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Seize the Internet!
Social scientists have said much about the impoverishment of our language and therefore of our minds since the last world war, but few people were listening to social scientists as the radio and the boob tube became ever more ubiquitous and popular.
I fondly remember how my family gathered around the radio in the evening to listen to our favorite programs. But my father was dead set against having a television set. It was some time before he caved in to the sulking around the house concerning what the Joneses had--much to the wounding of our pride--and brought home a TV. You know the drill back then: there was only one channel with a few programs. I watched the shows sometimes, but I mostly followed in my father's footsteps: I read books for my entertainment and edification; they are really one and the same thing to me, for learning is my greatest pleasure.
I like nothing better than a good hard read, and the denser the better. Plain English bores me to no end, even more so than soaps, sitcoms, and commercials. My father read difficult books too, yet he still loves the art of plain English most of all. Yes, I know, plain English can clearly express very complicated ideas, say those in metaphysical tomes; but no, thank you, philosophy that reads like a technical manual is not my cup of tea: I prefer mine with sugar and cream and romantic frills and thrills.
Oh, yes, I mentioned the boob tube. I must confess that I put down my books and really got into TV during the Eighties. It was more or less of an escape from thinking about a life that was not too pleasing at the time no matter how much beer I drank and sex I had. In fact, I actually became a boob for a few years.
I think most of us have realized by now the many dangers of passive entertainment; it seems that some of the social criticism did get through the popular noise-making. Why, it even became fashionable to criticise TV before and after watching it. And some parents who had time to be parents insisted on getting rid of it or turning it off for long periods of time. Still, TV is the major influence on people's lives.
But now we have the Internet! We can be interactive now! Those of us who could hardly compose a decent letter have become writers in order to communicate with each other and perhaps to gain some fame and fortune to boot. And now that everyone is letting it all hang out in virtual space, those who still have three eyes can see what is really on people's minds, the sorry results of the very mass culture social scientists were warning us about.
In plain English, What a mess!
Those of us who enjoy extended arguments, narratives, and expositions are confronted with readers who have the attention span of a gnat. But I exaggerate; studies have shown that the average Internet reader does not like to invest over thirty seconds of his time on any one article, so eager is he to click onto something else lest he miss something or the other--he knows not quite what.
It seems that years of boobtubery and newsmindedness has resulted in dirty foreshortened brains with truncated minds incapable of thinking cogently or carrying an argument in any one direction for more than half a minute or a minute at the most. Only the concrete dots, the objects, the facts, warrant attention: the line, the subject, is ignored.
Since there is no sustained drive in any direction, there is no resistance to the milling herd or to the authorities who thrive on its dull-mindedness. There is no unity of consciousness, either projected as God, or introjected as human identity. Thus we witness in Internet writing the chaotic results of a sort of madly scrambling, scrambled mentality of scatterbrains, of fragmented personalities coordinate to a vast wilderness of consumer products advertised by sound bites and fleeting concrete images.
Furthermore, the experts who preside over the prevalent bite-sized, take-out mentality chant a dead, practical language that provides the status quo with an fatalistic aura of scientific inevitability. In turn, the mass, like a chorus of demented magpies, drinks the verbal formula and repeats the refrain of hackneyed phrases. Most of all, the lobotomized mass must have its easy read, its preferred narcotic, the dimwittedness drug. Easy reading presents no challenge, no stimulus to wilfully think; by its means mass man is buried in heaps of trash, garbage and junk. Yet anxiety is not completely smothered: some become discontented with the life of walking, talking maggotry, and become mean junk-yard dogs; they are disgruntled but they lack alternative vocabularies: they wind up protecting the barbed-wired status quo.
Yes, the social scientists were correct. Much damage has evidently been done. The situation is dire but not hopeless. We have the Internet now; its faults are ours, and we can do something about that. Reading and writing on the Internet does not offer some of the spontaneous advantages of a good conversation, but we still have a golden opportunity to collect our thoughts, to take our language back, to restore our sanity, to literally save our world.
Therefore seize the Internet before it is too late, before it is downgraded and dumbed-down to just another idiotic sequence of commercials and massive heaps of stultifying stuff.
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