I find this quote by Howard Rheingold intriguing. What does it mean for the human race if every person on the planet can publish content for every other person on the planet to read, see or hear? Will this be an incredibly liberating phenomenon, will it increase the knowledge of mankind roughly six billion fold, or will it fill up several trillion bytes of computer hard disk space with a lot of gibberish? I guess we really won't know until some time has passed and future generations view what this generation leaves behind. The proof of the contribution of the Internet to the human race is some distance in the future.
This doesn't mean we are not able to see and evaluate the innovations that the Internet is bringing to our lives. We can see the usefulness of these innovations and we can take advantage of their features now. But just as the alphabet and the printing press were innovations that humans could put to use immediately, the true benefit of those innovations became clear only over a long period of time. In both cases humans went on using the technologies they were meant to replace for many years afterwards.
What actually lies behind the idea expressed by Rheingold and inherent in the Internet, starting with what has been referred to as Web 2.0, is the idea that information exchange is no longer a one way street. The days when ordinary citizens were expected, and indeed content with, being passively fed the news by professional newspaper reporters and TV newscasters is giving way to the man on the street with a camera phone and a twitter account. And as the people of Egypt demonstrated, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have given the ordinary citizen the ability to create the news that the traditional news media only catch on to as "Johny come lately's." However, the possibilities go beyond the dissemination of news, but all the way to the self publishing of books, magazines and videos. What was once the preserve of professional media people is becoming the domain of ordinary people, leading ordinary lives, sharing the ideas that ordinary people care about.
In all of this excitement about the possible benefits of the Internet to the human race one of the most intriguing possibilities for realization is the holy grail of communication: a common language. Whether you believe that the story of the Tower of Babel is a myth by simple people to explain the reason why we don't all speak the same language or not, you probably would agree with the notion that if we could all understand what each other was saying we could accomplish greater things. Is it possible, using the power of the Internet for doing cooperative work, that a common, or universal, language can be created, some form of communication that would allow us all to understand each other without the need for translators or bridging languages?
It is not as if attempts have not been made in the past to develop a universal language, there have been a number. Some of you may recall a language called Esperanto. It was created in 1877 by a gentleman named Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof with the goal that it would be easy to learn and politically neutral and thereby be a tool to foster world peace. Well, as you know, the idea never caught on and today there are only about two million people who can speak it. Though to be fair, this outnumbers those who speak Scottish Gaelic by about 1.9 million.2
There have also been a number of languages that have been considered to be "lingua franca", which are bridging languages between two mother tongues. Of course English is the lingua franca today, but perhaps the best known lingua franca language of the past was Koine Greek, which was seen as the universal trade language of the eastern Mediterranean throughout the period of the Roman empire. The Greek Septuagint (Greek version of the Hebrew Bible) and the New Testament used Koine Greek.
You may be asking why a common language is necessary. After all, a very large portion of the world speaks English and don't we have automatic translators that do a very good job of translating now? The English question is one that is easy to answer. It is estimated that roughly one billion people speak English as either their first or second language. So this leaves around five billion who do not. The English language also comes with some political baggage, especially after America went to war in Iraq against the wishes of much of the world. The second question is a little more complex, but basically, machine translators are not fool proof. They have been getting better, but they still have issues and you wouldn't trust them for really critical work. Perhaps this movie clip will help highlight the problems with machine languages.
Mars Attacks: First Encounter using a Machine Translator. The Translator is behind the general.
As can be seen, things can go seriously wrong in translation. Did the Martian misunderstand the symbolism of the dove, or did the machine translator make a mistake? The president of the United States, played by Jack Nicholson, believes it is the former and makes another attempt at negotiation, which ends with the destruction of the entire U. S. Congress. This is a funny scene from a cult movie and of course real machine translators are nothing like the one in the movie. But I think it makes the point well enough.
I suggest that we take another route to a common language. This is a good time to introduce another subject that Rheingold is enthusiastic about; computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). CSCW has had a lot of attention in the information systems sector, as part of a movement to embrace the notion of "groupware." In his book, The Virtual Community, Rheingold brings up CSCW in his discussion of using IRC chat as a commuications tool rather than just a toy, as it had been originally been used as a game with dragons. Some software tools you might be familiar with that are considered groupware are online chat, video conferencing, application sharing and wikis, to name a few.
Related to CSCW is "collaborative computing", which manifests itself in such projects as the FireFox Web Browser and the Linux Operating System. Commonly known as "open source" software these projects rely on a cadre of volunteers, working independently, but cooperatively, to produce highly effective and "professional" products. Projects like these, even though they have an independent nature about them, are highly organized with an extensive degree of cooperation between the developers involved. Another well known project that involves collaborative computing is the Wikipedia project. This project allows teams of volunteers to create web content about almost anything, as long as it can be shown to be of general interest to the public. For example, a entry about George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi, or the Japanese Tsunami would be considered in the public interest, but a story about my favorite dog's life would not. The amazing thing about Wikipedia is that just about anyone can contribute, not only by writing articles, but by correcting spelling errors or adding images to existing articles.3
With this in mind, let me take the discussion back to a common language and ask whether it is possible to use the Internet and collaborative computing to create one? Developing a language using an open source model, like that at the Mozilla FireFox project, or even the "openly editable" model used at Wikipedia, has many advantages.
FireFox's open source model gains improvements and enhancements from the software developer community, who are able to view and improve the code that runs the browser. The advantage this model has over a closed software model, such as that found at Microsoft, is the larger pool of technical expertise available to work on a problem, and the cost of development is a lot lower.
Another way to look at Wikipedia's openly editable model is to see it as collaborative writing. Wikipedia defines the term collaborative writing as "projects where written works are created by multiple people together (collaboratively) rather than individually."4 Using the Wikipedia model would make the project more open and allow more people to contribute from everywhere in the world. The key to making this a successful language is that it takes in ideas from as many people, cultures and language groups as possible.
The goal for this language is that it will take on a life of its own. Rather than being a language that is imposed on the Internet by scholars and linguists it will be a language that is created, developed and used by the ordinary web user. How it would look and operate is up to the web community. It could use symbols, pictographs, iconographs or an alphabet. The web community could even develop something completely new that we haven't seen before. The one thing that makes this language different than the development of other languages is that previous languages were developed from the spoken word. This new language will be developed for a medium that is mainly about the written word.
What is the point of creating this Common Internet Language? Well, other than the possibility that an American could tell a joke to someone in China who does not speak English and they could both have a good laugh, we could perhaps do a great deal to improve relations between nations. I don't know if we can go as far as to claim that this language will bring about world peace, after all, many of us who speak the same language still do not get along very well, if at all. But we can always hope for the best. What's amazing to think is that for the first time in history we have the tool that gives mankind the ability to cooperate on a truly global scale.
Here are a few common, internationally understood symbols to inspire:
- Howard Rheingold on collaboration, Howard Rheingold, TED Ideas worth spreading, Filmed Feb 2005, Posted Feb 2008, http://www.ted.com/talks/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html
- Number of Gaelic speakers, Simon Ager, Omniglot.com, August 14th, 2008, http://www.omniglot.com/blog/?p=714
- Ten Minute Guide: How-To Become a Wikipedia Pro, Rob Ousbey, Distilled-Pure Website Expertise, April 2009, http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/reputation/how-to-become-a-wikipedia-pro/
- Collaborative writing, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_writing
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