by Barbara Anne Radtke
Last year, when my grandnephew was entering second grade, he told his teacher that his favorite color was cyan. She faithfully recorded it on a little chalk board, along with his other favorite second grade things. I got a copy of the picture she took while he held the little sign board. “Cyan?” I wondered. His grandmother, my sister, is an artist. “She must be teaching him these sophisticated color names,” I thought. Yet, I discovered my assumption was incorrect. He changes the cartridges on her color printer and, as she reminded me, cyan is one of the color cartridges. I am not sure if he debated whether he liked cyan, a blue-green with more green, than turquoise, a blue-green with more blue. In fact, I never determined if turquoise occurred to him as a choice. After all, it is not a printer cartridge.
This is not the only instance I can cite of how digital life has introduced a vocabulary word into someone’s lexicon at a young age. Recently I spent an afternoon with a five-year-old. He was using his designated screen time to play the simplest form of Minecraft, a game I had never seen played. My young friend was eager for me to understand the game and kept referring with great respect to a character that kept appearing on the screen. I could not get the name. As his mother thrust a slim book Minecraft for Dummies into my hand, she whispered that her son was saying “golem.” Even though my young friend had a little lisp, it was not his pronunciation that threw me off. It was my lack of expectation that I would hear this word from a five-year-old.
Digital life has not just influenced our vocabulary and the words we learn first. It also has become a way we talk about our lives. We talk about taking time out from our routine as “rebooting,” as if we turn ourselves on and off. We talk about something gone wrong in our daily schedule as a “glitch,” as though our day was software with a programming error. We speak of a “reset” of our goals or our relationships. We sometimes refer to our capacity for problem solving as our “bandwith.” You can probably think of more examples.
Language is organic. The Oxford English Dictionary accounts for the growth and change in the English language when it reports its new words each year. Yet, the phenomenon reflected in these vocabulary examples is indicative of a larger issue than language appropriation. Society has spent considerable time this past year discussing artificial intelligence, fearing digital reality will approximate or exceed human intelligence. Yet, have we given enough thought about how human life is being described and measured as though we are the machine?
By the way, this year my grandnephew’s favorite color is green.
Kathy Hendricks is taking a break and will be back next post.
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