[Reader-list] Linguist Chaos on the Internet?

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Hi all,

An interesting essay pondering the question as to whether the Web is 
becoming or has been dull and anglocentric, and arguing for a bit of online 
linguistic chaos. Enjoy !

Shuddha
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Things That Matter: Waiting for Linguistic Viagra
By Michael Hawley

Would you rather be blind or deaf?
I love those classic conversation starters. Has Earth been visited by 
extraterrestrials? Does President Bush need to carry money? Why is it that, 
after making love, men fall asleep and women wake up?
Let's focus on the blind/deaf question. Genius overcomes many difficulties. 
As evidence, we have the pantheon of blind and deaf artists, ranging from 
Beethoven to Goya to Milton to Ray Charles. According to neuropsychologist 
and author Oliver Sacks (in his book Seeing Voices), whether it's better to 
be blind or deaf depends on how old you are. For an adult, blindness and 
deafness are about equally problematic. But for a child, there is no 
question: it's better to be blind. Anyone who has had the opportunity to 
teach a deaf child knows this. Hearing is the primary channel through which 
we receive language, and all of those incoming words downloaded into our 
brains carry a wealth of emotional and cognitive apparatus that structures 
and empowers our imagination. Language is the mind's opposable thumb.
Whether it is a book, a pencil or a computer, technology deeply affects the 
way we learn, and interact and create with, languages. The word "hello" 
came to prominence in English because of the telephone. Or consider the 
emergence of mass public literacy. It wasn't born in a vacuum. It is 
largely a technological by-product of the printing press—and it's been 
greatly affected by the rise of television and other media that compete for 
our attention. The question is, how will future information tools influence 
our relationship with languages?
David Sarnoff, an early president of RCA, believed that the broadcast of 
radio and television would spread English as the world's unifying language. 
It did and it does. More recently, the World Wide Web has further fostered 
English as the global lingua franca. Visit a developing country and you 
find that people seeking better lives see two clear paths: learning English 
and mastering computer skills. The two are intertwined.
Historically, technology has had a huge impact on the use of language. 
Around 1811, the steam engine collided with the printing press, and the 
result was as explosive then as the collision of computers with the 
telephone network is now. The rotary-driven steam press printed hundreds of 
times faster than any other available technology—so fast that publishers 
couldn't afford to feed enough paper into those voracious machines. In the 
1850s, some clever Germans invented a cheap pulp papermaking process. The 
new stuff became known as newsprint, since that's largely what it was used 
for, and with the force of this flow, the modern newspaper took shape.
Soon it became clear that paper was no longer the scarce resource. Nor were 
printing presses, or even news. The scarce resource? Readers. In 1858, only 
one in 20 British army recruits could read. Other European societies had 
similar levels of literacy. And so, in countries across Europe, as well as 
in America, policymakers began mandating more systematic schooling. By 
1900, literacy among British recruits had jumped to more than 85 percent 
and the novel had become a mainstream art form. Mass public literacy, 
therefore, was an outgrowth of a burst of technology that liberated a huge 
quantity of text, and then encouraged an ensuing ballet of sorts among 
policymakers, educators, authors and printers.
If steam engines plus printing presses ignited a literacy revolution in the 
19th century, what might be the combined effect of computers and 
telecommunications today? When the Web first self-assembled like the 
world's biggest set of tinker toys, the eyeopener was that the words and 
images on your screen were coming not just from your own local disk, but 
from disks on computers sprinkled all over the planet. As more and more 
bits piled up, the personal computer became like a soup strainer to filter 
chunks of useful information from the great wash of bits. Search engines 
like Yahoo! and AltaVista were followed closely by pidgin translation 
systems, which are interesting even in their fledgling state—and which will 
need to improve dramatically after two billion people in China and India 
come roaring online.
What nobody can predict, of course, is what new intelligences will spin out 
of this computer-driven, massively global engine of cause and effect. Or 
