i can has proze?
Hai, mai name iz k8e, and im addicted 2 lolcat. 1m 2 31337 4 u. And I can’t deal with it anymoar. I sincerely hope that I am not alone in this problem.
My boyfriend and I started talking (and typing) in lolspeak because it was lolarious. He lives far away and we found over time that lolspeak immeasurably enhanced (imbued with lolariousness!) our otherwise banal conversations, conversations about what was had for dinner or what we did with ourselves during the day (oh you know, went to the gym, patted Bobo cat, read for a while), conversations that would not be had in any other context than that of the long distance relationship. Banality encased in lolspeak became defamiliarized and therefore bearable, endearing even – it became a kind of cryptographic game with which to pass the months we spent apart. However, I have noticed a decline in my ability to construct coherent, grammatically correct sentences and intellectual thought. I keep wanting to, like, spell things phonetically (i spind so much monee!) and I can’t punctuate for the life of me. Well, you may say, if you’re weren’t so banal then perhaps you would not be having this problem. Nonsense, I say! This has nothing to do with that. Now, I’m not heavily prescriptive, but as a writer it certainly seems to be necessary to maintain a certain level of “correctness” about ones work, and for me, those cute cats, their bible, their unique phonology and syntax, and their animal friends have been getting in the way.
Moving on we see that lolspeak is not the only online danger clawing at yr perfect prose. No, friends, much subtler is the syntactic ruin caused by the inflated, gross, coy, pretentious, language of blogs, advertising, and the news media. Craigslist is great for story ideas, but personally, I find that sometimes I write better when I avoid the internet all together, and not just because it’s a time sink. Have you had a similar experience? Want to talk about it? Exhausted by rapid fire exchanges on Twitter, and people who comment on your Facebook photos before you’ve even finished uploading the entire album omg how do they do it!!!!1 There is a safe haven waiting for you in the tradition of slow blogging.
Yes, as with foods and fashion, blogging has slowed down as well, as hoards of pplz have gotten on board with the slow blog movement. Do you see what I did there? Go diagram that sentence and tell me it doesn’t look like something from the local news. For four years now, these “slow bloggers” have been doing it slowly. First came Todd Sieling, probably, in 2006 with his slow blog manifesto. In 2008 the New York Times ran an informative story about the movement, noting at the end that Todd Sieling had given up on his slow blog, however he has since started back up. The funny thing about slow blogging is that it assumes that blogging slow necessarily means blogging better – that problems with internet prose will be corrected with careful thought and revision. Furthermore, it privileges earnestness over snark, but earnestness is often overwrought, pretentious, or bland just as snark is often shallow. In any case, I’m not really interested in the merits or demerits of blogging per se – my issue with blogging is that it (like most things) can be pretty junky, and my issue with slow blogging is that it makes a move towards literariness that will necessarily be diminished by the way in which we read words on a screen, which is not the same as the way we read from a print source. The Wikipedia article on screen reading links to many fine references. So, on the one hand, if you blog badly people like me will hate on you, and on the other hand, if you blog well it doesn’t matter because it will not be appreciated. You would have been better off in print. This would appear to be a no win situation compounded by all those empty words in sidebars, chat conversations, cat macros, 4chan, Yahoo answers, OK Cupid, Wikis of all kinds, Myspace, Facebook, Reddit, IMDB forums, Youtube comments, Gawker Media, et al; fine prose and the internet may be incompatible (with the exception of some British news sites. I ain’t no anglophile, but they are sometimes really delightful! And I’m sure there are many other excellent examples of good prose available on the internet, so please direct me to them.)
The heart of the matter now lies in what this surfeit of bad text and shallow reading does to writers when they close that chat window and open up their word processing programs – like me, writin liek a lolcat, and you, writing something like copy for a fiction assignment. Or vice versa, for who among us has not written a sentence that sounded like an ad for a vacation or something. Loretta entered the airy Croatian bar, taking note of the ample seating and soft music playing in the background. She ordered an ice cold Coke Light and sat down to drink it. All around her locals whispered to each other over their own highball glasses filled with ice cold, refreshing Coke Light.
I can see two possible solutions for writers confronting this internet problem: either avoid it entirely or become its master. For example, I dream of one day writing a novel 3n71Я3lЧ 1n 1337. These solutions may be impossibilities, so we best muddle through, I suppose.
Nao, do you think teh interwebz r ruinin ur writin? Or do you think it might have gone bad with the ever-increasing ubiquity of the language of advertising? Thoughts? Solutions? Interesting links?
Tags: grammar · Katherine · LOLCatz3 Comments
“The Internet” isn’t ruining anything, but our use of it can ruin things–the onus is always on the users or inventors, not the device. I remember the proliferation of “bcuz,” “nm,” “lol,” “brb,” “roflmao,” &c., on AIM and IRC, of 1337-speak on UBBs and in chat rooms, and in every case the conscious decision (at least on my part) to, since I could, play with written language while still understanding and being understood by other people. Two groups of people frolicked thus–people who enjoyed fucking around, and people who could only fuck around, or people who always write like they wish they could, or is passingly clever, even when it means they lose the ability to write well. (The same people, I expect, still bring papers to writing centers with the “your to wierd” kind of mistakes.) These groups may seem to overlap, but when something becomes the norm for a person, a habit, it often loses part of its pleasurableness. I doubt LOLcats are as amusing as you find/had found them to people who don’t (or didn’t at one time) have some idea of what’s wrong with the text: the joke is the juxtaposition of cute cats with, I guess, either how we imagine cats would type, or the textual manifestation of humans babytalking to their pets.
When you say “…much subtler is the syntactic ruin caused by the inflated, gross, coy, pretentious, language of blogs, advertising, and the news media,” you broaden your argument so much that you lose it, having transitioned from musing about possible negative effects of idiotic Web entertainment to all bloggers, journalists (only those who appear online, I assume), and advertisers. “Pretentious” implies lording hypercorrect, not ruined, syntax over bad writing, or some kind of meta-bad writing over good writing that is distinct from pretentious writing, which calls attention to its correctness because what the writing says is not very interesting–I Am Grammatically Sound And That’s The Best Thing About Me. Reputable publications’ copy is as littered with errors in newsprint as their online counterparts, and blogs run by bad writers have the same kind of bad writing as print newsletters or leaflets sent out by bad writers. Online advertisers are crafty, and we are inundated with products that we don’t need marketed to us with slogans and images designed to make us believe we do: I take it you think this is a new development. To paraphrase David Foster Wallace (PDF), it’s shortsighted to blame the Internet. It “didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression,” and it “has simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.”
Therefore, the only thing I can pick out of the expanse of your argument is that the Internet is bad for us, or worse, at least, for us than print, because of plentiful, but by no means ubiquitous, “junky” content, and the irrelevance of anything that isn’t junky because non-junky content isn’t popular, and reading things on screens is bad for us. Which, in other words, means almost everything is shit, and everything that isn’t this kind of shit is a different kind of shit. In a 2007 essay for the NYT Book Review, Joe Queenan divides bad books into categories, “the stupid, the meta-stupid, and the immoral,” and each “has its own inimitable charms.” The Internet is not resistant to similar categories.
The problem you’ve noticed–and it is a problem–seems to be less one of medium and more one of concentration. So much is possible via the Internet that what is banal and ridiculous and dangerous can’t be kept out. A person who wants to write in this time doesn’t need to write a 1337 novel (but I will read it), and can try to avoid the Internet as much as possible or master it. I lean more toward the latter, at least to the extent I can.
… what does 1337 means? and “3n71Я3lЧ”? I am familiar with the LolCats, but I think I might be out of the loop with everything else…
For your edification.