Its wild to watch society at large do this more and more often, from the outside, as a non corpo, algorithm driven social media user.
People are unlearning, or just never learning, how to be accountable, how to communcate precisely, at a linguistic level… and hyperbole just keeps getting presented as literality.
The only thing I can compare it to is 1984’s newspeak, but that is all top down, mandated, enforced… and this is … organic, but amplified by our communication methods being maximized for drama.
The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.
Its even impacting the art we make.
Idiot plots.
Idiot plots everywhere, more and more entire shows either heavily involve or entirely revolve around characters continuously making increasingly emotionally elevated judgements against other characters, which all could have been solved or avoided if one or two or three of them just said a few things that were more precise and less vague at key plot beats.
Maybe we need a name for a trope that is a subtype of the idiot plot, for a plot that only happens because everyone is emotionally bipolar/hypercharged, and also is incapable of directly and accurately asking a question, answering a question, making a statement, incapable of not using loaded questions, vague answers, and ‘Schrödinger’s Irony’ style statements, where its just a joke if immediate reception is negative, but totally serious if reception is positive.
Its wild to watch society at large do this more and more often, from the outside, as a non corpo, algorithm driven social media user.
ironically, i’ve sort of done this at a smaller scale among some of the communities im in, and you would not believe how stupid people are, even when you literally inform them to their face that you’re saying stupid shit for the purposes of saying stupid shit.
rage bait is incredibly effective and there’s a reason everything using it goes so far. It’s innate to the human psyche.
oh and by the way, for anybody who thinks this is like unethical or whatever, trust me, they LOVE eating it up. You would not believe how much shitpost you can do, before people realize that you might be shitposting.
I ended up abandoning most of my online ‘friends’ because their entire vocabulary devolved into thought stopping cliches, canned meme responses to almost every situation, apathy, Schrödinger’s Irony style statements that are either ‘obviously ironic jokes’ or ‘completely sincere and serious’ depending on their immediate reception…
Just completely duplicitous hypocrites, actively mocking any attempt to have a serious conversation about a serious subject… but highly interested in having extremely lenghty discussions about trivial, unimportant topics, in ambiguous, inconsistent and highly emotionally charged vocabulary, with anecdotally, vibes based ‘logic’ always trumping actual empirical data and properly backed theories.
apart from that, yeah i agree with you. in general, if you compare Trump’s and Hitler’s speeches, you can see how extremely complicated some sentences that Hitler said were. Watch some (AI english dubbed, starting around 30 seconds in). Compare that to Trump’s speeches, whose vocabulary seems to consist of 5 words.
Yeah, quality has gone down, it seems. I just talked to my aunt and grandma about this exact same thing yesterday. Everything seems to gradually loose quality, or in other words, enshittify.
(btw, i do not mean to say that Hitler’s speeches were “good”; i was merely pointing out that the clarity of expression has gone down. The same can be seen with automobiles, houses, and many other things.)
Btw, I remember reading an article that said, after 2000, universities in the USA specifically tried to erode clarity in speech, because they found it proper. It’s called post-structuralism; structuralism referring to “clarity”. I hoped i summarized that well.
It might have something to do, or not, but it definitely is a coincidence.
Yeah, if you follow the Flesch-Kincaid reading level of Presidential speeches over time, that’s another way you can broadly track American English just literally being dumbed down over time.
Trump basically only speaks in stream of consciousness, run-on sentences that are so vague that my 6th grade English teacher would describe as ‘word vomit.’
Speaking of 6th grade… the average adult American reading proficiency is now between a 5th and 6th grader.
Less than 10% of the population is capable of critically comparing contrasting stories about the same thing from different sources, and pointing out their differences and comparative biases.
Something like 30% of the population is functionally illiterate, only able to read extremely simple instructions and basically children’s books.
EDIT: Also, its not a coincidence.
Republicans, for longer than I’ve been alive, have been wrecking public education.
The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.
One of my most frightening and profound realizations as an adult, was that our language is our most powerful tool and nobody seems to know or care. It’s how we can abstract the universe, rearrange ideas and concepts and come up with new ways to approach problems and explain feelings.
Because if you’re not consciously explaining your feelings, you’re unconsciously doing it, and make no mistake, your brain is ONLY a tool for telling a story to explain your feelings. It’s not some vast computer or calculator, it’s a hyper-charged neural network designed to write stories to tie up loose ends and provide cause and effect for the world around you. It doesn’t seek logic or reason, it just wants continuity.
The sooner you realize this in life, the sooner you can start getting a handle on things like your own mental health, identifying rumination and where it comes from, figuring out what choices give you the best outcomes and how to overcome momentary discomfort for great rewards later. Things that our disconnected world is increasingly having a harder and harder time doing.
Because we’re abandoning language. And no, listening to social media and reading posts doesn’t boost your language, it doesn’t train your brain how to take YOUR experiences and feelings and abstractify them into ideas you can move around and view from different perspectives… something we should be able to do with ease if we have a large enough toolset to make accurate pictures of our lives. Social media and reading posts doesn’t boost you abilities to accurately abstractify the world and your life, it just gives you other people’s stories. Which are usually equally inaccurate or limited in scope.
If we don’t have language tools to help your brain write a more accurate story, you will believe terrible things about yourself, about others, about the entire world, and you will live in that state always.
