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New Indian Express
4 days ago
- Politics
- New Indian Express
Death of the dictionary
Samuel Johnson, the dictionarist Creative Commons Opinions Death of the dictionary The written word is no longer the most efficient way to store knowledge. Thanks to a glut of enabling software and hardware mankind is turning back to its earliest mode of encoding culture: audiovisual media. Dictionarist Dr Johnson would've tutted at how we treat language today Pratik Kanjilal The Gutenberg revolution appears to be waning as the written word, the defining mark of civilisation—whether on Babylonian stelae or in racy detective novels—recedes in the face of the ever-compelling power of images and voice. The written word is shaking off the grip of regimentation, which had tightened over the centuries since printing caught on in Europe and later, dictionaries formalised language. Young people no longer read editorials to learn hieratic language. Instead, they are at ease with creoles, pidgins, slang and memes. But ironically, high feelings persist about language as a political and cultural marker of identity, purity and authenticity. Notable exception: at the press conference after signing the India-UK free trade agreement, a struggling Hindi translator was told to feel free to use English words. Meanwhile, Maharashtra is upset about the three-language formula. Governor C P Radhakrishnan has weighed in on the problem of 'linguistic hatred', and recalled seeing a north Indian man in his home state of Tamil Nadu being beaten up for not knowing Tamil. Language politics in Tamil Nadu, an element of the Self-Respect Movement, was a bulwark against the Union government's promotion of Hindi, which sought to flatten cultural diversity and make the states politically accessible to Delhi. Many states in the east, west and south didn't enjoy being pushed around, and Tamil Nadu made it an enduring political issue. But it is rare for someone from the state to admit that linguistic assertion has an unpleasant side. An extreme example: the Second World War was triggered by Hitler's determination to connect German-speaking populations in East Prussia and Austria with the German nation—'Ein volk, ein Reich, ein sprache', to rip off a Nazi slogan concerning the Führer. That was over 80 years ago. In the mean time, the world has globalised at a speed not seen since classical times. This could have been an era of bridge languages like Urdu. Instead, machines, the internet and their users are beating down the formalisms of language, and what was unthinkable is now doable. When Kemal Ataturk switched Turkish from the Arabic-based Ottoman script to the Roman alphabet in 1928, it was a radical act. The measure, intended to bring Turkey closer to the West, was denounced by critics as a 'cultural rupture', as older texts became inaccessible to younger people. Perhaps it worked only because 6 percent of Muslims were literate at the time. But ever since Usenet launched group communications over the internet, before most languages had digital fonts, phonetic communications in the Roman alphabet have been commonplace. And now, AI-powered translation is the norm. When Tony Blair's Britain asserted multiculturalism in the late 1990s, the road sign of Bangladeshi-intense Brick Lane in London was rewritten in two languages, English and Bangla. When Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane became a bestseller, it felt like borders were dissolving. Decades later, in the US, which has become multicultural without quite preparing for it, machine translation is creating weirdness. Public institutions like hospitals and transport have signs in multiple languages including Hindi and Bangla, but what they say sounds inhuman. Naturally, because this language is machine-made. Across borders, there is concern that young people do not read these days; but let's focus on what they do read. YouTube loyalists read closed captions generated by a machine. These are frequently incorrect, but it doesn't bother anyone because the world's language purists have either given up the ghost or the struggle. The dictionary is just another book and books are archival legacy media. If Samuel Johnson were around, the dictionarist who said that language is the dress of thought would have dismissed us as ragtags, with bobtails barely concealing our modesty in scanty hashtags. Why is this happening? Information storage and retrieval began with visual and auditory media—cave paintings, dance performances, oral epics and songs. But why are they regaining salience? Because the written word was the most efficient storage medium for about five millenniums, from the clay tablet libraries of Babylon to Dewey Decimal via the Gutenberg press. But over the last three decades, magnetic and optical data storage has scaled up so rapidly that the contents of a refrigerator-sized magnetic tape bank of the 1970s now fit on a microSD card. With AI, it is normal for data processing to use as much power as small towns. The written word is no longer essential for storage, and the human race is again embracing the