Sheehan Quirke, more famously known as The Cultural Tutor recently shared his observation on a podcast that the word processor had inadvertently lead to us becoming overall “less literate” as a population compared to our literary ancestors. People with a similar level of education one hundred years ago, according to him, were a lot more eloquent and could communicate much more vividly. The advent of the word processor has resulted in a homogenisation of language, making it sterile and boring.
In the past when people wrote, it would just be the writer and their paper. Now, between the writer and the paper exists a third invisible body, the word processor, which guides the writer’s hand to produce works which are in tune with what is being created in the contemporary space. Contemporary writing is succinct, to-the-point, minimalistic. Such a trend is influencing the way we write through both technological and sociological means.
Slightly mind blown by this observation, I have since realised that it holds true to pretty much every aspect of our culture. If what we create is influenced by our immediate surrounding, then advancement of communication technology has resulted in all of us existing in a similar space. As a result, we are thinking similarly, creating similarly and consuming similarly. The world has become smaller, they say, but for something to become smaller it needs to lose parts of it. There used to be a beauty to the vibrant diversity in cultures that existed around the world, but now, homogenisation has manifested in almost an inevitable way.
At the base level, if an organism stays isolated for long enough, it leads to the creation of a new species. In case of humans, atleast modern Homo sapiens, the relatively shorter isolation period only resulted in distinct cultures. Our inherent tribalistic nature also helped keep the cultures seperate, which is why it was possible for two villages on either banks of the same river to have slightly different cultures.
The moment we started inventing new techniques to communicate at long distances and at a large scale, starting from the printing press, we were doomed to overcome the natural law of cultura through isolation. The sheer force of large scale information transfer overcame the resisting forces of geographical isolation and inherent tribalism.
I often wondered if our species would ever speciate, it didn’t see likely anymore. Are we really the end of the final branch of our tree? I wondered. Save for a distant future possibility where we become a multiplanetary family of species, I thought that we really would be the last of our kind.
But towards the end of the same podcast, Sheehan mentioned something reassuring. He said that we are hardwired to dislike boredom. Now that is something! Yes it is true that we really do not enjoy being bored and will seek any distraction to get away from it. But that also means that this innate dislike to boredom is the very reason why we probably will never settle into a global monoclulture.
That brings me hope.