I have an ambivalent attitude toward electronic culture. On the one hand I love what it enables me to do: watch movies and TV shows that I've missed; create documents that are nearly professional (I wrote my doctoral dissertation on an old typewriter and then paid someone a dollar a page to make it look professional; even then I found errors after it was accepted and I am certain they are still there); communicate with others quickly; etc. The primary thing I dislike is that the electronic ease makes us sloppy and superficial. Everyone scrawls on their Facebook wall, and language ceases to matter in the way that it did when I was paying a dollar a page (and earning 8300 a year). A couple of clicks and all these words disappear, for example. Or, I could simply publish the most trivial of thoughts here (and who's to say I haven't) and they would stay till I took them down or the sun burned out.
Language matters. Language makes having a self possible if a self is defined "as that which can be an object to itself." (That may be from George Herbert Meade.) In other words, any of us can stand in the alongside and think about ourselves. Language is thus that which separates us from our fellow creatures in the animal kingdom. All our pets are distinct and individual but they are all locked into the present moment; we aren't. They have personalities but not selves. We have a language that enables us to think about the mystery of being and the mystery of being conscious in a universe filled with strangeness. Having a self means having the knowledge that death is imminent.
Language matters. If I say that three times it is true. On the other hand, our culture is the culture of the tentative where language doesn't really matter. Nothing is; everything is like. Start a revolution there.
My sons say I should "enable comments," so every so often I will.