2 Media Technology and the Evolution of Language

By Dave Bostwick

When silent movies became popular early in the 20th century, my grandmother (pictured here) had a part-time job improvising mood music on the piano to accompany the action on the screen. As popular movies began to include sound in the 1930s, local musicians such as my grandmother lost their jobs as movie accompanists.

At the same time, the advent of recorded sound in movies led to new jobs for script writers, who could now craft language creatively in new formats. At my grandmother’s expense, recorded words became an integral part of making movies.

This chapter shows how media history often repeats itself. The disruptive nature of media technology, which can affect jobs and language usage, did not start with my grandmother and silent films, though. For the next section, we’ll go back somewhere in the vicinity of 400 B.C.

But first, here’s a quick question about you:

LETTERS

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates recounts a legend about an Egyptian god whose “great discovery” was the use of letters for writing. He showed his discovery to a pharaoh, who feared the discovery would not lead people to wisdom. The pharaoh says …

“… this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing.”

You should especially note the line saying that the introduction of letters for writing will give people “not truth, but only the semblance of truth.” That sounds a bit like our debates about fake news today.

Over the centuries, widespread adoption of written words led to less emphasis on oral storytelling traditions passed from generation to generation. The best storytellers and philosophers eventually became writers.

And as writing became a way for information and ideas to spread, so too did some rulers seek to control what their people read. Way back in approximately 200 B.C., China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, directed his officials to destroy classic cultural books in history and education. Today’s historians believe the emperor did not want the Chinese people to compare his rules to the teachings of Confucius.

MOVABLE METAL TYPE

Most historians credit the Chinese with the first printing technology that used movable type. In Europe, Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century innovations using movable metal type enabled mass distribution via the printing press.

John H. Lienhard, a mechanical engineer and historian, wrote an essay titled “What People Said About Books In 1498.” The essay included his observation about the immediate impact of the printing press.

What did they say in 1498? In the end it doesn’t matter, because it was — ipso facto — useless commentary. For everyone looking at the new books in 1498, the future was as hopelessly unpredictable as it is now. We cannot have a clue as to what any technological future will be until we learn it from a new generation of users.

Now that we have more 500 years of perspective about the printing press, we perhaps can make some general conclusions.

Before the printing press, spellings were inconsistent due to regional dialects and evolved quickly with pronunciations. If you study the English author Chaucer, for example, you may come across old texts that use cnicht or knyght where today we consistently spell knight.

Here’s a brief video that emulates spelling and pronunciation from Chaucer’s day, around the year 1400.

Back then, speakers would have pronounced knyght to include all those consonants. As one English instructor said in a video tutorial, you have to pronounce everything and “get phlegmy with it.”

Over the centuries, as printed materials were commonly distributed, the spelling of English words became more formalized, and dictionaries became part of the language landscape. Some linguists use the term fossilized to describe words that are spelled the way they were pronounced during the adoption of the printing press. Consider, for example, the inconsistent sounds in these examples that all end in -ough:

• Through
• Thorough
• Trough
• Rough
• Bough

Because of the printing press, many English spellings sometimes remain mostly unchanged from centuries ago, while pronunciations have evolved. The printing press also led to the need for a new group of language workers, called lexicographers, to compile dictionaries.

SENTENCE LENGTH

Let’s focus on the infancy of American English, specifically the year 1776. Here is the opening of The Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Compare the opening sentence of the U.S. Declaration of Independence to this excerpt of three sentences from Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, which was published in 1926.

It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette.

In 150 years, how did American English evolve from the free-flowing structure of the Declaration of Independence to Hemingway’s sparse style?

Part of the answer lies with advances in media technology. The brief presentation below chronicles a few developments that affected the evolution of our language.

Study the following presentation slides by using the forward button or clicking on sections of the control bar. To enlarge any interactive presentation in this book, click on the lower-right full-screen option (arrows). 

As a side note, in his book The Gutenberg Parenthesis, Jeff Jarvis wrote that because the telegraph allowed “instantaneous communication with unseen strangers,” there were initial concerns about “stranger danger.” Some stakeholders thought jobs in the new telegraph industry were inappropriate for women.

RADIO, TELEVISION, THE INTERNET …

Our media technology continues to affect our language usage in ways we don’t fully realize yet. Here are a few current examples.

• Texting
(capitalization, shortened spellings, emojis)
• Search-engine optimization techniques that emphasize keywords
• AI-generated text

And history repeats itself as many Americans today fear the consequences of our 21st-century tech evolution. Similarly, some philosophers feared the danger of written text in Socrates’ day. Centuries later in the late 20th century, some Americans feared that watching too much television would hinder children’s language development.

As a recent example related to language usage, in 2023 a few state legislatures mandated cursive writing in public schools so that students do not rely entirely on digital keyboards for writing. One theory holds that cursive writing is more conducive to individual student thinking and learning.

Consider how the communication devices you use today may affect the way you write in the future.

@emojis
FWIW: i think declare of indy wld be diff today / LMK ur thoughts

Will all 📚 soon be printed with emojis that represent 🙀 or 💩 or 🏈? How could that change the way we define literacy?

MORE ABOUT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND WRITING

We can only guess how AI tools may change our future language usage. Large language models (LLMs) use algorithms that can analyze speech and generate words and phrases in context. If you text on a smartphone, for example, you may have noticed that as you type a text message, the app displays commonly used words that attempt to predict what you may want to type next.

In an online journalism course sponsored by the Knight Center, Sil Hamilton, a language-model researcher, provided the simple example summarized below.

The United States of __________

In a large percentage of instances, an AI tool (such as Chat GPT) will generate America as the next word. You can ask the tool to regenerate a response multiple times, but you may never get the word Pizza.

On the other hand, if I’m looking for something interesting to read, I’m more likely to engage in a story with this title:

The United States of Pizza

AI tools can work well to give us predictable (sometimes boring) text, but their level of creativity is debatable.

For a conceptual overview of language models, study the following interactive presentation.

We’ll see new employment opportunities and job titles for people who can skillfully use AI tools to generate, edit and publish useful and reliable text. For example, AI programs already require a vast amount of gig workers who sift through and clean language banks that train large language models.

Ironically, the BBC reported that there are jobs for copy editors who rewrite AI-generated text to make it sound more human and thereby avoid AI-detection software.

RECAP

Here’s a simple chronological overview to hammer home the disruptive nature of media technology.

• Letters disrupted an oral tradition.
• The printing press disrupted the tradition of handwritten manuscripts.
• The telegraph disrupted tangible (printed) media.
• Radio disrupted the evolution of the telegraph.
• Television disrupted the entertainment model of radio.
• The internet disrupted the evolution and popularity of TV, radio, movies, newspaper, books and magazines. It has changed how we define them.
• Computer-generated words and images have forced us to reconsider ownership and appropriate use of content derived from non-human sources. (However, we don’t yet know the extent of disruption caused by AI-generated content.)

Because of this continually disruptive process over hundreds of years, many workers, such as my grandmother, have been forced to adapt to new media environments.

CLOSING – A NEW DECLARATION

The opening sentence from the Declaration of Independence seems clunky today. Let’s use an AI tool to rewrite it as a hipster version.

NOTE – With the exception of the opening meme and the first portrait photo of Lesley Bostwick and the  uncredited images in this chapter are in the public domain and available through Wikimedia Commons.

video store image – Jon Konrath CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
opening meme – Ochre Jelly on Flickr