audiovisual media with which it had begun to encode culture millenniums ago. Ironically, it's a step back—there is now room enough for all the misbegotten utterances that the race can dream up. In a strange case in bilingual Belgium, an attendant in a train running through Dutch-speaking territory greeted a passenger in French and faced proceedings right away. The proceedings have just ended, and the harassed attendant has turned language activist—he is selling coffee mugs bearing greetings in both languages to promote linguistic amity. The resurgence of audiovisual media at the expense of text is starkly visible in politics. From West Bengal to Washington, visual media personalities are prominent in legislatures, and few of their most important associates can be accused of learning, or even literacy. Win some, lose some, say the Americans, who are postmodern—in the sense that they have never respected linguistic formalisms very much. Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, The Fletcher School, Tufts University (Views are personal) (Tweets @pratik_k)
Hindustan Times
5 days ago
- Automotive
- Hindustan Times
Your Type by Tanya George: Colourful language
What if a signboard could tell you who belongs — and who doesn't? In India, where most people speak more than one language, signs in multiple scripts do precisely that. One message, repeated over and over in a different script? It's just hoping that its intended audience will understand at least one of them. Look closely. Amul's Gothic lettering keeps its flourishes even across regional scripts. In bustling Indian marketplaces, a shop or brand sign must accomplish two goals: Inform (about shops, services, or directions) and persuade (that the goods or services are worth their attention). So, before a designer even begins to choose bright colours or stylish fonts, shopowners must make a key decision: Who's the sign for? Which communities do they want to speak to? Whom do they want to invite in? In a linguistically diverse India, everyday business rides on this. Rath Dental Clinic's sign includes English, Odia, and also Telugu, to make it more inclusive. Take this sign in Berhampur, at the southern tip of Odisha — it includes English and Odia, but also Telugu, since Telangana lies just a few kilometres away. It visibly affirms who is seen, recognised, and welcomed into public spaces. The idea of a 'neutral' language is a myth in India, and barely useful. So, why not embrace the rich diversity instead? The bonus: The joy in watching languages interact visually. In Ahmedabad's old city, a garment shop named Autograph uses a handwritten-style English logo with a dramatic underline — and sits between a Gujarati version in the same casual form, and also a Devanagari-based Hindi rendering that omits the headline stroke, so everything matches across scripts. Autograph uses an English logo with a dramatic underline, with similar Hindi and Gujarati versions. This visual harmony is no accident. My first strong memory of it was the Amul logo. Even as a child, I noticed its Gothic style, originating from scribal traditions in Medieval Europe and a design Gutenberg took inspiration for his first font back in the 1500s. It suggested history, tradition, authority. And in India, where English often represents aspiration, adopting that style seemed to confer legitimacy. Designers have, over the years, created matching letterforms in Indian scripts, as if authority in English visuals could magically transfer across languages by mimicry. It's fascinating how visual ideas migrate with Amul showing examples of Blackletter Devanagari and Telugu! The trend continues. Serifs, those pointy strokes at the ends of Times New Roman or Garamond letters, have crept into Indian font designs, lending it a kind of formality. There is no actual historical grounding for these serifs in Devanagari or Malayalam, but they persist. Simple bracketed serifs are used to match the designs for the English and Malayalam letters at this warehouse in Kochi. Many designers believe that there is no space for serifs in Indian fonts. But these designs are not listening to anyone. They're going nowhere. And as long as someone doesn't typeset entire books with them, I am happy to not wage a war on them. Good designers harmonise signage across languages, so more people understand it. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the use of Urdu by a municipality in Maharashtra. 'Our misconceptions, perhaps even our prejudices against a language… must be tested against the reality of this great diversity of our nation,' it declared. 'Our strength can never be our weakness. Let us make friends with Urdu and every language.' That declaration resonates deeply with me. Why limit signage to just the government‑mandated languages? Let polyglotism be our strength, not our obstacle. Multilingual signs do more than communicate. They affirm identity, invite inclusivity, and celebrate India's plurality, and that's a worthy cause to champion. From HT Brunch, July 26, 2025 Follow us on
Khaleej Times
17-07-2025
- Khaleej Times
UAE: Can digital detox be the new norm with Gen-Z?
