A Word on the Words

I’ve come to realise that the digital generation, zoned-in to mobile phones, with data, news, views, stats, analysis, blogs, vlogs and infotainment hurtling towards them along the information super highway… doesn’ t actually pay much attention to all that info.

Despite the volume of words, they appear to learn little. Their general knowledge is weak, their grasp of history loose, they’re lost when it comes to geography and common sense is uncommon. Most unforgiveable, from my point of view, they can’t spell, punctuate or form proper sentences.

I welcome an informed society but if all they glean from the digital waterfall is what one celebrity said about another’s hairstyle, then what is the point?

I’d love to be proved wrong. I’d love to believe that this tsunami of information in written form is creating a wide and deep ocean of human knowledge.

But then I hear a contestant on BBC show The Apprentice saying she thought a “Norman village” was a English hamlet in the county of “Norman”.

Or I see an online article in which the author states he “disagree’s”. Or a blogger types “baton down the hatches”. Or a writer doesn’t know there’s a difference between “sown” and “sewn”.

We are becoming a society that has all and any information available at the swipe of a smartphone screen, but no-one learns from it.