Our Current Path Leads to Anarchy

As the technology for electronic publishing improves, print will be eliminated. New technologies allow for greater and more personal reach. However, online publishing needs to be regulated or else it will devolve into an anarchistic mess. People have grown far too reliant on the benefits afforded by electronic writing. This is a new technology, and it is changing quickly. There are unknown and known effects of electronic writing that could have dire repercussions if we don't introduce limiting measures.

Cheaper production costs and a greater ability to reach a wider audience will allow electronic based publications to flourish while print media stagnates. For example, www.cracked.com is a website that was formerly a magazine. It was in direct competition with Mad magazine. However, it was not as widely recognized as Mad magazine until it started publishing on the internet. Mad, on the other hand continued as a TV show. Out of the two, Cracked became much more known as a website than Mad as a TV show. By modernizing more quickly and keeping up with what is considered to be mainstream by target audiences, Cracked has proven to be more successful than Mad TV.

Technological improvements such as handwriting recognition and lighter laptops will lead to more journalists and field users relying on electronic writing as a means of note taking. For the most part, journalists are still currently using paper notebooks to take quick notes. This is because typing is still not as fast a medium for taking notes. However, there have been improvements in handwriting recognition as well as electronics in general. One major problem in a fully functional laptop is its weight. A notebook can be kept in a pocket and its presence is rarely noted. A laptop, however, requires a carrying case and cannot be held comfortably in one hand while the other writes. It's simply too heavy. Another example of new technology that has yet to be implemented is magnetic based memory. Silicon based chips can only be shrunken so much before they start to melt, making magnetic memory the next logical step in miniaturizing technology.

Electronic writing is also on its way to becoming unnecessary, as we improve communications technology. Just as history has shown to move from verbal storytelling to written letters back to verbal communications with telephones, we as a people will move back to speech and visual communication rather than written. All Apple laptops, for instance, come equipped with iSights, their web-camera technology. Apple has also improved video chatting through their software, iChat, making the image appear clear and the audio tolerable. Before this, limitations would include poor data transfer rate, as most people did not have a fast Internet connection, and poor processing power, as most computers were slower. Live video feeds take both an enormous amount of data to transfer and power to process constantly moving images and streaming audio. We have that technology now, as well as cheap storage capacity. A hard drive with 1 terabyte capacity is now little over 100 dollars, when a decade ago no such thing existed.  William Crossman argues “Human biology is driving us to seek speech-based methods for storing, retrieving, and communicating information”. We, as a society are moving towards ways that allows us to communicate without written language.

More generations of people are born into a society that increasingly focuses on environmentalism and instant communication. People don't want to waste paper products because they want to save the trees. Print has become exactly that. Most published material ends up going to waste. With electronic writing the data only needs to be produced once and can then be copied at no extra cost to numerous viewers. People in their teenage years and twenties have grown used to being able to access information and communication quickly and effortlessly. They have become an impatient society, where news updates are fed to them through Twitter. Instead of having to wait until the next day to read the printed newspaper, these people can just access the newspaper's website to read up to date articles.

Unfortunately, this impatience also creates a generation of people that put no thought into their writing. Prose is devoid of the usual sentiment as people write to inform, not to illustrate. Instead, we convey feelings through superfluous methods. As Andrew Lam puts it, “[w]e substitute human emotions with those strange symbols :-) and :-(, hoping somehow these colons and exclamation points could substitute our sensibility and taste and convey the nuances of our lives”. This is not only degrading towards illustrious writing, but also towards the quality of writing in general.

Younger kids are getting used to keyboards as they find it easier than writing longhand. With enough practice, typing can be much quicker than writing out longhand. An additional benefit is automatic spellchecking and grammar checking. Right clicking in Word displays a list of options, including a thesaurus. If a word is misspelled it’s underlined in red. Sometimes Word will even “autocorrect” certain words that are commonly misspelled, such as colour to color. The problem with this advantage is that students become accustomed to the computer doing all the work. Their writing becomes lazy and it shows. Instant messaging or text messaging on cell phones frequently use abbreviations and numerical replacement of letters to convey a message. While they are proficient users of abbreviated English and native English speakers to boot, only a limited amount can write “at a level of proficiency necessary for future job success.”.