The digital detox is coming, and I know it both anecdotally and personally. Personally, it sucks. Social media, staring at a screen for most of my work and entertainment, or dealing with some AI nonsense. Whatever it may be, the time is coming where the wide use of cell phones and digital networks overall will decline. Maybe it's that large language models and so-called AI are already messing with peoples' heads by delivering them delusions of grandeur and false information that perpetuates all sorts of stereotypes, prejudices, racism and inhumane thinking, but I struggle to believe this globalised society, less than 200 years after the industrial revolution, has at all contended with what all this tech is doing to humanity. From our collective well-being to our individual health, it seems as if though we never moved on from the economic boom-seeking culture of the 1980s, we did our utmost to hold up the enthusiasm for ever-more complex gadgets and systems. On the surface, and in many early cases, these advancements were good; cell phones and personal computers freed us of work, the internet showed us we could build a truly global society, and advancements in AI offered a glimpse at a post-work, post-scarcity society. Unfettered by race, religion, culture and even our own bodies, what was to stop us? The Gutenberg press was a similar revolution; a wine press, some stamps, some ink and paper – and Europe and Christianity were changed forever. Are we as flawed for believing our species and society could remain the same after so many advancements in such a short period of time, or is it new, 21st century hubris for believing we were better than our ancestors? We fight the same wars, commit the same genocides, and rob the same people of liberty and opportunity when it's someone else's turn at the top of the geopolitical wheel? I don't know the solution, just that it needs to start with pulling back. Healthy use of all technology is not at all on peoples' radars, and I accept that, I'm no Luddite. But as a species we have to contend with living in a world where billionaires can ride rockets like space cowboys, while children are starved to death in Gaza. When I think about it, I shut off. Outside of work, I'm cursing myself if I go on social media, I'm annoyed if I open a streaming service, and I'm uncomfortable when I have to write another form email to ask the same query of a person weathering 1,001 questions from people just like me. Now, I don't subscribe to the theories which proclaim anxiety, depression and suicide are on the rise only because of social media – I'm convinced this is a case of correlation not equalling causation and gathering data on mental health is just easier as the stigma declines – but we do know for certain that how false information spreads and can be manipulated or suppressed by those in the control seat. I am still looking, but we all must find a way to split the difference between those community 'it takes a village'-type ties, and broader solidarity around the world that travels by respecting other cultures while not giving ground where it matters most.
News.com.au
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Apple, Facebook, Netflix among biggest disrupters of the 21st century
It's the year 2000. You've just booked a taxi via a landline to go on a holiday after buying physical tickets from a travel agent. Once you get to wherever you're going, you cling to a map like flotation devices. You take photos using fragile film that then has to be carted to chemists or photo labs to be printed to actually see. Friday nights mean stressful dashes to Video Ezys and then the sour disappointment of finding the VHS you wanted was out. If you want to access the internet, it means having to listen to the wail of dial-up and then waiting. So much waiting. Our 25@25 series will finally put to bed the debates you've been having at the pub and around dinner tables for years – and some that are just too much fun not to include. In 2000, the majority of Australians didn't have mobile phones (only 45 percent) and two thirds didn't have home internet access. Today, there are nearly 40 million mobile connections, which works out at roughly two per Aussie adult. The world today bears so little resemblance to that. There is no part of our lives that is untouched by incredible, and incredibly fast, techno-isation of the way we shop, date, travel, listen to music, holiday, and even buy toilet paper. Gutenberg had his printing press; we have Prime and the algorithm. Nearly all of the companies and brands that are fundamental, immutable, unshakeable, non-negotiable parts of our lives in 2025 didn't exist back at the turn of the millennium, when Sydney was busy hosting the Olympic Games and Britney Spears was still being called an ingénue. So - which one do you think has changed your life the most? Facebook In the early aughties, in a dorm room in Harvard, a freshman coded away, creating a handy way to rank the hotness of fellow students, an offering that would morph into Facebook, and in doing so create an industry that has been blamed for everything from inciting racial violence to skyrocketing rates of youth mental health distress. Facebook itself might have long lost its youthful disruptor edge, with the kids having since migrated to other platforms, but there would be no Instagram, no X (formerly Twitter) and no TikTok if Zuckerberg had not been so keen on finding a way to rate the bang-ability of his classmates. While there were social media sites before Facebook, it was Zuckerberg's baby that ushered in the social media revolution. Today social media is how we communicate, express ourselves, stay in contact, and connect with loved ones and influencers flogging dubious tooth-whitening products. Aussies spent about 14 billion hours on social media last year. Facebook's parent company Meta has achieved even greater global cultural domination than when McDonalds started exporting golden arches. Four out of five people on this planet, outside of China, use a Meta product every day. Its birth has also had unthinkable consequences. The Russians weaponised it to sow disinformation during the 2016 US election. In 2018, Facebook admitted the platform had been used to incite violence in Myanmar. The year before, the country's military unleashed a sweeping campaign of massacres, rape, and arson, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2021, President Joe Biden accused Facebook and social media platforms of 'killing people'. Last year US research found that nearly half of all teens think social media has had a mostly negative effect on their age group. Apple Yes, the iconic computing