Ask yourself how many languages you have learned in your lifetime? Two? three?
Ask the same question to some random people and the reply will probably be a long list of foreign languages- “Spanish; French; German; Chinese….” Yet I bet none will truly give a full answer. This is because a language can be far more than the verbal lexicon of a nation, it can be anything which helps two different entities understand each other.
Now those of a computer persuasion will probably add a few more languages to their list- “Java, Basic, Python…” and so on, and there are currently over 500 known computer languages they could choose from. But even if programming is not your thing, then you too can probably add a bunch more languages to your own CV as well. For instance, do you competently use your smartphone each day? Do you know how to get full use of the Television using the remote control? You see many of the gadgets we have grown to rely on over the last 100 years each come with their own unique languages that the owner needs to fully understand to engage efficiently with that item. It is not language as a two-way dialogue exactly, but it is a procedure or code that you both need to understand and is a rite of passage at the purchase of any new product. When that item gives years of enjoyable service it is time well spent learning it, but whom among us has not spent ages learning to programme a new gadget before consigning it forever to a drawer merely days later?
Your own list of obsolete tech languages that you have mastered or attempted will depend very much on your age, but mine began in the 1980s. At the time the shops were hot with cheap digital watches. As the integrated chip got so small it could fit happily into a watch, manufacturers took it upon themselves to cram as many features on to their watches as possible. The popularity overlapped with our love for pocket calculators and mine therefore was a black Casio Calculator watch, a watch with buttons so small you could barely even see them let alone press them. I do remember however that it came with a thick book of instructions showing which sequence of buttons you needed to press to solve even the most technical of equations and I began soaking it up in earnest, but of course at that age my interest in solving differential equations via my wrist waned pretty quickly, and when the tiny battery gave out after only a few weeks, it was naturally not replaced. This sadly would not be the last tech language I tried to learn in vain.
In the early 1990s when PDAs or Personal Digital Assistants began to emerge, we believed they were going to be the answer to leading tidier and more efficient lives. Out went the furry filo-fax and in its place came the sleek plastic PDA with a plastic stylus that pretended to be a pencil. For me the biggest draw was that some came with handwriting recognition software built in so you could theoretically scribble your haphazard notes onto the screen with the stylus and then let the machine read, transcribe and store it for you. This seemed like the ultimate time-saving accessory, leaving my creative juices uninterrupted by having to laboriously type things out via a keyboard. I distinctly remember spending days and days running through the tutorials for the programme to ‘learn’ my handwriting , and as each day passed of correcting each other’s efforts into words and sentences that actually mirrored what I had written, it eventually dawned on me that this time saving venture was ultimately doomed. Like anyone aware of their own language limitations I naturally felt the communication gap was probably my fault rather than the machine’s, but in truth this PDA and I spent weeks writing incoherent messages back and forth to each other before I finally gave up and the stylus was put away for good.
You would think after this failed attempt I would have learned my lesson, but clearly that was not the case. A few years later as Laptops began to take off my family kindly gave me a speech recognition software by Dragon. Just as before (but this time with a headphone and mic rather than a stylus) my laptop and I struggled our way through days and days of attempts, corrections and counter-corrections. In truth the technology had evolved somewhat so my ability to communicate with the machine via voice was probably marginally more successful than the handwriting had been, but still the machine and I spent far too long trying in vain to understand each other.
Most computer software by definition will always require a close grasp on a very specific language to work efficiently, and we all know how frustrating it is to finally comprehend where all the buttons are on your edition of Microsoft Word or similar, just as an upgrade comes along and you are forced to start all over again. But this frustration stretches into many other areas of our life also. Since nearly the first day mobile phones were created they have come with accessories and button sequences you need to learn to get things to work properly. The problem with phones is that unlike computers they possess very few keys through which to access, programme and use the available accessories. Therefore, for many years diaries address books and alarms on your phone all relied on a Phd level knowledge of which button sequence to press and at what time. And since phones get changed more regularly than computers, it is with frustrating regularity that we are forced to wipe the language slate clean just as an etch-a-sketch would do with your drawing.
Sadly, as technology trips over itself ever faster there is little chance of the language trap reducing. Although in truth most products have a shorter lifespan than ever before, those that create them do so with the view that their product will be used for a lifetime. Therefore, we are told to diligently forget everything we have learned before and to fully embrace this new gadget as though it will be our cherished friend for many years. Is it so surprising therefore than as we get older, we let our children and grandchildren master the products for us instead- life is too short to learn yet another flash-in-the-pan language!
Photo attribution: Atypical welcome by Quinn Dombrowski ; MacBook instruction Manual by Mechanicjosh98 ; headset by Tod Baker