Shakespeare's plays rendered in text-speak and separate "text walking lanes" in the Antwerp city centre for the citizens absorbed in their smartphones show how technology evolution might alter the past as well as the present.
Language, especially in its use in everyday communication, is an essential aspect of being in the world. It is a temporal medium that is prone to being fluid, though quite as often used as a force against change - to put down what endures and abides. So linguistic and literary conservatives might feel that the seventh seal of the Apocalypse was being opened when they read the rewriting of Hamlet's dilemma as -
"2 *bee* or not 2 *bee*, that is the ? " {*bee* as in the bumble bee emoji on whatsapp)
Shakespeare is, after all, the father of immortals. Yet in his own time the plays of Shakespeare, who was far from being a linguistic purist, spoke a language that was brilliantly in flux, vitally enlarging the scope of spoken and literary English. The nicest thing about Shakespeare is his ability to be a contemporary in every century.
