The linguist Raffaele Simone believes the Internet to be the “enemy of the book”

The Italian linguist discussed the Internet with the Spanish philosopher Savater at the Santillana group in February 2000. He stated that the Internet was “the principal enemy of the book and of reading in itself, although on the surface it appears to be the ideal medium for reading and writing”. Simone, who gave a lecture organised by the Santillana foundation, said that knowledge accumulated during 20 centuries had been turned on its head during the past 20 years, which signified an evolutionary retrograde step with the process of reading being replaced by the mere glance.

Simone, who is professor of linguistics at the university of Rome Three and author of the book La Tercera Fase, formas de saber que estamos perdiendo, published by Taurus books, (The Third Phase, manners of learning and finding out what we are losing) maintains that the 21st century marks the third phase in the history of the accumulation of knowledge, which will be dominated by a culture of audiovisual input.

The linguist dedicated his lecture to the four major changes which have caused the dissolution of a paradigm of culture, of the ways of information exchange, and of education in general. To Simone, the priorities in our visual perception have changed (now natural vision prevails over the alphabetical); the importance of the picture has increased (and hence, the predominance of less complex over more complex structures). The nature of penmanship and the typography of texts have undergone changes, too, (which can be modified endlessly), and finally, a new way of processing information has developed, which the linguist has taken to calling “non-propositional logic”.

According to Mr. Simone, this new manner of creating information has lost all long-established characteristic features of being analytical, well structured, contextual and referential and “has transformed itself into an indifferent mass in which anything is contained in everything” and analysis and experience are valued only little.

Knowing that his ideas on this subject take up a “controversial position”, Mr. Simone adds the concept of slowness to the three conceptual characteristics (peace and quiet, solitude, and a cultural memory), which, according to the philosopher George Steiner constitute the classical view of the reading process. He also agrees with Mr. Steiner`s opinion that,” in this day and age, our reading habits are vague and contemptuous.”

In his final thesis, Mr. Simone said that access to information through the Internet was “the most formidable, unprecedented barrier to the contact with reality.”

The philosopher Fernando Savater warned of the progressive simplification of the language used by young people. He emphasised that he strongly opposed both “apocalyptic visions” and excessive storms of enthusiasm sparked off by the Internet, concluding that “these days, young people do not read, because they understand only very easy texts.” The philosopher gave examples of the dangerous influence the new technologies have in education – in particular, the disappearance of orthography and syntax, which is characteristic of many e-mails.

About this posting

This posting is part of a series dedicated to topics dealing with various aspects of the English language which usually get short shrift on the internet and in other publications. It is, in a wider sense, concerned with the English language crumbling into incomprehensibility at alarming speed and how society is influenced by it. How do schools and universities react and in what way is literature affected by all this? Furthermore, how do people working in education and linguistics cope with this avalanche of “Local English neologisms”?

What often sounds like modern Pidgin English can generally be put down to neo-pidginicity. It is an artificially accelerated and manipulated process – or rather linguistic genetic engineering – of attempting to oversimplify Standard English, the result of which is in all cases some sort of Neo Pidgin English or Simplified-Simple-Speak. Four major fields of contact contribute to the gradual encroachment on Standard English: Basic Global English, as advocated by Dr. Joachim Grzega, machine translations of any kind, unedited documents and publications – frequently of international validity – being passed off as standard English but in fact written by non-native speakers of English, the acceptance of “Local English” and non-native speakers of English teaching their version of “Local English”. The result of the English “produced” in all these areas of contact is often, at best, a barely elevated Pidgin English.

And to compound matters, Globish appears to become a composite haphazard mixture of all about 180 Local Englishes and may for that very reason not be as easy as some people think once it has evolved into a sub-language of Standard English.

Finally, it would be interesting to see the first book written in Basic Global English, Dr. Joachim Grzega`s novel and daring invention and see in which section bookshops will display such a work of art