With the musician's pitch-perfect ear Phil Shapiro creates this example of digitally literate communication: a digital native's ode to the ending of Western Union's telegraph service:
<<The Invention of the Telegraph <So like the telegraph was invented in 1844 by Samuel Morse so that he could <IM with his friends. So he would like telegraph things like, "What hath God <wrought. brb." His friends would telegraph back, "u r the gr8test!!!!!! <LOL!!!!" Samuel Morse would then telegraph back, "BCNU CUL8R GTR. <Telegraph rocks, IMHO." (Be seeing you. See you later. Got to run.) <Samuel Morse's parents used to limit the amount of time he could telegraph <with friends. He was only allowed to telegraph with them after he had finished his homework. <On January 27, 2006, Western Union discontinued the telegraph service that <they had been offering for 145 years. The press release for this <announcement said <simply: Telegraph service just ended, OMG. TTFN. TAFN. (Oh my gosh. Ta ta <for now. That's all for now.)>> Imagine such a digital native, fluent with his thumbs, asked to read the opening lines of Manuel Castells' THE RISE OF THE NETWORK SOCIETY: "Toward the end of the second millennium of the Christian Era several events of historical significance have transformed the social landscape of human life. A technological revolution, centered around information technologies, is reshaping, at accelerated pace, the material basis of society. Economies of the world have become globally interdependent, introducing a new form of relationship between economy, state, and society, in a system of variable geometry." What does the digitally literate but otherwise text and meaning challenged student faced with such prose do? What does his teacher do? Does she abandon Castells and substitute hyperlinks to fun web sites? Does she have the student read Castells, but on a screen subdivided so that other messages can appear at the same time to make the multitasking twitch speed digital native comfortable? Perhaps there will be a new profession employing skilled translators such as Phil who can turn the flow of ideas in such complex texts into digithumbspeak. TAFN. GTR. Steve Eskow [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
