Tuesday 18 March 2008

Idiocracy







I recently watched the movie staring Luke Wilson called "
Idiocracy", the movie was alright, nothing outstanding, but it makes a good point. The story line of the movie is basically that Luke Wilson is selected as an "average joe" to take part in a top secret military "hibernation" experiment, he awakes 500 years in the future and discovers a society so incredibly dumbed-down that he's easily the most intelligent person alive.

When checking my 'unnamed social network site', it's worrying to see this fictional storyline, could have a lot of grounding in reality. There is an entire generation of kids at the moment who are slowly but surely "unlearning" how to spell and talk. Its down to two things... texting and laziness, this is then slowly brought forward to chat rooms, and then bebo messages, and then more recently I've heard kids "speaking in text talk" using terms like "LOL" in actual conversation, abbreviating words beyond recognition



dis isa typical xampl of txt tlk, evry wrd shortend witn an inch of it's lyf, 2 fit as mch N2 a txt as posbL
(converted to text talk using http://www.lingo2word.com/translate.php)


"English examiners have complained about the use of slang expressions such as "gonna", "ain't" and "shouda" in GCSEs. Markers for the exam board Edexcel said "almost unforgivable" basic errors were made by apparently bright pupils."

I would have thought that the enivitable result of this continued "iliteracy" over a period of say the next hundred years, would result in the above mentioned "idiocracy" situation, but it seems in this case, as ennoying as I find this, the evidence suggests otherwise. An article in The Guardian states;

"Mrs Plester said: "So far, our research has suggested that there is no evidence to link a poor ability in standard English to those children who send text messages. In fact, the children who were the best at using 'textisms' were also found to be the better spellers and writers."

"We are interested in discovering whether texting could be used positively to increase phonetic awareness in less able children, and perhaps increase their language skills, in a fun yet educational way."

(Texting slang aiding children's language skills - Alexandra Smith Monday September 11, 2006)


But oohhh, how it still annoys me! :)




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