The Language of Digital Civilization in Progress: Tools and Impact

Marklen Konurbaev – Professor of English Philology at Department of English Linguistics, Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University. Lecture in English. In the early noughties, human civilization came to perceive the language, very rightly, as the most powerful tool for society management and control. Indeed, language is our critical knowledge representation system that works uniquely as a toolset for building a distributed cognition environment. We have finally learned to separate the wheat from the chaff and tamed the language to serve our various cognitive needs exactly, by creating language templates, algorithms, rubricated thesauruses, glossaries and, eventually, natural language neural nets – a nightmare for the humanities. Hordes of redundant linguistic chores were replaced, much to the relief of content managers, by orderly and easily digestible cliches that do our communication job almost perfectly. But this, in its turn, affected man, who is increasingly transforming, not