WTF?

How is it that the internet, information superhighway and answer to all of life's problems, is actually lowering the level of discourse? Search engines have cataloged the entirety of human existence. There is no need to memorize information, to "know" anything.

Person A: What's the state capital?
Person B: Don't ask me - just f*cking Google it!

Beyond that, the internet has developed a language all its own, completely incomprehensible to the uninitiated and the initiated alike. The anonymity of chat rooms allow us to relax our standards of grammar, punctuation, and spelling to that of particularly dense five year-olds. Capable and intelligent human beings end up sounding like this ...

Computer A: OMG i wuz liek STFU!!
Computer B: o rly???
Computer C: ROTFLMAO!!!11!!1!*

The fact is that having all the world's information at our disposal has made it eminently disposable - no one goes to the library anymore. The same goes for communication. Personal letters are laughably old-fashioned. Why bother spell-checking your email, when the recipient it just going to delete it anyway?

And I'll be the first to admit, I am the worst transgressor against Mother Knowledge. I write a blog with absolutely no real content. If I spoke out on political issues or shared recipes or reviewed books I'd at least be contributing to the the vast body of misinformation that makes up the World Wide Web. Instead, all I can offer is psuedo-intellectual whining about something that is inevitable and irreversible.

To be plain: we're getting stupider, people, and there's nothing we can do about it.


*Who am I kidding? I love internet slang. I'm one of those annoying people who will say "OMFG" aloud during normal conversation ("Your dog got run over by a car? OMFG, that is teh suxors!").