Hooked on Morphonics
The Death of Language
Read Mercer Schuchardt
April 1, 1997
Ever since the web was spun, new media pundits have been exclaiming, "Print is Dead!" despite the fact that magazine subscriptions soar, your office manager can't keep the printers and copiers stocked with paper, and the actual number of periodicals in circulation has increased steadily since 1980 when the personal computer first heralded the age of the "paperless office." The culture is oversaturated with factoids, memes, and databits, agreed. The obvious fact is that print hasn't been this alive since Gutenberg took over half a millennium ago. It's not the health of print that is in question: it's the health of language itself. Because language is the means by which we discuss everything else, it is difficult to actually get behind it and look at it without ending up looking through it. A fish doesn't know he has an environment worth describing until he becomes a fish out of water. That words have character, shades, and tones of meaning is their strength, for all words are allegories of something else. But the sudden seismic semantic shift that has resulted from the convergence and acceleration of the mediascape has produced a linguistic free-for-all: words expanded to mean many things end up meaning anything—or nothing. In our electronically bitmapped culture, language from academia to advertising is reaching a critical mass of contraction and contortion much faster than we can predict or control, and the end result is a shopping mall full of distracted, jaded, and hungry adolescents chanting "Whatever" to one another as though they were speaking meaningfully. If Symphony is a chocolate bar and Rembrandt is a toothpaste, then Life can't help but be reduced to a magazine, a board game, and a breakfast cereal. What you are ...
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