blinkit

Misspeaking in tongues

WMD: In more timely fashion, here's my latest Courier column the day it's actually published. You can catch the direct link here. As usual, I'm reproducing the text below:

A note: writing about culture, language or ethnicity in a popular format is always chancy. You run the risk of either being accused of racism or receiving altogether too enthusiastic accolades from people who are indeed racist. But either you try to describe current social reality, however breezily, or you give up and just make stuff up to attract readers. I hope I'm doing the former.

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The other week one of our reporters asked me to listen to an interview she had just taped. She had talked to a source on the phone for five minutes and barely understood anything he had said. I listened carefully. The man had an exceptionally heavy accent, and I barely understood any of it either.

Vancouver, I have no idea what you're saying anymore. We've become, within a decade, Babel on the Pacific. With a dozen different major languages in currency, and widely varying abilities at English in play, communication on our streets is becoming a tad difficult. At the risk of paraphrasing Dennis Miller, I don't want to go on a rant here, but it's also starting to suck.

Admittedly, it's one of the prices of going global. People are coming to Vancouver from all over the world, and that's fine because we have far better restaurants now.

The variety of skin tones at the beach are also quite nice. And our new global self has created the Great Vancouver Pastime, which is to guess where everyone living here is from. As it turns out, everywhere but here: The latest census figures reveal that only six people in Vancouver are actually from Vancouver. (There was a seventh, but he sold his West End studio, moved to Saskatoon and bought a neighbourhood.)

A multiplicity of languages does make for adventurous living. When I rented a few years back, one of my building's maintenance men was Russian. He was very nice and helpful, and I would talk with him occasionally, which was interesting because he sort of spoke English, and sort of did not. If he showed up at my door with a tool box, I knew he was there to fix something.

Such adventure is now on the increase. When I take a taxi, often the driver sort of speaks English, and sort of does not. I tell him where I want to go, he sort of drives me there, and I sort of get there. And then by looking at the numbers on the meter, I know how much to pay, sort of.

At a cafe near where I live, one of the servers sort of speaks English, and sort of does not. If I order coffee, she understands what I want. But if I order tea, I have to point to the actual box on the counter display so she understands what I mean.

I have the same problem when shopping. At a Canadian Tire this past summer, I was helped by a clerk with an Asian accent so thick he finally--and graciously--wrote down what he was trying to tell me. The person next in line to me also helpfully pitched in as a translator. Between the three of us, we got to the bottom of my problem, which was that Canadian Tire did not have the automotive light bulb I was looking for. Good thing it only took 15 minutes to find out.

Ask around, and you'll find people with similar tales, whether it's buying an iPod at an electronics retailer, calling up a grocery store, or ordering new flooring.

I'm sympathetic to everyone involved, whether they speak English or not, since we're all in the same rocky multilingual boat. It also makes me wish, yet again, that life was like TV or the movies. That is, when someone speaks a language I don't understand, or mauls English so completely that they might as well be speaking a rare Tibetan dialect used only by a dozen monks high up in the mountains, that subtitles would flash in front of our eyes to explain what people are saying.

I could use subtitles while at the mall. I've noticed two things about retail in an economy with a labour shortage. With so many workers going into construction or resource work, the B listers are filling the store jobs. Many of them, especially the younger ones, regard customer service as a contagious disease. Others speak English so hesitantly you're better off using sign language. Or switching to written notes, like that Canadian Tire clerk. The other alternative is for me to take my business elsewhere, and if that starts happening on a wider scale among Vancouverites, business is in trouble.

Is anyone to blame? The provincial government has cut back on ESL funding. The federal government, which sets immigration policy, largely washes its hands of settlement issues when it comes to language training. That leaves local municipalities, schools and community centres and heroic little non-profits to take up the slack, and they have more goodwill than resources.

Languages, accents, and varying ability at English do create a kind of urban music. But that's as long as everyone can follow the chorus. Increasingly, I fear, we're singing different tunes.

The return of Mr. Squid

Today's bLINKit: And a long overdue nod to Mr. Squid, better known as the most famous astrophysicist ever to originate from *Lennard Island, who's got a blog going on again. And a sharp looking blog it is: Blogger has really upped its roster of design templates, and Squid has kept it basic but classy.

In his most recent post, Squid opines on an NHL open air game in Buffalo (vs.the visiting Penguins) slated for New Year's Day 2008, and what a great idea it is. He also takes a shot at TO, or at least the Star, which considers an open air game a dumb idea. I'm with Squid. I remember the Edmonton open air game from 2003 on TV, and it was fine watching.

