If you can understand the true intention of the author, is that enough? Hemingway had immense trouble with past participles. The Great Gatsby contained hundreds of spelling mistakes, including “yatch” (instead of “yacht”) and “apon” (instead of “upon”). Plus there are countless conversations regarding the fluidity of language, much to the chagrin of orginalist Justice Scalia. If you can’t adapt, get on with it mate.
However, I would say yes, it absolutely matters. Not because I fancy myself a pedant refusing to get with the times, but because anything over 140 characters and we hardly take notice of such oversights. Therein lies the biggest problem. The rate at which we consume information is rendering information moot, rudderless and disposable. If the Internet predicates that publications churn out story after story in order to compete, then no amount of information is enough, and it will never come fast enough. Unlike Hemingway or Fitzgerald, or countless other authors who had trouble with affect or effect or dangling participles, we aren’t reading. We’re skimming. We’ve abdicated our duty to information in our quest to consume and overshare. Typos are the tip of iceberg.
Split the Internet in two and wait for the singularity to shut us down.
Which brings me to a final question: what is the solution? Is there a solution? I applaud The New Yorker for the way in which they’ve handled the Internet takeover of print. Some articles you have to pay for, others are free; as if they’ve created a hierarchy of content. The content you have to pay for is less likely to contain errors.
What if we build on this concept and Solomonize the beast; split the Internet in two and wait for the singularity to shut us down. (It works so well for political parties.) One information superhighway would house all things pertinent, and the other, all things disposable. I’ll leave the bowdlerization to those much wiser.
Users would pay a flat monthly fee for access–like the Internet equivalent to a toll road or Fast Trak lane. There would be no distractions, no Meowls on the sidebar goading you to click. We’d waste less time. We’d be more efficient. It wouldn’t really be any different from paying a monthly subscription for your morning newspaper. Crazy, maybe. Elitist, not entirely. If print really is dead, as everyone so often laments, why are we holding on so tightly? It’s best to do one thing really, really well, and this solution would make certain that your daily news didn’t come with a side-serving of Miley Cyrus and typos as garnish.
We could call it the Internot. No monkeys allowed.
Image credit: Tawng / 123RF Stock Photo
