"so few Chinese are immersed in technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email."
Yes, but the ones forgetting are the elites and the trendsetters. If enough of them decide to start using the phonetic alphabets, the rest of the country will follow. Even a country farmer can't sell his produce to a city dweller who can no longer produce the word "rice", except phonetically.
This doesn't even have to be centralized, in fact it almost can't be. It'll be something that just happens or doesn't, and from the sounds of it, the initial phases are indeed already happening. It strikes me as far more likely that the encroachment of phonetic alphabets previously discussed on HN is the vanguard of major change than a short-term anomaly; the trends and forces are clear and strong. Human brains are extraordinarily good at optimizing away useless data and skills, it has (for the most part) a brutally rational approach to the question of "what is useful" based on a simple metric of "is this ever used?", and while it is possible to appeal the decision it takes a lot of effort for an individual to do so.
10 years ago I would have put a lot of money on the farmers having difficulty selling to city dwellers because low literacy left them with no way to sell things except phonetically.
If the elites are hitting the literacy level of the lowest and least educated, it could be setting up a new par that more people can match. Why give a job to an elite when you can give it to some farm boy desperate for cash if they're both dependent solely on phonetic language.
Well, since no English speakers use an ideographic language for English and we're all spelling... sort of... phonetically, there is clearly no reason to prefer a college-educated journalism major to write or edit for the NYT, we can just grab any ol' dirt farmer, right?
There's more to "literacy" than having muscle memory for writing an enormous swathe of characters of dubious usefulness, something most languages manage to do entirely without.
By the amount of spelling errors I've seen in NYT articles, I think hiring a dozen high school-only farm boys would garner better results than paying the university schlubs they've already got doing their proof-reading.
Print Journalism courses have been increasingly irrelevant since Gonzo became increasingly mainstream. Music, sports, etc. all rely more on personal opinion than they ever did. Journalism courses don't teach personal opinion, it's innate.
Major editors in the UK have openly expressed that they aren't interested in journalism graduates, they care more about personal experiences handed to them with an example of good writing with personal experience. Pick up a british tabloid, it isn't Journalism courses teaching writing completely biased completely unobjective articles. I have friends in journalism, I know they're not, and I know they're going to struggle like all hell to get a job.
Yes, but the ones forgetting are the elites and the trendsetters. If enough of them decide to start using the phonetic alphabets, the rest of the country will follow. Even a country farmer can't sell his produce to a city dweller who can no longer produce the word "rice", except phonetically.
This doesn't even have to be centralized, in fact it almost can't be. It'll be something that just happens or doesn't, and from the sounds of it, the initial phases are indeed already happening. It strikes me as far more likely that the encroachment of phonetic alphabets previously discussed on HN is the vanguard of major change than a short-term anomaly; the trends and forces are clear and strong. Human brains are extraordinarily good at optimizing away useless data and skills, it has (for the most part) a brutally rational approach to the question of "what is useful" based on a simple metric of "is this ever used?", and while it is possible to appeal the decision it takes a lot of effort for an individual to do so.