 

* spelling corrected since initial post

Don't write this down

WMD: And catching up with my weekly column from last week, I interviewed William Crossman, an American philosopher who believes writing will die out in the advanced West by 2050. Part of his argument, which I did not get into in my piece, for the always persistent problem of lack of space, is that I suspect Crossman is advancing his argument partly because he wants text to die because he believes an oral world supported by appropriate technology will be a much fairer one. All the same, I believe he believes in his thesis, and it's a compelling one to chew over. I heard Crossman interviewed over the summer on the SETI Institute's weekly radio show and gave him a call. You can hear the radio interview here.

The link for the original column, still tenuous, is here. I've reproduced the text below:

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Three Rs down to one by year 2050

U.S. philosopher predicts digital age spells end of written word

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Fifty years from now, no one will be able to read the words printed on this page. Or any of the other pages in this edition of the paper, should it survive until then.

That's the argument advanced by American philosopher William Crossman, who believes hardly anyone in North America in 2057 will know how to read or write. And he believes it will be a good thing.

Crossman, director of the San Francisco-based Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures, has spent more than a decade examining trends in computer technology and demography and their effect on how we communicate. His conclusion is that the written word is disappearing and will be replaced by talking computers that will make possible an oral and democratic global culture.

That's right. Text is dying, so much so that Crossman believes it will be gone from schools, business, work, leisure and even the sciences by 2050 in the developed West. We won't need to know how to read or write, because computers will provide us--through Star Trek-like sound and graphics, the likes of which we can only imagine now--with all the information we need to do everything we do now. Even your dayplanner and grocery lists will have gone super-digital. Within a century, the rest of the world will follow.

Few agree with Crossman. And anyone who's struggled with the horror of wordless Ikea construction manuals will place a technologically girded oral world in the same category as the mythical flying cars and robot maids predicted half a century ago.

But talk with Crossman and he becomes persuasive. Speaking by phone Monday, he said his argument is based on four main trends. The first is that by nature we are oral creatures. Humans are born with the hardwiring to speak. Even babies form their own languages. But we are not born with the ability to read and write, skills which must be taught, with a fair amount of blood and sweat, in schools. As computers learn to talk and to show us things visually, we'll go the easy route and talk with our machines.

That's the second trend--that humans are constantly replacing old technologies with new and better tools. First developed roughly 6,000 years ago, writing is merely a tool, like the plow or the PDA. As computers become like vast libraries we can access through regular conversation, the need for writing will wither away like an unused limb. "People simply won't use it," Crossman told me. "We don't cut our lawns with scythes anymore."

Crossman believes young people are already leading the way through their widespread rejection of text. That's the third trend. My generation, born in the '60s, developed a non-text beachhead by gluing ourselves to televisions. Today's kids are charging inland by throwing themselves into video games, computers and iPods, and doing it all at once through an ability to multitask that astounds their elders. Text, says Crossman, constrains us to the narrow sense of vision. Kids today are learning to learn by relying on the innate human desire to use all our senses.

As evidence, Crossman points to the infamous "how r u" speak of the text messaging world, popular among anyone born after 1975. It's a sign, he says, that writing is devolving to its bare necessities.

Finally, Crossman points out that writing was created and is maintained by social and economic elites. It took five millennia for writing to expand beyond a tiny segment of the population, and books were not widespread until a few hundred years ago. Even today, 80 per cent of the world's population, most of them in developing countries, are functionally illiterate.

But should information become widely accessible and cheap through computers based on orality, the poorer nations are likely to skip the huge expense of teaching their populations how to write and go immediately to digital, just as hundreds of millions in the Third World have skipped landline phones and gone right to cellphones. As they do, the world will become a fairer and more democratic place, Crossman says, as the poor plug into the global grid.

I'm still mulling over Crossman's thesis, the surface of which I've hardly scratched here. And I'm obviously romantic about writing, since I make my living from it. But last week, I bought the latest William Gibson novel--not in print form, but a spoken version downloaded from Audible.com. And truth be told, I'm really enjoying it that way. Oh, oh.

You can read about Crossman (while anyone can still read) and his ideas at www.compspeak2050.org.

'New worlds' at UBC

WMD: Catching up, here's a feature story I wrote about a project at UBC to use the technology of computer games and virtual worlds for research and education. In other words, students in select courses are being given the option of building, say, an ancient Greek temple using 3D modelling and rendering tools as opposed to writing a standard text-based paper about it. The idea is to eventually use these models to create networked virtual worlds which profs,students and the public can join, perhaps as avatars. The longterm goal: virtual recreations of the forum in Athens, and virtual counterparts of archaeological digs that grow in cyberspace as the physical dig in Armenia or northwest B.C. is uncovered.

