Language Devolving?
With the growth of television and the decline of Typography,
one can see that language as a whole is slowing devolving. According to Amusing
Ourselves to Death, during the 1600s, reading and writing was highly encouraged
in the colonies in North America. The book goes on to say, that this
encouragement was for all classes, not just the nobles. It also states that the
common people were able to understand high diction speeches given by
politicians, and then made their decision after. This was, however, before the
television was invented. When the T.V. was first created, its popularity
skyrocketed, which in turn lowered the ideas of reading and writing.
According to Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to
Death, the T.V. shows a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, and
sequence. Neil goes on to say that the information through the T.V. is not coherent,
irrelevant, and does not contain any context, whereas Typography makes the
human mind classify information, create inferences, and reason. Lastly, Neil
states that T.V. is harming society for three reasons. First, children cannot
learn information at school due to the fun, lively environment child T.V. shows
create, like Elmo’s World. Second, the average American watches four and a half
hours of television a day, which adds up to about twelve years of a person’s
life. And third, the T.V. causes disinformation, which means everything that is
important in a piece of information is lost. With the television causing so
many problems within society, it is obvious that Typography and language as a
whole is devolving. To truly engage in the reading and writing world, one must
understand the meaning of the words he/she is reading, weigh ideas, compare and
contrast topics, uncover lies, and connect one generalization to another.
However, the T.V. pollutes public communication and its surrounding landscape,
simply feeds information to it’s audience, fragments topics to show only a
portion of it, and breaks the continuity of context. Language is clearly
devolving due to television, and this is most clearly seen in reality shows.
Within reality shows, curse/swear words are now common and words that do not
even exist in the dictionary are used in everyday life. Not only that, but the
Television, and its ways, are being copied by both the radio, and the
newspapers, leaving language with no hope of recovery. With the youngest generation being caught up
in television, these habits in the decline of language are only going to get
worse, and worse.
