Is grammar an outdated technology

First off, let me say I love the written word. I read novels daily. But. Sentences crowd my phone and I don’t think they need to.

Here’s why it matters. I work and I have children, one of whom goes to rehabilitative therapy two hours a day. Commuting, sitting in therapy offices, waiting in the carpool lane (I know…) I like to get a little bit done on my phone. I don’t aim for balance, just a manageable work/life integration. For me, cloud and mobile technologies have allowed me to avoid large chunks of office time and therefore do more of what I want to do.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I can’t do everything I feel I should be able to do on mobile. I think grammar’s part of it. For a thousand years, grammar has been the underlying technology that gets words across. It turns a thing, like a pig, into an experience, ‘Yesterday a pig flew in front of my window’.

We have a natural inclination to cull unnecessary words and form shortened substitutes or symbols, as in text speak. But in order to really make communication more efficient, we need to think of more structured ways to change how ideas move from one to another.

This matters because of cyborgs.

I think the evolution we’re seeing with increased mobile usage, interest in virtual worlds, holographic devices are all moving more of our bodies into the virtual world. And now we’re seeing the virtual world move into our bodies. In other words, we’re becoming cyborgs (Side note, if you search for ‘friendly cyborg’ or ‘nice cyborg’ on google image,there’s an appalling lack of imagery. Someone in cyborg PR should address this.).

But as we try to narrow the space between our minds and their effect on the world around us, grammar is feeling increasingly clumsy as a technology to communicate our inner wants and beliefs. We have seen design shift to accommodate ‘fat finger syndrome’. What about ‘fat retinal syndrome’ or ‘fat neural impulse syndrome‘?

I’m not sure where we’re headed, but I think a good user experience designer might be well advised to look into the worlds of people who do not use the written word. As a mom of a four-year-old I get to live in this world much of the time.

In the library, they have their own search function that is subject and pictorially based. Would this work for a retinal function? Stare at the animal icon for 2 seconds>bird>blue bird, until you drill down to your subject? Or would it be maddening to experience?

Could we shift English into a uniform sequence, like Latin, where the verb is always last? A set formula: subject+subject descriptor+object+object descriptor+verb+time? This seems doable, but might not give us the efficiency we need.

It seems to me that right now the mobile space, and the emerging VR space both allow an amazing amount of content to move from one sender (usually a large business) to many recipient. But to really enrich our lives, these technologies need to adapt to more easily intake information from individual users and to allow individuals to quickly and powerfully influence these technologies.