Posts Tagged ‘dialogue’

Comment Graffiti

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Sometimes I wish that everything was commentable – blog-style.  Let’s start with the Internet.  Let’s make every web page be built in such a way that you can click on any spot on the screen and write a comment.  It would probably cause most web pages to look like the underside of a highway overpass or the walls of a men’s restroom, but you could build these comment fields to be collapsible so they don’t look quite so ugly.

And once we’ve conquered the Internet completely in this way, let’s move on to real life.  Let’s make posters, billboards, fliers, advertisements, etc. commentable as well.  Let’s use a technology that makes all these items interactive to the average passerby, allowing folks to have discussion and dialogue as they go.  It’d be a little bit like the [citation needed] graffiti, except much more expansive (and more acceptable). 

There have been more than a few times I’ve wanted to comment on something written on a particular web page or even on a flier stuck to a bulletin board somewhere without the means to actually do so.  Granted, a lot of such things end up as topics here ultimately, but I just think it would be kind of cool and fun if all of life was interactive on that level.  Of course, we could all possibly simply go insane with sensory input, too.

The Slangification of Culture

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Loller
Source: Ctrl-Alt-Del
I have something against the prevalence of slang in American dialogue.  The way today’s youth talks – or at least types – especially bugs me.  This comic from Ctrl-Alt-Del very adequately demonstrates my annoyance with this growing trend and my opinion of those forum junkies and text messagers who resort to such sloppy and shoddy forms of communication.  Granted, most of these abbreviations have arisen as shortcuts for frequently used phrases.  Heck, I use a handful of them myself, albeit sparingly.

You see it most frequently on discussion forums, where entire threads devolve into a series of acronymistic call-and-response discussions.  You start with “LOL!” Someone else responds with “FTW,” which is then followed up by a third response of “WTF.” Entire pages of discussion are lost to this bestial, primitive, mind-melting communication.  Strangely, it is the younglings of our species who seem to be most prone to this form of dialogue.  It’s almost a code to those of us in the older generation.  We can scan down these pages and have zero clue as to what’s being said, let alone what the topic is, if there even is one.

As Ctrl-Alt-Del so satirically points out, as soon as someone tries to introduce real dialogue and discussion, using real words that actually exist, the LOLlers are soon revealed as the slavering, drooling morons that they truly are, and the discussion thread implodes upon its own shallowness.

And is it any wonder why the youth of America find it so very difficult to communicate in a mature, coherent manner or why so many of them suffer from stunted social skills?  I weep for our future.