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Literature Teeters on the Edge of a 'Gr8 Fall'
aicrules writes "Yahoo news is reporting that the great works of literature often read and discussed by the brighter of our up-and-comers could be the latest victim of reaching the lowest common denominator at the potential expense of everyone. The article describes the efforts of Dot Mobile to make such literary masterpieces as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet more accessible. From the article, 'We are confident that our version of 'text' books will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy,'"
The article describes the efforts of Dot Mobile to make such literary masterpieces as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet more accessible.
Perhaps Professor Sutherland ought to check out the following links:
Romeo & Juliet
Hamlet
Kudos to Chris Coutts...they're still damned funny, although the idea of Professor Sutherland pitching this sort of thing for real is just ludicrous. As the epitath on the Bard's tombstone reads:Does this mean that Professor Sutherland is cursed, since he's caused Shakespeare's corpse to spin at such a rapid rate? ^_^
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Make them into games.
Can you imagine a more violent game than Romeo and Juliet?
Two gang waring mafia type families and a plot where the two main characters die?
Have the full text and add a game requirement that you have to talk to people with the accent and all. actually walk up to people and ask them questions and make statements that forward the game, rather than the standard now where you just button mash to get through the plot and power up.
Mix the two areas, good games need good plot, and good books need to be read by later generations.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Actually, it's worse than that.
It's not merely substitution of "u" for "you". It's an entire dialect. If you read through it "aloud" (i.e. subvocalizing every word, in the order in which it's written), it's parsable as spoken English, but not as written English.
The frightening part is that it's an indication that we're indeed raising a generation of illiterates. People who make it through school in this state can (probably) read English, they can (definitely) speak English, but without punctuation or capitalization, they're incapable of writing it.
(random googling ensues... revealing the following representative sample that appears to discuss the physics/animation of a computer basketball game)
Stick a few commas and periods and capitals in there and it's essentially a machine-generated transcript of the following spoken English:
The punctuation and capitalization cues aren't strictly necessary to make sense of it, but their presence enables a brain to quickly scan over the passage without having to read it as though it were dialogue on a script.
Net effect: People who write English can have their ideas read and digested more rapidly than people who write in txtspeak.
But if we're moving to a postliterate society, that might not be such a hindrance for the illiterates. If you can read English quickly (because most of the written English you'll encounter still contains punctuation/capitalization), but are never required to write English (because omnipresent voice/video messaging has replaced email as a means of communication), maybe it doesn't matter that you're half-illiterate.
Oh, it is sad that I know this: You're looking for a movie called "In the Flesh". It is surprisingly, shockingly true to the play.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K