Continuing the thought from yesterday, let’s fast-forward to some time in the future when we will all be able to see displays floating in the air between us.
In such a world, you and I won’t be looking down at SmartPhones. Rather, we will always be looking outward, toward each other and the world around us.
This is not necessarily a panacea. After all, in such a future I could be rudely checking my email while pretending to be focused on our conversation. Yet I suspect that once such technologies become ubiquitous, people will become very adept at reading those nonverbal signals, and social conventions will be worked out.
But there’s something else going on here: In such a future, every face to face encounter will have a built-in whiteboard. Drawing pictures, sketching out ideas, bringing up images, all of these things will become normal in face-to-face conversation.
If this leads to an evolution of natural language, then the major innovations may end up being made by little kids (as generally happens with natural language). I’m excited to see what they will come up with.
Is it in fact the case that “little kids” are the main drivers of language evolution?
One might think that linguistic change is driven mainly by errorful learning on the part of kids, but I’m not sure there’s much evidence that this is the case.
If anything, the evidence from sociolinguistics of how variation comes about and spreads would seem to suggest that it is social groups that want to set themselves apart from other groups (e.g. teens, islanders vs. mainlanders) who are the main linguistic innovators.