Langu age
Sunday, June 19, 2011 at 5:30PM About twenty years ago, it was still believed that after the brain’s initial formation period, brain networks were static. Neuroscience now recognizes that the brain is shaped by experience on an ongoing basis. Brain plasticity is the ability of the brain to rewire itself and form new networks at any age.
The internet, and especially social media, is without a doubt affecting our reading and our writing, but what I find particularly fascinating, are the examples of brain plasticity in these areas, now slowly coming to the fore.
Without us being consciously aware of it, our brains are adapting and adjusting to the time we spend online.
The splitting of words as we type in haste, the joining of words for convenience or for use with hashtags, (a word only recently added to the Oxford dictionary), omitting letters for the sake of character limitations, and the use of numerals 4 certain words, are now everyday phenomena in cyberspace.
The very concept of cyberspace is effecting not only the way we use words but also the meaning we give to them and the way we see them.
What if nowhere is seen as now here
Tweeps refer to everyhere not everywhere as they meet online with users from various countries simultaneously.
The concept of an iCloud is not at all strange.
The blog u r reading right now is called here2here.
Only recently I came across this tweet:
@GammaInfinity One whole day has passed, and I remain amazed that until yesterday I had never noticed that “race car’” backwards is “race car”.
These are exciting times, for these very abilities will overflow into everyday life. Whereas before we could look at something for years without noticing certain aspects of it, we will now begin to take new perspectives on worldviews we had never questioned before. Outlooks conditioned by upbringing and culture will be looked at with new eyes. Reversals, splittings & combinations will see insights evolving.
As an exercise, I decided to take the word “language” and play around with it.
Langu age, was perhaps a natural split, as we hear much about entering a new age.
Research revealed that besides being an iphone app to make the learning of Spanish and Mandarin Chinese a lot of fun, “langu” also means “my” in Swahili.
A promoter of collaboration, I immediately looked up a translation for “our” in Swahili, only to discover that it is “wetu” which I of course read as “we too”, appropriate I felt in an age of interconnectivity and connectedness!
Lan guage was another possiblity.
My eyes muddled up the letters in guage on first reading and I saw it as gauge.
LAN is an acronym (hard to believe that two years ago I did not know the meaning of lol!) for local area network, but as more and more of us access online space, the question of what to gauge as local becomes an interesting one.
Let’s look at one more possibility for “language”: La ngu age.
Age keeps reoccurring, la added a French ring to the, and ngu is an acronym for never give up. The never give up age!
My eyes, probably because I come from Africa and have many times visited the Kruger National Park, immediately saw “gnu” the first time I read la ngu age. The age of the gnu?
The gnu is a wildebeest and spends much of its life as a loner on the move. This is possibly not inappropriate when we consider how we as individuals are continuously on the move in cyberspace. In a sense we are alone as we do this, but in another sense, this aloneness is only physical. On an energetic level, we connect to so many others in virtual space. The gnus are famous for their annual migrations in the Serengeti, and together we in here2here space, are making mass migrations to new ways of being.
People from the West write and read horizontally from left to right. In the East many languages are written and read vertically from bottom to top. The mass migrations we are making together in cyberspace, however, are rewiring our brains and altering the way we write and see things. Now, for example, in the West, emoticons are written vertically :) while the Eastern smilies interestingly enough run horizontally ^_^ with most of us beginning to use them interchangeably.
In @GammaInfinity’s Flickr photostream you will find what he has entitled Luminal Butterfly. He states that in this magic fantasy, butterfly has another stage after adult, where it becomes pure light, creating beautiful displays in late summer.
Not only is language undergoing a metamorphosis, but we, both as individuals and as the collective, are undergoing one too.
As we do so the heart is opening:
heartheartheartheartheartheart is becoming
hear the art hear the art hear the art
_/|\_