Imagine breaking your leg, losing your job and it’s raining cats and dogs and you have no rain jacket. Your mate asks you “How was your day” all you have to reply is “good”. In 1949 George Orwell published a book 1984, a dystopian future where life, as we know, is reduced to a bleak, simple world. In 1984 we see the language being cut right back so there can be no hate speech. In today's world, fewer people take languages, we are restricting freedom of speech and social media & technology shrinking our vocab. When reading this we are falling right into the pages of 1984.
Taking a language helps us to communicate better with the world, however, this is slowly declining each year with students not taking languages. English is only the 3rd most spoken language in the world after Chinese and Spanish. A study done for high schools shows only 20% of students in high school have taken a language at least once in the USA. Later followed by 7.5% of all students that took a language right to the end of high school continue on in university in the USA. In New Zealand, only 6.4% of Year 13’s were taking Language Level 3 in NCEA in 2013. With apps translators now available on phones, people aren’t seeing the use of taking a language and think that taking one will not help with getting a job or going to university in the future. I feel to help this decreasing subject we need to make taking a language more useful by offering the likes of scholarships or higher priority when getting a job so students don’t see languages as a waste of time if English is their primary language. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “The limit of my language means the limit of my world”. This means that by not taking a language we are restraining ourselves and where we end up in our unique world.
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By clamping down on hate speech, we lose the right of freedom of speech? What defines hate speech, offensive language, stating your opinion on controversial topics regardless of who it might offend on the basis or race, religion or sexual orientation? With recent events that happened in Christchurch, we are clamping down on hate speech. The man responsible had spoken on social media of his judgment about the Muslim religion and was later deleted afterward by Facebook. Facebook has recently been thrashed by the public for allowing this to happen and now is taking action against hate speech. But by doing this are we losing our right to voice our opinion. A rugby star recently has lost his job after voiced that homosexual people will go to hell, also a man has been arrested after shouting abuse and slurs outside a mosque by police. With all these events happening we can see that our rights to voice ourselves is slowly getting chipped away at. I feel that social media should not ban or delete comments or opinion, instead put up a warning before clicking on the page about the content on the page. This means we would not have to delete and clamp down on hate speech, but instead warn that content may offend so only people who feel that they want to see what they have to say will see this which protects our freedom of speech.
With social media, our communication skills are being affected in a negative way, how many times has your parent told you to look them in the eye and shake your hand firmly because apparently, our communications skills are lacking? With social media, we are following the lives and achievements of our friends without having to be there. Social media gives us the ability to talk and communicate with anyone where ever, whenever. This leads to people not catching up with friends but to just to sit there and text them instead. Because of this fewer children are having face to face conversations and are losing the skill to communicate, such as looking people in the eye, to people in the real world. With technology becoming more advanced and easily accessible people are becoming more uncomfortable talking to new people in the real world and would much prefer just talking to them over the phone. I feel we need to stop spending all our time on social media and learn new communication skills, that could land us a job, and spend time socializing in the real world with friends or completely new people. Otherwise, we could land ourselves in front of important interviews or speeches that we fail due to feeling uncomfortable talking to real people or holding eye contact.
When was the last time you sat down and read a book for enjoyment, not because it’s part of homework or an assignment? Reading at least 15 minutes per day can expose you to more than 1 million words of text in a year. A school in the USA interviewed the children and asked if they read for fun anymore and if not why. Children came back, in large numbers, as not reading for fun as they feel it is boring. A child wrote, “I stay a whole 5 days at school studying, so coming home to read resembles being back in class”. With all the technology and activities available to children these days peaceful reading seems like a waste of time compared to fast action games or playing sport with friends. I agree why would you want to read instead of the fast pace, dopamine pumping world I could experience on my phone or laptop, or go and watch a movie with a friend. The thing is I feel books are just books. Occasionally I get a book that grabs my attention and I’ll read non stop but they are far and few. I feel that these dopamine filled activities can snatch attention and make reading seem useless. Recently I have learned how beneficial it is to slow down, take a breath and just be peaceful and empty the mind, something that occurs when reading. I feel that we need to learn about the importance of reading and how just setting aside a few minutes can help change our vocabulary as well as our well being.
I see the future of our world and language could possibly be bleak and simple. Where we only know how to speak one language like back in primal times, where we can only speak in simple sentences and can barely communicate in the real world. Where the freedom of speech has been choked out to erase hate speech feel if we are to turn this around we need to reward people who take second languages or turn off the tech and go out and socialize in the real world, where we can learn skills to improve our social abilities and the end of the day just spending 15-minutes reading can make a big difference. But that's up to you and how you want our world to be in as short as 50 years.
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