We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the loss of our shared language and knowledge due to the rise of new technologies.
Alberto Manguel's quote reflects a concern that as new technologies evolve, they come at the cost of losing our rich and historical common vocabulary, which has served to connect, enlighten, and bring joy to humanity over centuries. This shift may prioritize the perceived benefits of modern technology while undermining the depth and richness of our traditional ways of communication and understanding.
In practice
In a speech about the impact of digital communication, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of preserving language.
The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.
From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.
My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
I think a lot of the time there isn't such a black-and-white difference between what's a platform and what's an app. It's really just like the most important apps become platforms.
I am all for everyone having a voice; I just don't think everyone has earned the microphone. And that's what the Internet has done.
The next great technology revolution might be around the corner, but it won't automatically improve most people's lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly but also inescapable.
AI is going to be extremely beneficial, and already is, to the field of cybersecurity. It's also going to be beneficial to criminals.
Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.
There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.
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