The Weakening of American Minds: Language and Technology
The American mind is weakening from a compromised language and the replacement of needed thought processes with technology. I will support my theory with examples of recent changes in society created by media and technology, the medical repercussions of the changes and the overall effects of cause-effect relationships on Americans.
The aggregation and dissemination of intelligence by modern media fare is the primary benefit of technology in First World countries. The average American’s ability to summon any information to a handheld device within seconds only solidifies the need for an internet possessing all known information and history, a 24-hour news cycle in an array of niches and perspectives, and endless mediums for user-generated content. The more customers there are with devices, the more content is needed to sate the diverse customer base. This cycle embodies technology and media’s integration and necessity in the twenty-first century and is known as Global-Lateral Omnipotence Propagation (GLOP).
With affordable access to up-to-the-second world news and centuries worth of knowledge, companies offering mobile connectivity or Wi-Fi-enabled devices are creating demigods of all individuals with means to purchase the service. Within a couple decades, GLOP will have bred a race of humans who can answer any question faster than history’s greatest scholars without ever using their own memory. The only secret to intelligence will be the ownership of a device and a monthly access service charge.
At its core, GLOP is the media giant’s agenda to monopolize the news and information we receive by creating a deep, personal need for “all-in-one” devices that gives them a direct portal to individual consumers. This portal, bridged by our blind trust of innovative technologies, will be their direct access to our eyes and mind; a disencumbered chute to funnel advertising, media and information to us while clandestinely implanting advertising and censoring content as early as its source. The plan is simple: in order to keep the cycle alive, it must be self-sustained and self-contained; therefore, collusion between the content holders and device makers becomes paramount. The more parts of the GLOP cycle they own, the more control they have over the end user.
Our crippling reliance on technology has already weakened children’s minds and chipped away at our lackadaisical education standards. Our ability to retain information has been compromised by devices offering direct access to more information than any one person could dream of retaining; access so simple it undermines the need for retention completely.
Try summoning a phone number you call daily through a speed-dialing system in your mobile phone. If you have trouble remembering it, or even a phone number you have known for years, it is possibly the onset of a condition known as Semantic Atrophy of Sense and Significance (SASS). SASS results from a lack of memorization, usually regarding important social and historical events, that leads to a physical shrinking of the brain. The most aggressive cases have been found in viewers of reality television shows and audiences of conservative news organizations.
The suggestion that a machine is an acceptable replacement for human practice seems absurd, yet the calculator has been so deeply integrated into our business and educational systems that rudimentary arithmetic is suffering a fate similar to our native language, an issue I will address later on. That the technology is apt is irrelevant; we are substituting the rehearsal of long-term memory by leaning on GLOP instead of utilizing our brain’s potential. We are slowly investing more and more of our intelligence to the cloud, blindly confident that our future will never lose signal to the server we have entrusted our futures to.
There are other dilemmas with having a generation plugged solely into one database. As it is now with news and entertainment, there are only a handful of corporations controlling either the source of, or our access to, entertainment, media, and our internet-based wealth of knowledge. In fact, the majority of our current and historical information already trickles through the fingers of media conglomerates before it ever sees our eyes. As the source-to-absorption pathway moves dangerously more vertical, it begs the question: how can minds grow if they draw the same datum from the same database? The culture and diversity of our society will lie in the hands of the few who can kink the hose; corporations so intoxicated on power they can alter the past, present, and future with mere say so. They will run empires that only provide content if it bears financial benefit and destroy anything that challenges their political alliances. With all minds homogenized, the future will be bought and sold back to us before we realize it.
The last twenty years have yielded amazing advancements in technology, and along with a new industry comes a new canon of vocabulary. The internet alone has added a sizable nomenclature to the English language. From search engine optimization terminology to computer-mediated communication (the compounding and acronymous alteration of words), all citizens now freely use terms a person in the 1970’s would think were gibberish. This swift, simultaneous expansion and contraction in language is called the Lexical Invert/Evert Dynamic (LIED).
Yet, with unmitigated access to centuries of knowledge, including English’s immeasurable complexity and expanse, we have not only chosen to cull the already-thinning volume of commonly-used words, but also to cheapen a rich, historic language with lazy shortcuts. Where dictionaries are no stranger to the gradual integration of slang, this blending of lexicon and informal web-jargon is more likely a circumvent of education than a universal acknowledgement of acceptance, and it is proving a troublesome challenge for our teachers to control thanks to media’s further reach and tighter grip on America’s youth.
The ripple effect of this lingual shift is more than just confused parents and young adults appearing mentally handicapped; there has been a resurgence of a rare disease known as Idiom Cessation-Kuru (ICK), where the brain and CNS are critically impacted by a lack of decipherable, intelligent interpersonal communication. The cessation stems from continued overuse of computer-mediated communication, such as “LOL”, in day-to-day conversation. Kuru is prominent in individuals who substitute the description of an “emoticon” (e.g. saying “sad face” aloud) for the muscle reflexes and chemical reactions our bodies require to maintain emotional homeostasis.
In summary, based on the cause-effect relationships of GLOP-SASS and LIED-ICK, the American mind is substantially weaker due to our apathetic response to the rape of the English language and the collusion of media conglomerates and mobile technology manufacturers to outsource our individual intellects and cede control of the world’s knowledge database to the highest bidders.