how these developments will influence the language we speak.
We may be in for some real surprises. Will this process cause sophisticated 
artificial intelligence to finally burst onto the scene? Will the lingua 
franca dumb down from English into a sort of Internet Esperanto? Will 
cultures colliding online spur interest in other languages?
On the face of it, the prospects for another technology-induced upgrade in 
the popular use of language are not good. For one thing, computers have 
evolved into visual media. They are more deaf than they are blind: aural 
and linguistic interfaces lag far behind visual ones. What's worse, 
computers are coming out of an increasingly Anglocentric culture. Even at 
universities, fewer and fewer departments teach foreign languages and fewer 
students study them. Shockingly large numbers of U.S. elected officials 
have never traveled out of the country. The erosion of foreign-language 
study is a melancholy sight: there is nothing like learning another 
language to help you know your own more deeply. Whether it is calculus or 
Cantonese, you think differently in other languages, and those differences 
matter.
This linguistic ignorance dismays me because I love words. In fact, I'm a 
word nerd. I get a kick out of tossing a few odd ones into my column, just 
to see if the pervicacious editors will weed them out. Back in the late 
1980s, I created one of the first computer dictionaries (with entries from 
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary) on a NeXT computer. At the time, 
it was exciting to have hot-and-cold running definitions at your 
fingertips. You could click on any word that aroused your curiosity and my 
"Digital Webster" program popped up the definition. Isn't that the essence 
of the educational itch? First, having the appetite to know more; and 
second, actually satisfying that appetite.
One engineer used the dictionary to build an unbeatable Scrabble-playing 
program. Someone else tried to automatically translate the newswires into 
rap. I never got around to throwing Digital Webster at the New York Times 
crossword puzzle, but that kind of word play was what we hoped computer 
dictionaries would unleash. Sadly, it wasn't.
Recently, it seems as if information technology has become a sleeping pill 
for this sort of creative and constructive language hacking. Today's 
computers no longer come with a first-class, built-in dictionary; that 
feels like a step back. There are, of course, dictionaries online. But 
although you can graze these canned Web dictionaries, you can't write 
programs to chew through them and do interesting things. The programmatic 
interfaces are closed. The pattern formed by networked PCs—the glut of 
Windows software, the lowest common denominator of Web servers—has become 
too much like the one-way information delivery of dumb cable television, 
and not as inviting even to word hackers like me. And writing teachers 
always bellyache about the insidious ways that word processors engender 
choppy, sloppy writing.
Maybe this is a lull. Maybe the current landscape of ugly displays, poor 
typography and flaky networks is too primitive compared to a beautifully 
printed magazine. But when the displays get really good, and when network 
connections are always available, like the air that we breathe—will we then 
see the emergence of a Napster of books to really shake things up? Can you 
imagine some hacker selling shoebox-sized pirate copies of the Library of 
Congress?
Perhaps we will wake up in a decade or two and the prevailing online 
language will be Cantonese. Perhaps it won't matter because computer and 
telephonic translation will have become so fantastically frictionless that 
worrying about Chinese copyright ripoffs will be superfluous. Ask to watch 
a spaghetti Western in Italian, and the system will not only translate the 
language on the fly, it will add the extra hand gestures, too. And maybe, 
if the biotech wizards get their way, we won't need all those clunky 
computers. I'm waiting for a linguistic Viagra pill that instantly makes 
you fluent in Italian, at least for an hour or two.
It's important to communicate. It's important to have a lingua franca. But 
it's also important to think differently. The most fertile, thriving 
cultures have a balance of order and chaos, with constant ferment. But 
today's computer media are flat and Anglocentric. Things are a bit too 
stuck, a bit too ordered. Both within the machines and across the network, 
we could enjoy a little more linguistic turmoil.

Michael Hawley is the Alex W. Dreyfoos assistant professor of media 
technology at the MIT Media Lab.


Shuddhabrata Sengupta
SARAI: The New Media Initiative
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 052, India
www.sarai.net