[PLUG-TALK] Re: What comes after filtering.

[GLL]

: Or maybe  you're suggesting just filtering out
: the offensive words themselves.  Either way, a
: procmail recipe can do the same thing with your
: own list of words. This is not new technology. 
: Procmail has been around for more than a decade.

I am bringing up an idea (for discussion only) of something beyond - we've 
moved from mere spell checker to word processing programs that offer hints 
about higher levels of constructions, such as making ever mre intelligent 
guesses about sentence grammar and suggesting, for example, that a clause is 
ponderous, or that passive voice ought not be used. That technology already 
exists.

I am wondering about the next evolutionary step - word and phrase filtering 
which would (should one be so inclined) detect and replace f-words and 
s-words with an assortment of hecks, shoots, shuckses and darns - 
AUTOMATICALLY and at the input end of one's mail server and web browser.

I next expounded about two effects of THAT level of filtering. The first was 
that people's communication styles would fragment into diverse styles so fast 
that each of us might eventually need the re-translator browser more and more 
as a kind of crutch - how do you translate "three sheets to the wind" to a 
person who, growing up in Wyoming in 2025, might in that day have 
insufficient cultural knowledge of sailing ships to associate the phrase with 
the correct meaning? Imagine an e-mail+browser system able to replace words 
of one sender's local dialect with equivalents of in the local dialect of any 
recipient. The auther would no longer be certain of the content he created, 
as it might be rescripted 100's of slightly different ways.

The second effect would be kind of the opposite of diversity - Did anyone see 
the Steven King movie 'Misery,' in which the psycho reads a draft of one of 
the horror writer's works, finds it being full of salty language she herself 
hasn't heard in the aggro-midwest, and says, "People don't TALK like that!?!" 
There could emerge a whole stratum of society who could effectively insulate 
themselves from 'popular' culture, by automatically re-scripting everything 
they receive to fit their own toleance level of invective. Depending on how 
often the fictitious character above would get out and about (which 
frighteningly enough, could mean less and less as the Internet evolves - for 
all of us) she could tune her e-mail, browser, and cable TV box so as to 
spend the rest of her life believing that nobody ever said an f-word in 
public. Not only would she have little to no countervailing experiences 
coming into her life, but she would be HAPPY having created a for herself 
world and a life in which 'people just don't speak like that.'

What do you think? Can we invent the technology?

- GLL

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