A good example of over reliance would be: “[t]he hasty process of e-mail leaves a large gap for mistakes-and muddled thoughts-to pore out. (Spell checking maybe useful, but it shouldn't replace learning or a dictionary. It didn't catch, for example, the homonym "pore" in the previous sentence, when "pour" was meant.)”. This trend only continues as people become more reliant on technology. It is difficult to estimate just how beneficial or damaging this will be in the long term, however. The technology is still new. But technology that has been around for sometime that we have grown to rely on, such as cars have proven to be both useful and detrimental. While they achieve greater commutes, they pollute the atmosphere more. Electronic writing could also have this double-edged effect on the English language. Especially as people start to incorporate more and more abbreviated terms such as ‘brb’ for be right back and ‘omg’ for oh my God into every day speech.

Another problem with too much reliance on spell checkers is the possibility of abuse. A company could simply pay a spell checker to replace certain words like water with Arrowhead, or fast food with McDonald’s. There is no quick way to find out where a spell checker is getting their sources. Most of the time, it’s a matter of personal belief as to what is relevant, as the article demonstrates, “[w]e don't view ourselves as dictionary makers or experts” says Microsoft spokesman, Mark Thomas. Yet there are people who rely on them for exactly that purpose. It’s problems like this and others, demonstrated below, that demand the need for a more controlling presence on the internet.

Without a regulatory body specifically focused on policing sites, it will only get worse. Most print publications issue retractions and are generally monitored by a government body such as the FCC. While there is an argument that websites with a history of accuracy will be trusted more readily by the public, it leaves out the fact that the general public is full of gullible morons. For example, people do not double check the link that they are viewing to make sure the website is real. A website was created for the sole purpose of generating fake BBC articles that could be used to trick people into believing a story was true. There is even an entire site, www.snopes.com, devoted to debunking internet hoaxes and fake emails constantly forwarded by said gullible morons.

The Internet's greatest advantage is also one of its greatest downfalls. It connects people. It allows for people to communicate instantly, but it also becomes subject to gullible people falling for once dead tricks. The chain letter was ridiculed for being entirely unbelievable. By the 21st century, very few people would spend the time copying a printed chain letter to forward to 10 of their friends. However, with the computer came instant copying and pasting. And with the Internet came instant forwarding. New chain letters began appearing, targeting younger audiences and their fears. One infamous example is a letter allegedly from the CEO of Microsoft, saying that they are running out of space and will therefore be deleting any inactive accounts. The only way to ensure one's account was considered active was to forward the email to 10 friends. This is redone in many forms, from social networks to instant messaging accounts.

Granted, it is possible that most of the people who forward such letters are new to the world, and therefore naive. A lot of the people who use social networking sites are young and immature. It is also improbable that those who spread online chain letters are older people, as they have encountered them before. Chain letters are often the target of ridicule because of their superstitious nature. With all these arguments in mind, it is still notable that old people spread online chain emails just as much. Sometimes they are taken in by the promise that a special trick will happen if the email is forwarded ten times. Or they are fooled by the warnings that some chemical commonly found in the human body is dangerous when placed in a food. Whatever the fact is, the reason why anybody forwards something that they think is true is because they don’t know any better, and are too lazy to verify the facts. Even if they are trying to look out for their friends and family members, they are still being a burden by perpetuating falsehoods.

Even with helpful sites to combat internet scams and hoaxes, the fact remains, there is no specific form of control over the Internet. Some countries attempt to add legislation, China and Australia are trying censorship, the RIAA sues everybody, from dead people to children, that violates intellectual property. The closest legal body the Americans have right now is the Federal Communications Commission, or the FFC. There have been instances where the FCC has stepped in to ensure net neutrality, or equal transfer rates for all forms of data. However, the FCC does nothing to ensure the integrity of data. Their website claims that the FCC “is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable” but not websites.

Government responsibility is a sham, as criminal cases are always relative to the country that the website is hosted in, even if the webmasters live in a different country. This means they can take advantage of more lenient laws on issues such as piracy by using foreign servers. There has to be a more unified effort to take down criminals websites. However, this does not seem likely, as it would take a unified world government, or an internet nation, something with a universal set of laws. Software piracy is a main example of Internet crime. Several legal threats have been made against The Pirate Bay, a website that maintains torrent files. However, they remain, for the most part, immune to most attacks as Swedish law on making available copyrighted content remains vague.

Electronic writing is a wonderful thing, but the main problem with it is the location. The Internet is a horrible place where perfectly normal people, bestowed with anonymity, turn into raving lunatics. If electronic writing were to be taken away from the Internet, and kept on electronic devices, such as moveable print and portable writing tablet then it has plenty of room for growth and development. There are plenty of new technologies coming out that help this, but without the proper protocols in place will be useless to save electronic writing.