Images are everywhere: on the street, on the television, on our phones and also on the Internet. They are used to share ideas, to promote new products and sometimes to explain a point of view. With new technologies, we are more likely to use our smartphones than a real book. There are many advantages to this and let’s enumerate some of them. Phones are more practical, lighter, smaller and we have the possibility to find some information in a short period of time. However, my opinion is that our image-centric culture tends to contribute to the decline of language.
First of all, with the arrival of the cinema, people slowly stopped reading books. They went more to the theatre to watch a movie. Today, other technologies are being developed such as computers, Netflix, illegal movie websites and online streaming. We have multiple choices to watch what we want when we want. We could take as an example Harry Potter. In fact, a lot of people abandoned the books in favor of the movies. With this procedure, people tend to lose their writing skills because they don’t see words anymore. If we don’t practice, then we will lose what we’ve learned during our life.
The second problem of our society with new technologies is texting. It would be very interesting to know how many people still don’t have a smartphone. We are texting all day and we are not focused on the grammar we’re using. Three examples of violation are: omission of capitalization and punctuation, omission of words, and finally unconventional punctuation. The mistakes we make in text messages are transcribed in our important handwritten texts. It can be a real disadvantage for a job application. If the boss of the company receives a letter full of mistakes he will throw it away directly.
In conclusion, images can be really useful in many situations. They have helped me to understand things in school. Words are sometimes too complicated and a good schema can totally unlock problems. But actually my feeling is that our society uses images or movies for everything. People are also more and more focused on their smartphones. We are losing our social contacts and the desire to discover the world around us. Maybe we should set a time limit to our screen appliances each day. t