The Internet and the English Language

Since the Internet took over the world the average humans ability to write a grammatically correct sentence without numerous spelling mistakes, abbreviations and home-made shortenings is as rare as spotting a large diamond resting in the middle of the road! Ages ago, and I'm sure that all middle-aged and 'oldish' readers will remember this, English grammar and sentence structure was a heavily policed subject at school alongside lessons in handwriting and 'how to use a dictionary'.

Today the educational establishment emphasises computer use and the Internet and the English Language takes second bat. Once upon-a-time parents took their kids to the Library, some evenings or on a Saturday morning, books like Tintin (minus the racially discriminatory one of Tintin in the Congo), Asterix and Obelix, 1001 different spiders of the world, "how to win the fight against evil sister in ten easy steps", or Nancy Drew or Biggles books would be devoured with all the enthusiasm of a 'silent' nun to a soundproof room and with her alone inside. Libraries were enthused over by all, the father might be found hiding amongst the "how to buy a new car without the wife finding out" manuals, the mother deep into the magazines on "how to stop your husband spending so much time on his car" and the grandparents might be asleep underneath the Observer or Times newspapers.

Library-goers are surrounded by a mass of structured English sentences that are correct in grammar, content, form and minus the mass of irritating spelling mistakes, abbreviations and personalised word inventions that one finds on the Internet. When it comes to correct English Language use the Internet and the Library are as far apart as hell and heaven .

The internet promotes a certain lack of caring, it allows publishers and writers to be sloppy and wanton in the end result. Articles, essays and anecdotes are uploaded en-block having never undergone a re-read by the author or editor and the only check for correct English Language usage having been the spell-checker on the computer (which by the way might be an Americanized, Australiaanised or Singaporeised La version, something that the author is totally unaware of).

Authors, publishers and website owners get away with the criminalisation of the English language because quantity has overtaken quality and simply because it is now a well known fact that when a person reads something they don't read every word; in fact it is possible to understand a series of sentences even though they are utter gibberish in reality. So what happens now?

It is blatantly obvious that the era of the library is coming to an end. No new libraries will be built, many existing ones will become wired-up and screened and others will just silently shutdown without notice or heed. The Internet will be the place for finding information, for researchers to spend time on and for parents to leave their children to for a bit of peace and quiet. It is therefore the Internet and the World Wide Web that has to upgrade, to build up a culture of correctness and to reinsert into daily life the values of correctness within the English Language. Websites should not accept documents or written spiels that are filled to the brim with sloppiness, quality should hold greater importance than mere quantity and authors should be aware that their articles and writings should be re-read, corrected and grammatically viable.

If the value of the written language does not improve on the Internet the world will have lost something valuable, humans will have foregone an important ingredient in their make-up. The simple art of studying grammar, of improving the quality of written speech and attention to detail is carried over into everyday life. And conversely the Internet promotes rashness and lack-of-detail on and off the screen! Publishers, webmasters and authors must rebuild, integrate and re-produce a culture of correctness and English language integrity in the information that they offer, otherwise the world becomes ridden with a sloppy virus that will quite happily eat away at society without pause for remorse.

To aid this culture reversal; webmasters, internet publishers and authors can be aided or forced into this direction by search engines and directories. These massive machines pull up results when a required search engine term is input. If the algorithms of the software were configured to penalise websites with badly written documents, or even to penalise authors with endless articles that resemble a seven-year old's first essay, then quality rather than quantity would hopefully re-instate itself and become second-nature!

One would hope it will change as with the blatantly obvious decline currently underway there might not be much point in learning the English language at all - who needs it!