Are we aware that we the technology-driven generation of today are becoming partially brain-dead halfway through life? There are some cultural symptoms of this ailment. Much of our brain and thinking is delegated to computers and as for our personal opinions, we just tick a box in a media-prepared multiple-choice cluster.
Take for instance a shopkeeper selling stationery today. Say, he has sold two items that cost ₹9 and ₹11. For totalling this simple purchase, he reaches automatically for the calculator. But take a traditional vegetable vendor doing his rounds of the streets in the early morning with his pushcart. This anachronism in the digital age is still found in some of our towns. He sells a number of items and adds up in his head in a few seconds, while his calculator-toting counterpart is still punching in the prices on the gadget.
Many school and even college students today fumble on spelling. They have outsourced this task to the computer. They say, “Why should I tax my memory with spelling? The computer knows them.” True, the computer knows the right spelling, but you got to know the right word. Say, you are typing in the following sentence: “Conserve water, do not waste it.” You are not sure of the spelling of “waste” and key in “waist” and run the spell check. Sure enough, your spelling is confirmed as right and so you print the water conservation slogan, “Do not waist water.” And you are waist-deep or neck-deep in trouble with your message.
This tendency to keep our brain in deep freeze is invading even campuses. Teachers prescribe English guidebooks and teach lessons straight out of them. Prefabricated answers are readily dished out in guidebooks for every kind of question from one-word answers to full-length essays. There is no direct engagement with the text of a poem or prose lesson. And woe to those students who dare to do their own thinking and “stray” into their own original answers deviating from the guidebook answer. Such intellectual mavericks will be awarded lower grades for doing their own independent thinking. Once bitten, twice shy and they fall in line with the crowd.
This slavery is seen also in the tremendous social pressure on parents to send their students for private tuitions straight from the classroom. Coaching agencies advertise their centres and brainwash the parents into enrolling their wards to guarantee high marks to qualify for professional courses. As broiler chickens are fed lavishly and injected with hormones for faster growth, in these coaching shops, the adept instructors dish out answers to all questions and students do not have to exert even one byte of their brains to tackle questions. Is it any wonder that our students scoring mind-boggling scores in college exams are rated by foreign universities as having the intellectual maturity of high school students?
Today, emojis are banishing words from social media. People are losing their grip on actual words and regressing to the age of the caveman who drew cave drawings as he was ignorant of the written language. When compelled to use words, they say ‘nice’, ‘cute’ or ‘cool’. Anything more nuanced is beyond their ken and is like reading philosophy to a beast.
This malaise is not restricted to students only. It has infected staff members too. Many lack the discourse skills to write even a simple report of an event. No worries. There is ready technology help at hand. Just feed in barebones data such as the theme of the event, the speakers, the chief guest and so on and a readymade report will be churned out in no time by a computer application.
With overwhelming heavy technology application in language, our word processing cells are likely to atrophy and our brain size can shrink following the inexorable law of evolution of discarding the unused parts.
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