Now, having studied 2 foreign languages that don't use the latin alphabet I've started to wonder how the english writing system got so messed up.

Japanese, Chinese and Swahili, all use a phonetic writing system where words are pronounced exactly as they appear.

Every character indicates a sound and that sound does not change from word to word.

Compare that to english where "pear" is pronounced quite differently from "appear", despite containing the same character.

So, today I was wondering about that and realized it might just be because the latin phonetic alphabet has been used for english for a long time, in a lot of different places. Each new group that achieved english literacy over the last 400 years created competing pronunciations, but, for the sake of consistency, we didn't want to change the spelling of the words themselves. So, over the years we developed a lot of ways of pronouncing the same words.

Japan, China and Kenya, on the other hand, developed their modern phonetic writing systems less than 100 years ago. So there's been less time to develop weird readings.

Of course, this kind of phenomenon can be observed for technology in general, not just writing technology. Most technology is great when it's first introduced, but over time it becomes outdated. This tends to give early adopters of tech a kind of disadvantage, in the long term.

For instance, the US built it's rail network long before China, and probably has spent more money in total creating and maintaining it. But I'd much rather ride a Chinese train than an American one. The Caltrain, which connects SF to Silicon Valley didn't even have outlets 4 years ago, let alone WiFi. China's high speed trains, as you'd expect, have both these things, and are about twice as fast. .

Now, you might argue, that's because trains are infrastructure. Surely the US has an advantage by being the first country to get computers and the internet. Unlike with trains, we can easily keep our digital technology up to date, so we shouldn't suffer from the same early adopter problems.

However, I think that, although our digital technology itself has been easy to update, our perspective towards it and the way we interact with it has not.

Because the US was one of the first countries to get online we maintain a kind of naive perspective on the internet. There were about 20 years when the internet was an intellectual paradise. The things you read online were relatively trustworthy. There were not many incentives for people to publish false information, aside from occasional chain emails. Many thought that the internet was going to be a great store of all human knowledge.

Then social media changed the game. It became possible for anyone to publish anything to millions of people while being rewarded for the attention they received. Incentives changed, technology changed, but our mindset did not. We continued to believe that we could trust what we read online, and we're now slowly realizing that this understanding is outdated.

However, my friends in Africa, who didn't start using the internet until after social media had already become popular, have a very different perspective.

My friends in Kenya and Egypt don't even read the news, let alone believe what is shared on social media. They seem to have the opposite mentality of most Americans. They believe that they can't trust anything they read online.

This doesn't mean they don't consume digital media, just that they read it for entertainment, not for learning, and they're dubious about anything claiming to be news.

There are surely many reasons for how this culture arose, and I have some guesses as to other factors, but it seems like at least one contributor was delayed adoption of digital tech.

Also, China is an interesting datapoint. Most people in China got the internet and social media at the same time. The way my Chinese friends consume digital media is definitely different than how we consume it in the US, but they're not totally untrusting of it the way my African friends are. So, more thought needed on China...

Anyway, what do you think? Is a disadvantage to being an early adopter? Do you think the US has an outdated perspective on digital media?

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