Many people - dare I say most? - today have "smart phones", mobile telephones which not only engage in telephony but also have cameras and lots of nifty applications, including email. Smart phone owners may feel very proud of themselves for being high tech, "with it" and, well, smart. Alas, I have bad news: your smart phone is making you look stupid.
The data which have led me to this conclusion have come from several sources over the last few months. The first are emails from my students. An unseemly number of emails - usually asking me to excuse their absences, raise their grades or otherwise do something nice for them - lack a proper salutation. Moreover, they usually lack capitalization. And some days the students really seem to be gunning for my ire, with messages such as, "when r u going to give back the essays?"The second source of data is an international discussion forum - by invitation only - of highly educated people discussing matters of great importance. One might expect higher standards in such a place, even if it is only an online forum. However, while the incidents are rarer, it is not by a wide margin. Typos abound. Capitalization is frequently optional. And comments are frequently terse, with antecedents unclear and thoughts undeveloped.
A third source of data comes from students who spend their class time twittering, playing games or otherwise distracting themselves from the studies for which they/their parents/the taxpayers are spending good money.
There are, of course, logical explanations for all these occurrences. Classes are boring and, besides, the professor won't notice me texting the girl sitting next to me. The buttons on phones, no matter how generous, are not as large as those on a keyboard (which, oddly enough, are usually just a tad larger than one's fingertips), making typos a fact of life. And in an effort to curtail the frustrating and time-consuming process of typing on such a thing, shorthand is common. Finally, many smart phones simply are not capable of differentiating capital letters.
However, there are good reasons to dismiss all these explanations. The professor can see you and does think less of you for allowing the little gizmo in your hand to distract you from your studies. Many smart phones can do capital letters (though you usually have to press an extra button or two - what a time-waster!), making a lack of capitalization unacceptable. But more to the point: if you cannot craft an adequate business message on your phone, what business have you using it for business at all? If you think that the ability to send über-prompt messages will outweigh their sloppy contents, I assure you it does not. The only message that your terse communiques, sans capitalization, sends is that their contents were not of sufficient concern to you to bother sitting down at a computer and sending a proper email.
It would seem that I must amend my title statement. Your smart phone is not making you look stupid: it is revealing you for the idiot you are.
8 comments:
The problem you've highlighted is not so much a problem with phones in themselves. The smart phone is merely the latest medium for what has been a standard means of expression online since the early 1990's, at least. This style of writing, with its simplistic grammar and persistent abbreviation, has been the principal language of live chats and emails for decades, following from IRC to ICQ to AIM to Myspace to Facebook to Google, and yes, into text messaging as well. If there is truly such a thing as an online "culture", this "l33t" speak is its vernacular. The phone is not making them look stupid, nor is it enabling an idiocy anymore than any other means of communication enables idiocy, be it an internet terminal or a cave painting.
Of course, this manner of writing is unacceptable for formal academic or business communication, and you're right to point out that the student have little or no awareness of situation. These students have grown up in the internet age, and often have no idea that language predates HTML. In 10 years, I've had very few breeches of protocol, though. Here's my secret. First day, I say this:
"You may be picking up that I'm a laid back guy, and yes, I don't sweat a lot of meaningless details in some cases. But this is a professional relationship we have here, and if you send me emails full of emoticons, LOLs, and cool internet abbreviations, it's probably going to negatively impact my view of you as a student."
To accentuate, I often draw these figures on the board while saying it. I smile, but they get the point.
So don't blame the phones, man. Besides, I have pictures of you on mine.
I agree with Mike: it's not the phones that are to blame. I'd argue that there are other factors at play which cause people to want to throw out formalities like salutations and capitalization.
The lead cause I see is the materialist/consequentialist reductions of the Enlightenment, playing out through modern history. Messages are a means of conveying data, and to most people's sensibilities, if the signifiers signify what's intended, mission accomplished. Thus, "LOL" is, on absolute level, just as good as "I found that hilarious."
The problem is that we (some of us, at least) recognize this isn't true. How something is said is just as important, perhaps even more important, than what is said. It's because, being thoroughly rooted in language, we can never instrumentalize language but stand within and expresses ourselves, quite literally, in it. The how of my words reveals my approach to my audience/interlocutor. If, at work, I'm emailing a client, I should dress my words appropriately.
But as for the smartphones, I still don't think they're problematic. There's a small segment of smartphone users who take great pride in employing proper capitalization, punctuation, etc. It's really not a lot of extra effort considering the benefit of knowing one is superior to all those other people. Wasn't it always so in other media, that there would be those who follow the rules of good form, and those who would not?
Mike, it's interesting that you mention students' lack of situational awareness. I lead discussions with students each week over various primary documents. My initial questions usually pertain to genre and situation: When was this document written? What kind of document is it? What does that mean about its content, structure, rhetoric, etc? I find that students often have trouble articulating the difference between a letter from the Tsar to his son, a policy memo from the National Security Council and a work of satire by Montesquieu. So it should come as little surprise that they're still learning to distinguish a text to their friends from an email to their instructors.
Last week we discussed a cable from the US embassy in Riyadh to Washington. In hindsight, I should have used the opportunity to look at some of its features, such as the all-caps all the way through and the frequent use of abbreviations. Why is this happening? What is this acceptable in an internal State Department cable? Would you see this in a public document? Why not? Well, perhaps I can do that next time...
Interesting point about language, Paul. In addition to a philosophic dimension, it also highlights the failure of students to ever learn much about rhetoric. How is it that one can get halfway through one's college career and not know - on some level - that form conveys as much meaning as content? One can pass blame all the way down the food chain: freshman English courses are not teaching the finer points of analysis and persuasion, but basic writing instead. They're having to do this because it was never done in the public school system. Which has had to babysit children whose parents were never present. The list could go on and on. I have long attributed any writing ability I may have to the fact that my father frequently read to me when I was a small child. The chain of causality might be a bit stretched there, but I think there's something to it...
Also, might I draw attention to two little things? First, the "ranting" tag: there is a certain one-sided-ness to this post, and I recognize that. Second, the final sentence, which might be paraphrased thus: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our smart phones, but in ourselves."
Here's my own mini-rant related to Paul's comment on how something is said and Aaron's last comment about the value of parents reading to their children. Not only should parents read out loud to their children, they should make their children read out loud, so that they know how to convey the meaning of a passage to listeners. Being read to as a helps a child figure out the meaning of the passage from the tone of voice, while reading out loud forces a child to figure out the real meaning of the passage and to convey it properly. I find it appalling how many people simply cannot properly read a passage out loud (this rant may or may not have been prompted by certain readers at church).
A point of historical comparison. I know in the past that telegrams were often full of abbreviations, and were generally not models of English prose (or poetry for that matter). The reason behind all the abbreviations, I believe, was that the sender of a telegram was charged per letter, so it paid to keep the message as short as possible.
However, as Mike's mini-history of the Internet seems to indicate, cost is not necessarily the problem here.
Steve, I think you're right in a literal sense that telegraphers were charged by the letter, whereas young texters are not. However, time is a real cost and should not be ignored. The problem is not so much that certain young people value their time (and therefore make use of abbreviations), but that they value the small amount of time it takes to write a decent note more than they value their grade (or some such) is a problem.
I always love a good rant! Well done!
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