h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Once upon a time, there were many languages on the earth, and these languages were part of rich and varied cultures. This made it very hard for people to travel, because it was difficult to communicate and understand.
But gradually people travelled and new means of communication were developed. People learnt something of the languages and cultures of others,and they picked and chose the bits that suited them. Some languages, especially a kind of American English, became very powerful, largely due to economic factors. So people learnt bits of this American English and swapped them with their friends. They didn't necessarily know how to use the language correctly.
Meanwhile, some languages which were used by few people died out.
After a while, the world ends up with a kind of sludge of language, which is understood and spoken by almost everyone. It is ugly and messy, because people forget the correct grammar and spelling. We get by with this sludge but the poetry and music of the old languages, their variety and links to the cultures which gave rise to them wither away.

While I agree that it's sad when individual languages die out, I'd look at it a bit differently. Change isn't a bad thing per se - and creole languages (like English and Yiddish) can be superproductive. I'm proud to use both of them.

I'm sure that around the time of Bishop Wulfstan, somebody was bemoaning the way English was deteriorating. It sounded like, 'Leofan men, gecnawath thaet soth is: theos worold is on ofste, and hit nealaecth tham ende, and thy hit is on worolde aa swa leng, swa wyrse...' Which makes perfect sense to me. And everybody who didn't spend several years learning that stuff can google it.

What I worry about is that in our haste to 'communicate', we're putting too much trust in the medium over the message. And no, Professor McLuhan, the medium is NOT the message. We actually need to do the thinking work ourselves, or it will all be to do over again. Too many shortcuts going on. Too much, 'I don't need to learn it, I can always look it up,' and hitting-the-forward-button mentality. 'What she/he said' is not a thought process.

I love the internet. It's a wonderful tool. It lets me talk to you. It provides me with a huge library in the comfort of my home. But we need to make sure the young'uns don't have to panic when their routers go down. We need to fight against the GIGO civilisation.

If you're 3, you've been influenced by those around you for a short time. If you're 73, you've had the chance (or the ultimatum) to learn to think for yourself and explore more options than the ones that were given to you when you were 3. Between 3 and 73, your DNA will be partnering with your environment, with some interesting and often unpredictable results. This is how even twins who are separated at birth can develop some differences -- maybe not a *lot* of differences, but there may be some. There's an interesting documentary about triplets who were so separated. It's amazing what variations they developed, while also being obviously triplets.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt7664504/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

There was an elderly computer expert across the street from me in the 1980s. What did he think about the youngsters who considered themselves so clever because he had helped invent the gadgets they used?