Its wild to watch society at large do this more and more often, from the outside, as a non corpo, algorithm driven social media user.
People are unlearning, or just never learning, how to be accountable, how to communcate precisely, at a linguistic level… and hyperbole just keeps getting presented as literality.
The only thing I can compare it to is 1984’s newspeak, but that is all top down, mandated, enforced… and this is … organic, but amplified by our communication methods being maximized for drama.
The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.
Its even impacting the art we make.
Idiot plots.
Idiot plots everywhere, more and more entire shows either heavily involve or entirely revolve around characters continuously making increasingly emotionally elevated judgements against other characters, which all could have been solved or avoided if one or two or three of them just said a few things that were more precise and less vague at key plot beats.
Maybe we need a name for a trope that is a subtype of the idiot plot, for a plot that only happens because everyone is emotionally bipolar/hypercharged, and also is incapable of directly and accurately asking a question, answering a question, making a statement, incapable of not using loaded questions, vague answers, and ‘Schrödinger’s Irony’ style statements, where its just a joke if immediate reception is negative, but totally serious if reception is positive.
ironically, i’ve sort of done this at a smaller scale among some of the communities im in, and you would not believe how stupid people are, even when you literally inform them to their face that you’re saying stupid shit for the purposes of saying stupid shit.
rage bait is incredibly effective and there’s a reason everything using it goes so far. It’s innate to the human psyche.
oh and by the way, for anybody who thinks this is like unethical or whatever, trust me, they LOVE eating it up. You would not believe how much shitpost you can do, before people realize that you might be shitposting.
I ended up abandoning most of my online ‘friends’ because their entire vocabulary devolved into thought stopping cliches, canned meme responses to almost every situation, apathy, Schrödinger’s Irony style statements that are either ‘obviously ironic jokes’ or ‘completely sincere and serious’ depending on their immediate reception…
Just completely duplicitous hypocrites, actively mocking any attempt to have a serious conversation about a serious subject… but highly interested in having extremely lenghty discussions about trivial, unimportant topics, in ambiguous, inconsistent and highly emotionally charged vocabulary, with anecdotally, vibes based ‘logic’ always trumping actual empirical data and properly backed theories.
hey that’s ableist!
apart from that, yeah i agree with you. in general, if you compare Trump’s and Hitler’s speeches, you can see how extremely complicated some sentences that Hitler said were. Watch some (AI english dubbed, starting around 30 seconds in). Compare that to Trump’s speeches, whose vocabulary seems to consist of 5 words.
Yeah, quality has gone down, it seems. I just talked to my aunt and grandma about this exact same thing yesterday. Everything seems to gradually loose quality, or in other words, enshittify.
(btw, i do not mean to say that Hitler’s speeches were “good”; i was merely pointing out that the clarity of expression has gone down. The same can be seen with automobiles, houses, and many other things.)
Btw, I remember reading an article that said, after 2000, universities in the USA specifically tried to erode clarity in speech, because they found it proper. It’s called post-structuralism; structuralism referring to “clarity”. I hoped i summarized that well.
It might have something to do, or not, but it definitely is a coincidence.
Yeah, if you follow the Flesch-Kincaid reading level of Presidential speeches over time, that’s another way you can broadly track American English just literally being dumbed down over time.
Trump basically only speaks in stream of consciousness, run-on sentences that are so vague that my 6th grade English teacher would describe as ‘word vomit.’
Speaking of 6th grade… the average adult American reading proficiency is now between a 5th and 6th grader.
Less than 10% of the population is capable of critically comparing contrasting stories about the same thing from different sources, and pointing out their differences and comparative biases.
Something like 30% of the population is functionally illiterate, only able to read extremely simple instructions and basically children’s books.
EDIT: Also, its not a coincidence.
Republicans, for longer than I’ve been alive, have been wrecking public education.
Why? Stupid people are easier to lie to.
One of my most frightening and profound realizations as an adult, was that our language is our most powerful tool and nobody seems to know or care. It’s how we can abstract the universe, rearrange ideas and concepts and come up with new ways to approach problems and explain feelings.
Because if you’re not consciously explaining your feelings, you’re unconsciously doing it, and make no mistake, your brain is ONLY a tool for telling a story to explain your feelings. It’s not some vast computer or calculator, it’s a hyper-charged neural network designed to write stories to tie up loose ends and provide cause and effect for the world around you. It doesn’t seek logic or reason, it just wants continuity.
The sooner you realize this in life, the sooner you can start getting a handle on things like your own mental health, identifying rumination and where it comes from, figuring out what choices give you the best outcomes and how to overcome momentary discomfort for great rewards later. Things that our disconnected world is increasingly having a harder and harder time doing.
Because we’re abandoning language. And no, listening to social media and reading posts doesn’t boost your language, it doesn’t train your brain how to take YOUR experiences and feelings and abstractify them into ideas you can move around and view from different perspectives… something we should be able to do with ease if we have a large enough toolset to make accurate pictures of our lives. Social media and reading posts doesn’t boost you abilities to accurately abstractify the world and your life, it just gives you other people’s stories. Which are usually equally inaccurate or limited in scope.
If we don’t have language tools to help your brain write a more accurate story, you will believe terrible things about yourself, about others, about the entire world, and you will live in that state always.