Language and how it is Devolving

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.