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Quality or quantity ?
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Food for thoughts. My RSS reader today contained at least 4 articles with obvious spelling and grammatical mistakes in them. I am not talking about people's blogs. I am talking about sites which make contents their business. This used to be unheard of from reputable sites like the BBC, but it seems like in the haste of making contents available, certain errors managed to slip through the stringent checks that were meant to eliminate them.
I am not born a native English speaker, maybe that arms me with an advantage because I had to learn English as it is supposed to be structured, not how it is used in real life. But this is the reason I am rather amazed that other non native English speakers managed to make the same mistakes as the natives do. The more common ones are:
- "I would have thought ..." instead of "I would of thought ..."
- "receive" instead of "recieve"
- "if you're interested" instead of "if your interested"
When they invented computers, they told us our lives will be easier and we would be able to relax and enjoy life more because the computers will take care of the menial work humans do not want to do. It seems the evidence for the last couple of decades have proved to the contrary. Humans have had to keep up with the computers, and we are under pressure to be more productive, and this, in my humble opinion, sometimes means at the expense of quality.
I make discreet observations of my fellow commuters in the morning on the way to work, and some of them have already started the working day as soon as they stepped on to the train. Meetings were arranged, appointments wer booked in busy calendars, and laptops were churning out memos, agendas, presentations, schedules etc. In the last few days, I have heard power meetings being arranged, products being sold, and people being interviewed for new jobs, all while they were sitting on the train. So how has technology helped making our lives better ? I guess most people think they are in charge of their destiny as they are able to do their jobs anywhere, not just in the office. I see things a bit differently. We do more but we do not necessarily produce more, our lives looks more flexible but it is in fact more restrictive, as people have ways of reaching us no matter where we are, or whether we want to be reached. We make more money but we have to spend on things we never had to before (like the latest iPod, the new XBox 360, the obligatory skiing holiday to the Alps).
Anyway, back to the original point, maybe we are seeing the first signs of the impending implosion of the fabrics of our beings, and the vortex of modern life is already starting to suck us all in, without any chance of escape. Just as a test of this theory, if you listen to the start of most mobile phone conversations on the train, most of them start with something like 'Where are you ?'. How did we all cope with tracking the movements of all our buddies before the mobile phone was invented ?
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by by David at 22 May 2006 22:23:38
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