Why would I listen and read all of that?

       Throughout the course of history, language has steadily devolved from the formal and complex to less formal and far less complex. Take Shakespeare, for instance; the language used in his plays is some of the most complex language in literature with his use of long soliloquies, complex metaphors and syntax. Most people today could not hope to understand his writing without copious amounts of effort. Even a few hundred years later, as Neil Postman points out in Amusing Ourselves to Death, future president Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas participated in elaborate debates containing complex syntax by each orator. Most people today do not care for reading Shakespeare, or listening to a debate lasting several hours, but in the days of the past, Shakespeare’s plays and the Lincoln-Douglas debates were popular and well-received. So what accounts for the change? Why do most people today only care for simple, concise uses of language?

            The answer lies in the transformation of technology from the past few hundred years. As Postman also points out, the use of the telegraph started a new pattern, a new form of media: the news of today. With the telegraph, information could be sent to people nearly instantaneously from any distance, making large amounts of information available to anyone. Eventually, as technology progresses, even more information will become available, but then arises the question: how is someone able to comprehend so much more information? Language, the medium through which thought is exchanged, must become more concise.

            The recent presidential debate for the Republican Party is prime example of language’s devolution. The debate between ten candidates lasted less than two hours, and the candidates certainly did not use complex language. However, even stating the debate lasted less than two hours is generous; I suspect most people (like me) did not watch the entire debate, or they may have even watched a video on the news showing highlights of the debate. With the pace of life in the 21^st century, people do not have time to listen to a lengthy debate like that between Lincoln and Douglas, and they most certainly would not like to listen to language that requires too much analysis. There is too much information available for people to focus on one event for a long amount of time.

            In addition to politics, the language of today has devolved in our writing and social interaction. In history class, it is often necessary to read letters written in the past few hundred years. Those letters contain formal, complex diction and grammatical structures. For instance, letters between John Smith and Alexander Hamilton have deep insights to discuss political ideology. The letters, even though they were only discussions between two people, are complex because the speed at which letters were sent was slow as compared to text messages today. In those days, a discussion between two people at a distance was carefully thought out because there was more time to make a discussion one of quality. However, with text messaging today, it is completely acceptable to write short sentences that are not grammatically correct because of the high-speed life we have in the information age. Why would one laboriously write out the word ‘you’ when one can write ‘u’ if it gives one a few more seconds to address all of the other information available to us today?