Tonight, I tried to have a conversation with someone on an Apple garble-machine, aka iPhone. Holy crap! What is the point in having a microphone on a device that is that grossly incapable of audio communications? The iPhone owner tried to pronounce the name of the street where I was going several times; “Sturdvant,” “Stirant,” “Sylbant,” “Sylvan,” etc. I asked him to spell it, but that attempt was so distorted that I almost suspected he was including letters from the Cyrillic alphabet. I made my best guess and was wrong, but both Google and Garmin sent me to an address that didn’t exist without even the slightest mention that they had picked a spot in the middle of an intersection where, obviously, there was no house.
Another friend just got a new iPhone last month and has still failed to figure out how that silly device can be used as a telephone. It kicks ass on the web and texting, but talking to people is just not one of its capabilities. I suggested he try using Skype on the phone, just for laughs. He did, but the problem is with both the iPhone’s shit microphone and even worse speaker; although the speaker did work better on Skype than it does through the “phone app.”
It’s easy and unfair to ridicule young people for their texting default. They’ve grown up with telephones that are incapable of being telephones and as their voices have atrophied their thumbs have become nimble. While their thumbs are far more versatile than, for example, mine, the combination of trying to type with a pair of fat digits on a crappy virtual keyboard plus those godawful “helpers” that replace “their” with “there” and “weather” with “whether” and “you’re” with “your” and the rest of the syntax errors we’re being trained to ignore, their English language skills are atrophying into grunts and groans. Just in time for Trump’s “fake news” world to take advantage of a culture of total illiterate fools.
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