I see almost the opposite effect: good writing attracts readers, so there is a major incentive to be clear, comprehensible and entertaining. Likewise, effective Internet communication requires the ability to write; there is a bigger premium on writing ability now than ever before. If you are semi-illiterate, everyone can see it now, it’s the modern equivalent of being semi-dumb.
]]>As per a shift to a more visual and image-based communication, people have always used hand gestures and visual cues to bridge language/cultural barriers. I would not be surprised to see Sign language become the international language. Studies, like England’s ‘Sign in Education’ (Robinson, 1997 http://www.signsforsuccess.co.uk/sfsimages/research/Tucker.pdf) have shown that children who learn to speak and Sign at the same time experience improved communication, literacy and math skills.
As per a Universal language, Wikipedia has an entry at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_language), that suggests it is, “a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world’s population. In some contexts, it refers to a means of communication said to be understood by all living things, beings, and objects alike.”
I may be ‘old school’, or at least in the manner(s) by which I grasp the burgeoning technologies (taking a ‘bottoms-up’ approach) however; when researching anything, be it simple or complex, you must reduce all to a common denominator, breaking things down to their basic components.
In reducing languages to their common denominators, I’m inclined to follow the logic of using binary code, first espoused by Gottfried Leibniz in 1666 within his “On the Art of Combination” and (refined much later) by Claude Shannon in 1948 in “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, used in the current worldwide telecommunications.
In this Technological Revolution, information is reduced to a series of ones and zeros. Given the complexities of telecommunication and its use of binary code, I am confident that “the 6,900 or so languages spoken on the planet” today, as well as the languages threatened to become extinct can be reduced to and preserved using binary code and that binary code could be deemed a/the Universal Language where information about ourselves for future generations of our civilization and civilizations whose existence we have yet to become aware is stored and commonly understood.
]]>On the one hand I write deliberately language-rich poetry, so packed with rhyme and complex phrasing that it is virtually unpublishable in the US and mostly appears in Ambit in the UK. On the other hand I am co-founder of a business that teaches business finance through board games, with an emphasis on social interaction and the physical movement of colored objects as a way of understanding foundational concepts — very limited lectures, explanations and readings, much more direct experience.
The future will see your identified trends operating more strongly by orders of magnitude. We are just at the beginning of brain-to-brain communication without the intermediaries of speech or gesture. What will happen to language then? Will we be able to avoid thinking in words? Obviously it’s possible — babies, animals and drunks do it all the time. How will we communicate? What parts of the brain will we develop, what will we neglect? What happens to language if we can communicate pseudo-psychically?
The least we can say is that existing trends will accelerate for the foreseeable future.
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