Consider how long children's books have been heavily illustrated. When I was little I won a "reading award" in my first grade classroom because I always had out this science book. Truth is I was just looking at the pictures and reading the captions. Nevertheless I obviously did learn to read, and I can assure you that seeing pictures as a child ruined my imagination in no way. Think of the vast amounts of data we are presented with every day. There are images, written words, music, speech, on advertisements, street signs, in movies, on television, in books, in classrooms, at home... If having one possibility illustrated (in a broader sense) before you actually stifled human creativity, there would be far fewer inventors, artists, and writers. And if you want proof you can search for "fanfic" and see thousands of young adults (perhaps older adults?) and children writing stories based on their favorite movies and television shows and books, simply because they want to apply their own creativity to the fiction. I found one story, obviously written by a young child, which sought to give a back-story for how pokemon evolved out of present-day animals.

In short, I think the least of your worries should be any new media constraining the imagination.

Thinkofthechildren! Technology improves illustrations --> Entire generation rendered illiterate! Soon they'll invent an entire GENRE of new media with moving pictures and sound and no need to read at all! And what will happen then!?

So it's running Linux?

I have always wondered what it would be like to live in Ancient Rome. Odds are I'd be poor and have to join the army to keep from becoming homeless, or worse: I'd be a slave. But if I became one of the aristocracy, or at least a wealthier family, then I would have it made. Anyway I find it hard to imagine that if computers and robots take over doing all of humanity's dirty work, then humanity will have no way to get by. Obviously SOMEbody will get by (the owners of the machines?) but consider the following.

A major food company gradually phases out human workers. They own countless farms, and they fire the farmers. They automate all their factories, they automate their lower levels of administration, distribution, and all the other human-run parts of their industry. But they do this because it's cheaper. And now they can produce far more than they ever could before. They're a food company, so the price of their food goes down, partly because they can now make more for almost nothing, partly because the people they fired have no jobs. But if the only jobs now available to humans are (presumably) in public relations, professional sports, entertainment, etc., then what's to stop our society from entering a new era of "bread and circuses," one in which there are two classes: the rich who get more because they are famous or do unique work, and the aristocracy who need not work because their needs are provided for by the machinery doing all the grunt work?

Then there would be no reason for anyone to be poor, because that station would be filled by the machines. Of course there are countless factors to look at and probably countless reasons why the above fantasy is just that: but I would like to hear them in following comments!

I agree with you on that last point, but I would prefer to generalize further. Nobody who speaks a language of ANY level of complexity has any right to criticize people who speak ANY other language. Just as it is not stupidity to speak Ebonics, neither is it arrogance to speak Standard American English, or Middle English for that matter. Nor are the rules of English grammar that complicated, but native speakers must view it through the kaleidescope of acquisition. That is, you do not learn the grammar of English, you just internalize it as a child, and you don't get it all from one trusted source. You hear different people speak different dialects and you put together your own idiolect without any true standard to point at and say "there are the nuts and bolts of my grammar." Asimov had his heart in the right place, but problems with literacy are not rooted in language. Also keep in mind that writing is not Language, it is a secondary system of representation. So while simplifying spelling could help (but consider how much more difficult it is to be literate in China, and their literacy rate is 93.3%), simplifying grammar would be neither easy to do, easy for people to learn, adopted by anyone, nor long-lived. Complexity in languages arises from speakers like you and me and everyone else. It is not bestowed by college professors. Indeed, Ebonics is in many ways FAR more complex.

I saw a lot of this in my freshman "English" class, and I find there are 3 reasons why this happens.

1) Natural language change. "Because" shortens to "cuz" because it's a high frequency word with an unstressed syllable. "Like" and "I mean" tend to get used in ways I find analogous to the Ancient Greek "men" and "de" discourse particles. Overall, this is not a bad thing (no matter what anyone says: it's a fact of Language and if it didn't happen we would all be speaking Proto-Indo-European), but it is not good paper writing (at least not yet).

2) English teachers don't know English grammar. Is it that surprising? I learned more about English in one year of high school Latin than in all my years of "Language Arts" classes, and it's simple why. One learns Latin from the ground up: you have to understand the way cases are used and the way verbs are inflected in order to read anything. In English, we have very little inflection, and much of it is on the pronouns. Furthermore, one does not "learn" a native language, one "acquires" it, which is to say that the process is different. You don't actively think about the rules of grammar when you start speaking: your brain does these mental gymnastics for you. This is why it's not accurate to say that these students have "bad grammar." I'm sure what they say is grammatical in their own idiolects, otherwise they wouldn't say it. But English teachers should be able to explain how the grammar of formal English, the paper-writing register, works by convention. That is, they should know when to use "who" and when to use "whom." But none of my past English teachers could tell you the difference between those words, and that is a huge problem.

3) ENTRANCE ESSAYS. Obviously this is a problem that pervades the writing styles of these kids, so presumably they did not just forget how to write after they got accepted to uni. So either somebody else wrote their essays (which should be considered cheating and grounds for immediate expulsion if discovered), or somebody let them in even though they write like that. If you want to blame anybody, it's the application readers I'd question first.

I hate these, usually because when I've gotten burned by them it was because they were not clear about EXACTLY what they were asking. By this I mean, that I would read your #1 and think "okay, I will necessarily complete this objective as I go through the list, because it does not specify that I should read all of the instructions BEFORE completing any of the tasks thereby assigned!" And so, if I were going to give an exercise like this to a class of my own, the first step would have to say "Read all of the instructions first!"

Think about this too:
Presumably we cannot be convicted for our thoughts. So clearly nobody can be arrested for just THINKING about what child pornography would look like, even though it's a pretty deviant thought. Let's say he drew this kind of cartoon himself, alone, just for himself, and the police found it while searching for ACTUAL crime. Would the courts go so far as to put a man in jail for drawing a picture? And what, really, is the difference between that and this? He did have to FIND the picture, and he did apparently KEEP the picture, but it still seems like a stretch. Honestly I don't even think the Simpsons look human enough. And there's another thing, what about anthropomorphic pornography? Would they have to calculate the presumed age of the fictional victims in dog/cat/furry years?

I basically agree. What we are seeing here is probably indeed the rise of Language (capital L) in this species. However I think it's a far cry from seeing the development of SYNTAX. It seems to me that what these primates have is a certain number of vocal signs (like monosyllables), and the possibility to combine multiple signs to achieve a greater range of meaning (like multisyllabic words). But meaning, as has always been apparent, is NOT to be mistaken for syntax. I can flip you the bird and you understand exactly what I mean, but there's no syntax there.

It does seem to me that, now that this species has this leg up communication-wise, their development of Language might be growing exponentially. So it might not be long (relatively not that long, which means I have no idea how long) before they really do put two signs together and come up with a SYSTEMATIZED method for expressing themselves.

My idea for preventing the submission of blank e-mails or e-mails lacking that attachment you were going to remember:

put the recipient address field below the message field

would that be helpful for anyone besides me? y/n

Why, hello there embedded infomation. I'd like to introduce you to my friend the hex editor. You two should get on swimmingly!