These kinds of activities always make me wonder how much we influence the A.I. databases being sent back to whatever company programmed our keyboards (in my case, Google). They definitely get a lot of cursing and not-English from me.
The grammatical errors drove me crazy.
125 characters. I found myself wanting to say something specific, but the three options predictive text gave me did not allow me to go in the direction I wanted, so I had to make do with what it did offer. Less as an English teacher and more as a result of social and linguistic upbringing, I tend to place great importance on clear communication, which manifests in my written communication as correct grammar. I use a lot of punctuation, and often send follow up messages (or go back and edit messages) to correct auto-correct or punctuation mistakes. Since the predictive text feature doesn’t suggest punctuation, I can’t really say it is reflective of how I would normally express myself. You can see in the video that I got stuck at one point where there was no viable, grammatically-correct option, and I had to grit my teeth and try to ignore it.
The lack of contractions and admittance of not knowing reminded me of the kind of discussions I sometimes see in MET courses or academic opinion blogs. In reflection on the use of algorithms in public writing, I would like to reference The Allusionist’s podcast episode #102, “New Rules”. The full stop has [perhaps not replaced yet per se, but] been fighting the period and commas for sentence-ending hegemony in the last decade. I know people who get annoyed by ten notifications, all a continuation of the same sentence or train of thought, divided by full stops, and I know people incensed at getting a message with the whole idea contained in one ‘wall of text’ with proper punctuation. What’s stranger is that we seem to never talk about it directly; I’ve only expressed my membership to the former to close friends in passing, by complaining about getting countless continuation messages from other acquaintances. I also think that this evolution in sentence-ending punctuation is what influenced algorithmic predictive text to not suggest punctuation, even though it suggests capitalized and lowercase variations side-by-side.
That’s it for my mini-reflection. The one note I do want to close on, is that, though it may not be often used by most people or it may even be used for entertainment as above, predictive text can be a godsend for people who struggle to swipe or type. Not everyone who uses phones is a digital native, or has full motor control or good eyes. Having the option to click on a full word from time to time instead of having to click every letter on a tiny keyboard when your hands are shaking is just one small accommodation that can reduce strain for the oft-overlooked demographics, and keep us all connected.
-B