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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,'"
And this mindlessness is exactly the sort of thing that will push it over...
Here's a message for them: Lrn2RdFlBks. UGtMrFrmIt.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
People have been condensing things like this for humor for years. Ophelia's last line: "Glub!" And remember the story about consensing the Lord's Prayer into a text message? (I think it had lines like "God, UR GR8")
So we take something that's been used for humor, and use it for Cliffs Notes instead. Big whoop. No one is going to think that the summaries are the original works. I mean, anyone who has taken a logic class has come up with "2B v ~2B"
Although it does remind me of the time in high school when we were reading Romeo and Juliet aloud in class. I read Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech, got through the whole thing, then looked at the footnotes, and had the reaction, "I said what?!?!?" (From then on, I read the footnotes with the text, not afterward.)
wtf wallhax0r cl4n?
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.
Why dont you actually learn what a fake book is before commenting? A proper fake book takes *skill* to play well. You don't get the "dumb chords"...in fact, all you're given is the melody line - a single tune, along with chords in text running along the top. It's up to you, the (typically piano) player to improvise the accompianment, harmony, vamps, and the like. There's a pretty big difference between a proper jazz fake book and the dumbed down classical books you're describing - nobody actually wrote down many of the jazz tunes in the fake books properly, and they're often carefully (and it used to be illegally) transcriped and published by jazz players.
I guess Dostoevsky's The Idiot will be appropriately titled.
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.
What use is it to teach kids about masterpieces of English literature without teaching them how to properly read them? As far as I'm concerned, this is doubleplusungood. You want kids to get more into Shakespeare? Take them to see a play, which is how Shakespeare intended us to experience his works! Hell, even watching BBC's Pride and Prejudice is better than "Evry1GtsMaryd."
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
It reminds me a heck of a lot of the speech Captain Beatty gavein Fahrenheit 451, where he talks about how this line offended a group, so it got trimmed, that line bothered someone else who didn't understand it, so it got nixed, and so on, until it got to the point where nobody had the patience to read the whole work, and eventually, books were eliminated (in the film, newspapers were in comic form without any words). Contrary to what some have said in other threads, Shakespeare is not that hard to understand -- if you're willing to make an effort at first, it gets easy once you get over that "hump".
I don't think we'll lose the classics, but I think we're heading toward a tiered society (if we're not there already) composed of the literate and well educated and the underclass who stay in non-thinking jobs, a lot like Metropolis.
Whenever I read news like this, I want to write Ray Bradbury and say I knew he was right from when I first read F451, and it's a damn shame he wasn't wrong.