“AFAICT ppl Adctd2txt pebcak” reads the text message.
Translation: “As far as I can tell, people addicted to texting have a problem that exists between chair and keyboard.”
There is a particularly egregious cell phone commercial that sings out that youngsters “text” at 70 words-a-minute while their parents can only “text” eight words a minute. This is of course the reverse of the truth. Using a full keyboard, I can easily type 50-words-per-minute, as can any trained secretary. Youngsters with two thumbs on a chiclet keyboard can’t “type” but a fraction of that speed, and then only by abbreviating to the edge of comprehension as demonstrated above. The older generation typed fast and precisely. The new generation “texts” slow and without elegance. Not very fast. But for this brave new teckkie world, apparently “gud nuf.”
California, similar to a half dozen “paperless” schools in Kansas, has adopted some online textbooks this fall, despite research showing we read slower on screen. It’s gud nuf.
Students also comprehend 30% less when they read on screen. That is now gud nuf too.
Why go to the library when we now have the internet? The first ten pages of your web search will be from 60 to 95 percent websites with wrong information. But the internet is more convenient and therefore, you guessed it: gud nuf.
That 12 megapixel digital camera can really take beautiful high resolution photos. But you can’t send such big files as attachments. Need to drop that resolution down to newsprint halftone level for friends on the internet. Pretty fuzzy picture. But gud nuf.
Download your music? Also strained through the internet, it is not quite the quality of other music media, but after a while, you don’t notice the difference. Gud nuf.
Wow, did you see that IMAX movie at the Cosmosphere? Makes us think we are really there! Halloween Part 72 is pretty scary at the movie theater too; not so scary on television though. Can hardly wait to download movies on your cell phone? It won’t be anywhere as exciting on that postage-stamp screen but it will be [yawn] gud nuf.
So the online course only covers half of the material of a face-to-face course. As long as we get our degrees—and a raise in salary—it’s gud nuf.
Even though more people are reading newspapers than ever before, advertisers are moving their ad revenue to online. So who needs local or foreign news and in-depth investigations? Just 140 characters to tweet? No problem. Sound bites are—well—gud nuf.
Strangely, other developed countries are not adopting every new techno-fad at the breakneck speed we are. Boy are they behind! They continue reading books. They keep face-to-face teaching. They read newspapers. They still go to movies.
In the United States, futurists are actually telling us that we will not have to teach our children to read or write. Students will speak into a computer and it will write for them. And of course it will scan text and read to them too.
When that future generation is dumb as a rock, unable to write or read on their own, and the rest of the world has passed us by, maybe then we will realize that “gud nuf” was not “good enough.”