brand is the only one that existed back in 2000 but in a completely different incarnation. There were no white, temple-like stores and all they made were computers either of the bulky lap or desk variety. It would be a full year before skivvy-clad wünder founder Steve Jobs would release the iPod in 2001 and seven years before they got into the phone business. However, that would perhaps be the defining technological leap of the millennium and it is hard to convey how profoundly Apple products have reshaped the world. The advent of the iPhone put more computing power in our pockets than what powered NASA rockets in the 80s and meant there was nowhere we could or should go without being perpetually tethered to the ol' information superhighway. Without the Jobsian revolution, we would not have apps and we would not carry the internet in our pockets. They were the first trillion dollar company for a reason. Netflix For a company that not so much disrupted the $480 billion global movie and TV business but overturned it like a Real Housewife on a table-flipping bender, Netflix started life as a company that sent out rented DVDs in the mail. In 2007 CEO Reed Hastings had the brilliant idea of this thing called 'streaming' where you could watch whatever you wanted and whenever you wanted, replacing appointment viewing with the free-for-all binge. The numbers today are wild: Globally, we watched 188 billion hours of Netflix last year and the behemoth has won 26 Oscars in less than a decade. Airbnb The original concept now seems laughable - with hotels in San Francisco at a premium, two young chaps figured they could rent out blow up mattresses on their apartment floor. Today that concept has morphed into the Airbnb monster that is worth $121 billion. It has changed the way we travel irrevocably. Some say that has come at a high cost in places like Venice and Lisbon, accused of pricing out locals and thereby eroding the populace of these historic cities. But still, it's like so handy, so… Amazon Who would have thought that once weedy bookseller Jeff Bezos would end up as one of the world's richest men and that he would revolutionise shopping and all consumer behaviour forevermore? In 1995 he launched the now ubiquitous site to help Americans get their copies of John Grisham and Nora Roberts novels faster and cheaper and along the way built the most monster-sized, Goliath of a retailer in human history. The Amazon store in Australia stocks hundreds of millions of products, it has been claimed. Bezos' baby has trained us to expect near immediacy and next-day delivery, to be impatient consumers who can have a new loo brush on our doorstep in under 12 hours. However, did we survive before? Tinder What Amazon did for shopping, Tinder did for dating, meaning we could undertake formerly out-of-the-house activities from the comfort of our sofa. Thanks to Tinder, love (or lust or everything and anything in between) was no longer something that had to be sought out in crowded bars on Friday nights or at horrendous things like singles salsa nights. On-demand dates were here. Critics have accused Tinder and the swathe of similar apps that have followed in its wake, of making dating feel disposable and superficial and that it is that much harder to find a genuine connection; supporters point out the vastly expanded dating pool on tap. However, based on US estimates, there are now about one million partnered Australians who met on platforms like Tinder. Or should I say, they got their appily ever after. Spotify What Netflix did for tele, Spotify did for radio, making every song, ever, immediately available, a gluttonous aural overload that has changed the lives of music lovers and musicians, for better and worse. The Swedish-born company's 678 million users can listen to Ace of Base's All That She Wants any time day or night. It also means that artists can earn as little as about $0.005 per stream. Uber Imagine the horror of having to get into a taxi and a) have to know a specific address and b) find your wallet at the end? And in a strange city? Where you don't speak the language? What Uber has done is make travel and moving about the world seamless in a way we now take for granted, offering a way to navigate streets foreign and domestic without having to get behind the wheel or find a bus timetable. The real test? 'Uber' Is now both a (new) verb and a noun.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Lots of COVID booster appointments available, says pharmacy manager, with 3 weeks left in spring campaign
It's been slow going for some Victoria-area pharmacies offering COVID boosters these past few months, as the Ministry of Health is reporting a steady increase in the latest variant of the virus. Linda Gutenberg, who is in charge of pharmacy operations for Heart Pharmacy Group, which operates seven locations in the Greater Victoria Area, said the current vaccine campaign has been particularly slow since it started on April 8. "We were kind of like all ramped up and ready to go and nobody really showed up," she said during an interview on CBC's On The Island. She said last week, pharmacists administered about half the booster shots they did compared to one year ago. However, as of June 1, the province said 287,294 people in B.C. have been vaccinated for COVID-19, up slightly from 282,911 at a similar time last year. Gutenberg isn't entirely sure why there's a dip in interest, but she has a hunch. "I think there's a little bit of vaccine fatigue, where people are just kind of tired of just coming in and getting vaccines all the time." With only a few weeks left in the campaign, which ends June 30, she said there are lots of appointments available. The latest variant of COVID-19, called NB.1.8.1, may be more transmissible than previous mutations, according to the World Health Organization. The organization's latest risk assessment, which covered July to December of last year, found the health risk from COVID-19 is still high, but suggests the impact is decreasing. The Ministry of Health said COVID-19 has been increasing globally since February. PCR and wastewater testing have shown low levels of the virus in B.C., but it has been rising since March. It said the best way to prevent severe illness from the virus is to stay up to date on vaccines. The ministry recommends anyone over 65, Indigenous adults aged 55 and older, long-term care home and assisted living residents and anyone over six months who has been diagnosed as extremely vulnerable, get a COVID-19 booster this spring. Anyone who doesn't fall into one of those categories but would still like to be immunized is asked to speak to a health-care provider.
