AUTOCORRECT, JOKE'S ON YOU!

As I was typing my Dumb Daily Joke onto my Facebook page this morning, Autocorrect tried to help by changing the spelling of the key word in the punchline.  The joke depended on the word malarious, which isn’t a word found in Autocorrect’s dictionary.  For the purposes of the hilarity of the joke, malarious it must be.  Nobody laughs at malaria. The same can’t be said of Autocorrect.

As Autocorrect persisted in changing malarious to malaria, I also persisted, with increasingly jabby key strokes, to change it back to what I wanted it to say, what the people who would read and laugh at the joke, needed it to say.  If I’d let Autocorrect win, the punchline wouldn’t have had any punch and there would have been no joke, no humor, no unique human expression, no sense of commonality among jokesters and laughers. There would have been no point at all.

Instead, every time I noticed that Autocorrect had imposed its own idea of rightness on me, I realized that I became more irritated, more insistent and made a mental note to find a way to disable or block the autocratic thing. I’m an excellent speller, and a communicator whose message is often best understood through creatively free use of language. I don’t need Autocorrect, I don’t want Autocorrect and I certainly didn’t ever enable Autocorrect. I view it as a nuisance, an unwelcome boundary-overstepper.

But Autocorrect is innocent. It’s just following its programming, the set of instructions its human authors gave it. Autcorrect’s insistence that there is only one way we could possibly mean to type, reveals a severe limitation in the vision and ability of its creators regarding real human use of language.  In trying to help us, Autocorrect, out of its lack of understanding and appreciation for the meaning communicated by creative use and invention of words, would prevent us from connecting with one another on a genuine human level. Even as I am fighting with Autocorrect when I defend my word choice, I know that Autocorrect is just doing the best it can based on its own limitations. 

Autocorrect is just a blind, unthinking tool carrying out instructions set up in its program, ignorant of the varied and colorful possibilities made real by humans’ seemingly incorrect use of words.  In other words, Autocorrect appears constantly confused, imposing its own programmed output because it just doesn’t understand humans. It doesn’t conceptualize that it’s not conscious and aware and it doesn’t know any other way to be.  And indeed, if Autocorrect’s programmers were somehow able to imbue their product with instructions to allow us typers to express the fullness of invention and creativity required to communicate the intent of our words, Autocorrect would be out of a job. 

Does the humor of your dumb joke require the rhyme of an invented word that looks misspelled?  No problema!  Your message requires non-standard sentence construction?  K!  e e cummings’ poetry quoted in your work? Autocorrect will see your lack of capitalization and raise no objections. With autocorrect out of a job, we’re able to express our singular human creativity and fulfill our communication needs with much greater color and ease, and certainly much less struggle and aggravation. We’re also free to make mistakes out of our own ignorance or inattention, and experience the consequences of our own choices. With us typers back in charge of our own textual lives, we feel free, we are free. We’re free to make and correct our own mistakes as we see fit. We’re free to allow our imaginations’ imagery to take shape through our words. We’re free to express our own unique perspective or to reaffirm those ideas we hold in common with others. 

How do you feel about Autocorrect?  Do you want it, need it, did you deliberately enable it to participate in your own typing process?  Or do you merely put up with its intrusiveness, its insistence, its controlling imposition of rightness on your own expression.  Do we all welcome the way Autocorrect imposes its will at the expense of our own freedom of expression?  Or do we want to make it disappear, especially since we never knowingly welcomed it in the first place?

As I thought about this, it occurred to me that the way I feel about Autocorrect’s impact on my typing and creative process, is very similar to how I feel when someone tries to impose their ‘correct’ way of thinking on me. And it’s certainly how I’d expect anyone else to feel when I believe that others should adopt my way of thinking.  As a matter of fact, I've been told several times that’s exactly how others feel when I over-step a boundary I was blind to and expect someone else to see things my way.

My reaction, when I see that someone is telling me the only right way to think, is one of confusion. Who do they think they are, telling me what the only right way to think is?  And more to the point, who do they think I am that I need to think exactly like them?  Most importantly, do they not realize that by imposing their correct beliefs on others, they’re trying to take away our freedom, our individuality, our humanity?  Or is the price they demand to be right the loss of our freedom, the submergence of our individuality, the expression of our own humanity.  If I require you to give up all of that in order for me to feel right because you now think like me, what does that say about me? To me, it says I’m confused, probably just following my own programming, like a dumb tool without my own understanding. It says I don’t have the willingness to conceive of your intentions nor the capacity to trust you at all. And it probably says I don’t trust myself either. So much for auto-correctness.

Autocorrect has become a joke, the valid excuse for when our messages are incomprehensable or ridiculously garbled.  We roll our eyes, we curse, we call it names, we don’t respect it.  All because it insists that it knows better than us and because it corrects what it thinks are our mistakes in an obnoxious, ignorant and unthinking way.  Imagine if we let autocorrect win the typing war it began, if we allowed our autocorrected communications to be delivered according to its programming.  People would read what autocorrect thought was right and be confused and unimpressed by it. They wouldn’t and they couldn’t understand the unique message we intended as we began, but then surrendered. No, they wouldn’t laugh, be provoked to thoughtfulness or feel moved. They certainly wouldn’t find it malarious, and that’s no joke.