The Language Virus

I was in my teens when I first read the 1970 book 'Future Shock' by Alvin Toffler which concerned itself with how soon computers were predicted to discomfort the old who would never 'get the hang of them'. From it I learnt that this new world would prove advantageous to the young, for whom their use would become second nature.

I was young enough to feel  that in 1980 I might be one of those who would feel quite comfortable with what the author wrote about it all. I was ready to study computers at 'O' level standard in the subject which was closer than most people of any age would get to computers where I lived. No matter that the way the class approached the subject was at the teacher's level, slow, methodical, very technical, utterly without reference to any future our studies had, and utterly without any sense of the practical or commercial application of the subject. 

I did not mind that; it became like some some sort of game or a study done for it's own sake rather than for the future it was once meant to directly offer. I was in an exam factory and the subject was interesting, if somewhat laborious, to get an exam pass in. The morality of the use of computers to misinform the public was not part of what we studied, though with hindsight I wish it had been.

I thought the exam result might still be useful. This was before exam inflation, where to get anywhere with qualifications that once seemed adequate my exam results had to be more numerous, gained more rapidly, and with better grades than I might have thought before there were over three million people, mostly men, who were unemployed, where work experience was that valuable many employers were no longer giving it out, they expected other employers to provide it for them.

Decades later I learned to make computers work sufficiently well that I felt that I could call myself a writer, for the want of a more useful label. I discovered that the obverse of Alvin Toffler's predictions were the word worlds conjured up in the worrying prose of William Burroughs, of which very little was usually enough. In his work a scabrous immorality, deep mistrust, and hostile confusion all found their maximum entertainment value.

Now I am older I live simply, and rather well on less. I live well out of the way of the great majority. Alvin Toffler's predictions have returned to me like old ghosts who have supped well on human troubles and become refreshed by the new situations which have given them greater powers to haunt than ever I would have thought. I must be one of many to feel this way. 

Government websites on Covid 19 are my case in point. They speak in a self referring technical language and work though circular links between this page to that page and back, and that there are no phone numbers given with live human beings at the end from which to get a live explanation, or breakdown of what words on the screen actually mean. When that happens the words and the screen become the verbal equivalent of mazes that seem designed to confuse and not elucidate. When the links on the page link to another page. it is a mirror site which does exactually the same as the site that got you there, but in reverse.

That the evasive jargon would multiply with it being put into new, more impenetrable, forms which are even impossible to process was surely part of Alvin Toffler's warning,