I let this simmer for far too long before committing it to words, but the outcome pleased those involved, in that they recognized themselves and their work in the piece.

Because of the length, I won't reproduce it here, so I'm not sure the link will last. The future of such links remains in debate as the Courier remakes its online presence. Read it while you can.

"The best place on what?"

WMD: When is a licence plate a propaganda tool? When it's found in B.C., or so I say in my latest column found here.

Thanks again to continuing uncertainty about the longevity of the link, the column is reproduced below:

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(Published in the Vancouver Courier Wednesday, September 12, 2007)

In B.C., licence plates identify registered motor vehicles. They're also propaganda.
The latest reminder of this use of personal vehicle space is the recent Olympic specialty plate, available for sale from ICBC since the spring as an alternative to the standard issue plate. Instead of the familiar "Beautiful British Columbia" slogan worn by plates in this province for more than four decades, the 2010 plates feature an image of Mount Garibaldi, the Games logo and the catchphrase "The best place on earth." It's the same catchphrase the B.C. Liberal government used to rebrand B.C. for both domestic and tourist consumption. You may remember the commercials of ordinary but overjoyed British Columbians standing by pristine mountain meadows and coastal fjords proclaiming how happy they are to exist in God's favoured space. Presumably, none of them works in the forest industry.

I hated that phrase when it first appeared on my TV, and I dislike it no less now that it's appearing on our roads. It's a needless boast, and to anyone who's travelled the world even slightly, untrue. Our landscape--pine beetle infestation, sewage runoff and expanding acres of suburban blacktop notwithstanding--is beautiful. And my how we're rich. But in our current fevered monied state, we forget how vulnerable the good times are to forces beyond our control. All we need is a drop in global commodity prices, trouble in Asian markets, or more mortgage and stock trouble in the U.S., and the best place on earth will look like the best place to leave in search of work. When the gas tank runs low, that plate will become a cruel joke.

But according to Christopher Garrish, who runs the fascinating website BCPL8S.ca, using licence plates as political marketing is nothing new. Garrish, a trained historian who lives in Penticton in the Okanagan Valley and works as a town planner for the regional district, started the website three years ago to mark the 100th anniversary of the first registered motor vehicle in B.C. Since then, he's compiled a geekily exhaustive list, complete with photos, of the hundreds of varieties of plates that have been used through the decades. His enthusiasm for the subject is infectious and, for outraged columnists, moderating. He notes that the "Beautiful" slogan was introduced in 1964 by the W.A.C. Bennett government as a marketing tool to draw tourists to B.C. Even then, Garrish reminded me, the uptight complained the slogan was too frothy.

The government of Wacky's son Bill ramped up the use of plates for political ends when it engineered the placement of a wavy version of the B.C. flag between the registration numbers. It happened to be the same flag symbol used by the then-governing Social Credit party. Like any longstanding, arrogant regime, Bennett and his cronies saw no difference between the controlling party and the government machinery they ran. Stylistically dated today, the flag remains on our plates as a reminder of past hubris. Where are the Socreds now?

As it turns out, they morphed into the Liberals, which is why we're getting another new licence plate catchphrase with political overtones. Garrish told me in an email that he's "not too fussed" by the new plates. He thinks the "Beautiful" slogan is overdue for retirement, and he'd love to see the aging Socred-era flag gone. He also points out that the Olympic specialty plates have proved popular. As of August, ICBC reported selling 45,000 Olympic plates to drivers willing to pay $35 for the privilege of participating in a government-orchestrated PR campaign.

Garrish says the slogan could be worse. The Bill Bennett government considered replacing the "Beautiful" slogan with "Supernatural," which was the tuneless Socred marketing slogan of the day. Garrish has also lived in Australia, where he says the state governments have a habit of hamfisted slogans for plates. Queensland actually called itself the "Smart State" on its plates, and the Australian Capital Territory, the seat of the federal government, quickly killed its introduction of "Canberra: Feel the Power," when it realized Canberrans were afraid their car would be keyed if they crossed state lines. Think of how Albertans would react to Ontario plates bearing "Canada's Centre."

Garrish advises us to get used to the new "Best place" phrase. It's already on consular plates, and he believes all plates issued in B.C. will move to the new slogan as an Olympic tie-in. In a province where shameless propaganda is as regular as the rain, I wouldn't bet against him.

Today's bLINKit: You can find Garrish's site here.