Checking in

 

Property of Stormberry

Sometimes one has ideas for a blogpost, but not the time or the energy, and other times you have the time, the desire... but just don't want to write about the topics you have already penciled up in a notebook or a notes app. One such a topic is "Opinions". How can you define an opinion and how to differentiate it from other forms of believes and communications, is something that has been consuming my thoughs. In a world so full of gaslighting, as we have today, where the truth is no longer true, and the biggest defendants of the "truth" are the ones that distort it and abuse lies the most. However, that's a topic for (maybe) some other time.

One other topic I've been thinking about is how people's communication skills seem to be shrinking. Maybe it's not everywhere, but where I live, the amount of people who can't stitch together the words for a decent sentence is mindboggling. Does it happen everywhere else? People speak Spanish where I live, and in written Spanish some punctuation symbols have an opening and a closing symbol. This way, you don't write "hey!", but you write "¡hey!". And it's similar with questions. You don't write "huh?", you write "¿huh?". I know it looks funny, but it's pretty basic. Or so you would think.

In "message writing", oftentimes people use only the closing sign, under the understanding that it's not to right way to write things. However, in the last couple of years I have found people closing exclamation or question phrases with the oppening symbol (what do you mean¿), which is disturbing, as these people consistently use the opening symbol at the end of the phrase as some sort of twisted trend. Then, there is the people who don't use any punctuation symbols at all. In a work setting this can be particularly problematic, as sometimes there's no way to differentiate between a question and a statement. And this grinds my nerves. And this doesn't come from young people, or people with lower level education, but often this sort of faux pas comes from managers or directors who are supposed to read many more memos and official communications than other people.

I don't really buy the excuse that "these people are too busy to type down a punctuation sign", because if they have the time to type down all the other signs, why would't they just press the question or the exclamation mark? If they are so busy, wouldn't it be better to get understood from the get go? Sloppily formulated questions also add to the issue.

"The invoice is in accounting".

Shall we understand that as a statement, that the invoice IS in accounting, or as a question? In the Spanish vernacular, the structure of the sentence allows for a question and a statement to be built up exactly the same way, being only the intonation the difference between one and the other. In a text, without an elusive punctuation sign, how is one to guess the correct intent?

What's happening is more than laziness, it's a trend toward the eroding of the written communications. People don't read, and much less write. Messages are mainly sent in audio format and received as audios. The reading exercise is reduced under the extent of a "tweet" of old, but probably no more than what you can fit in a traffic sign desiged for a highway. People don't read nor they care to read. People don't write either. And so, those who don't care allow their skills to fade, and even celebrate the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as a way to pass onto someone or something else the pesky task of taking the care to properly communicate. AI reads up for them, takes dictate and slowly but surely, writes the entire communication up. No, I don't envision a machine uprising, but I see a generation of humans degrading, giving up their intelligence, becoming little more than ruminating herds who lose even the hability to check if what the machine did is correct.

Human ennui, human disinterest, and the penchant for posturing as well as the penchant to leave every pesky task to anyone/anything else will lead loads of them to self fabricated problems due to miscommunication.

Language is a delicate thing, and there is people abusing it. Knowledge is the most valuable treasure, and yet many allow their fistful of knowledge to get poisoned, rot, fester and eventually fade out of their skulls, the same way a negligent person would leave an open carton of milk out on the kitchen counter (assuming this very person has no idea how to make cottage cheese out of it).

I'm disheartemed at how stupid people is allowing themselves to become. Because nowadays people can't care less about being intelligent, they only want to look like they are.