Thursday, September 06, 2007

The internet ....

... and the English language: Would Orwell have been a blogger? (hat tip, Dave Lull.)

"Yet the democracy of the web is in danger of becoming a cacophonous nightmare. For every carefully crafted, thoughtful expression of opinion, there are a score of half-baked rants: ignorant, bilious, semi-literate and depressing."

You would think that everything that ever appeared in print was thoughtful and perfectly phrased. Truth be told. huge amounts of garbage continue to be printed, gobbled up by those with a taste for it and ignored by those with more refined palates.

1 comment:

  1. Precisely. I have always had the uneasy feeling that commentators such as the one you and D. Lull cite compare a limited subset of print (Shakespeare, the Times, whatever publication the commentator happens to be writing for) with all of the Internet.

    That's something like asserting that print, with its managementspeak, advertising and pornography, is a decadent threat to the literate, reasoned discourse of such blogs as this one.

    ==============
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    "Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
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