the likeness of communication

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat

Low verbal skills have become more and more commonplace amongst people everyday. Verbal communication is slowly being eroded by years of technological force-feeding, creating verbal passivity en masse. The end results being mute 150-pound Nintendo-trained eight-year-olds, and Must-See-TV zombies whose key to personal relationships is the Ross and Rachel factor.

There are grassroots-level movements that illustrate state colleges are beginning to understand the widespread effect of having people enrolled in college who should not have passed their senior high school English class.

Colorado, Massachusetts, Texas, Virginia and New Jersey are among states that have recently discussed guaranteeing that kids who go on to attend state supported schools be ready to do college level work. Ingenious idea.

The plan works out as such: If freshmen students illustrate that they are unable to meet the demands of college level work, then the high schools that guaranteed they could must pay for any remedial level courses that students take in order to raise them to college level standards. Yet does this ensure that people will graduate from college with the ability to form and utilize coherent sentences, verbally? Probably not.

With the world connected as it is to satellites, via cellular phones and modems, one wonders why communication skills are on the decline at all. The very fact that we are able to work cellular phones and modems says much in showing that with many, illiteracy is clearly NOT the problem barring us from speaking articulately.

Television, one of many conspirators behind verbal erosion, is largely to blame for conversation no longer being an exchange of ideas, but rather a venue which showcases the colorful uses of the word like. It is as though the Nielsens have actually become a real family (comprised of American youth), and their only common show of familial loyalty is that they are required to use like at least four times in each sentence.

The importance of artificial communication methods (television, computers, UPN viewers) in our society shows that verbal communication will soon be totally encoded. In order to communicate verbally in the future, we may be forced to learn Java, HTML, and Dharma Speak before we even learn the alphabet or read our first Golden Book. At the rate we're going, those articulate enough to complete a sentence without using like incorrectly, will be thought of as having a Shakespearean sense of poetry. What's more, our verbal decay has shown that most people take passive roles in verbal exchange, creating a new generation of people who watch, never again expecting to take a participatory role with anything.

Whether it be from lack of reading (for most), to marathon TV viewing (again for most), the way people now communicate is, on the whole, completely passive. When we watch TV, we wait for the next show or commercial to captivate us. This scheduling of timed entertainment bursts saves viewers from thinking too much about what they're watching. Even more, TV has trained us to think surfacely on most subjects.

If an answer to a question cannot be found in the perfectly timed black space between commercials, then the question was probably over our heads to begin with. Basically, if the question is not rhetorical, then it's not really a question people are prepared to answer.

It is the same with people-to-people verbal exchange. Many people wait to be entertained by others in conversation, and get nervous or shocked when asked a question directly. Television does not expect us to answer questions, so then why should we expect to answer anyone else's.

Lines of communication are becoming blurred, and how we speak is quickly becoming the sacrificial victim of our obsession with mindless viewing, fast-paced action, and more upon more megabytes of RAM. Baby boomers rediscovered Nietzche's writing in the sixties and popularized the slogan "God is dead." Maybe our generation will mirror this by adopting the slogan, "Like is dead." In an odd way, they both mean the same thing.