Obnoxious Bitch

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Old Rant: Net Illiterati

Something I wrote back in the late 90s… [original here]

I need to start updating this site, so I dragged this nugget out of my old closet to build on a Tweet I made earlier:

Dear radio ad writers: URLs *never* hv a “backslash” in ‘em. VO peeps, if u see it in a script, complain! I won’t buy from proven idiots…

I think that if someone is going to build a website, especially if they plan to CHARGE for something there, they should take a few minutes to at least spell check the damned things! How in the Hell did these people manage to get out of high school, and even in some cases get college degrees without knowing the difference between the possessive word “your” and the contraction “you’re?” I’d guess that 8 out of 10 web sites that I visit have multiple instances of the confusion of the two!  Another word that is consistently misspelled is “categories.” It’s obvious to me that many people have gone through life learning everything from television, and have very little experience with the printed word.  Since I’ve read thousands of books, misspellings and grammatical errors LEAP off a page at me; but apparently the Illiterati of the Net are the rule and not the exception.  I suppose this speaks volumes for the state of our educational system.  I wonder sometimes if it isn’t a government plot - after all, the ignorant and stupid are more easily led, and if the Net is a fair representation of the American public we’ve got a disproportionately large population of morons in this country.

Yup. It’s only gotten worse in the years since my original post. Pretty sad.