Loving the Internet
A few years ago Douglas Adams wrote How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet.
...you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
- everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
- anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
- anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
He also talks about us being the first generation of internet users, comparing our use to that of a pidgin language.
...cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all.
The next generation will use it like a creole.
However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.
