4 U 2 No (or FYI, if you prefer)

Image from New York Times

The other day as I was walking through the halls en route to my Arthurian lit course I was stampeded by a distracted band of texters, eyes fixed on their phones.  They bounced off passersby (and me) as if they were balls in a pinball machine.  And they never missed a beat.

This behavior concerns me and this recent New York Times article suggests that my worries are well founded.  The anxiety expressed here is not new - that texting has changed adolescent brains and will have a negative effect on attention spans - but the comparison to the effects of television is novel, at least to me.  The great irony is that television-watching, which has always been demonized, comes off as the healthier of the two activities because it requires sustained attention, not the multi-tasking that Facebooking or texting encourages.

My question, which you've probably already anticipated, is what kind of effect will such behavior have on language use?  A friend of mine who is an active Tweeter told me that he no longer can tolerate lengthy texts.  Because texting and tweeting requires short and to-the-point text, longer works seem frivolous, superfluous, not worth the time.  What will then happen to the discursive text?

And the question that follows is: how should we respond?  Do we stop texting?  Do we limit Facebooking?  Or do we embrace these activities and change the way we learn and produce/consume text?  One alternative, which in some way responds to the latter, has been explored in another recent NY Times article.  Do we need go digital?  And if so, what is at stake for such digital texuality?

Aw Lancelot . . . Another beheading?

This isn't necessarily language-related and I don't want to get too "booky" here, but this story about the selling of a medieval manuscript may be of interest to us.  French romances, particularly the Arthurian ones, were tremendously popular throughout the Middle Ages and had a direct effect on our beloved English tongue.  One of the most interesting, and maybe disturbing details, about this manuscript is that it was so large that it must have taken 200 cows to make it.  For those of you unfamiliar with medieval manuscripts, this may sound strange, but if you know that medieval books were made from animal skin, this fact attests to how expensive this book really was (and apparently is!).  It reminds us that in many ways the birth of our language rests on the backs of animals - an interesting and often overlooked fact.   
  

The Death of the Book?

As the date indicates, we missed this conference, but it's a shame that we did!  The focus was mostly on the fate of the material text in a digital world, but as we know, these environments have immeasurably influenced the language, from the standardization of spelling to the coinage of new words such as "texting" and "tweeting" to the introduction a number of new abbreviations.  One of the post-conference articles even begins with the following "tweet": "Will the Internet age kill the printed book?  LOL."  What do we think about this question?  Will the printed book and digital text continue to complement each other?  Or will their relationship become increasingly hostile?  And how will this impact the future of English?