I mean, were the scriptwriters serious?! " We’ve learned Earth’s languages through the World Wide Web"?!
This just tore me up a bit, but its not the first time that screenwriters have displayed such an utter misunderstanding of the Internet; for one, the fact that the World Wide Web is only one Internet-dependent application (and one that is text-centric, not voice-centric) may render the above quote partly inaccurate.
I can only think that, if the two factions and their leaders were able to
- Receive radio signals emanating from digital-electronic, networked machines
- Use a voice browser to vocally read text
- Manage to pair recorded voice-readings of hyperlinked text to their own native language for comparisons, contrasts and translations of words and contexts
all within mere seconds on an incremental basis, then we might have a more solid hypothesis for the Transformer race’s own networking capabilities, alongside all the other technological capabilities which they possess.
But in the meantime, we only have this alternative hypothesis for what would happen if the Transformers had learned Earth’s languages by rapidly flipping through a web browser:
EDIT: See also this slightly-related writeup from 1996 on extraterrestrials using the WWW. Vos Post wrote a section about the potential hyperlinearity of alien communication, comparing it to the more familiar hyperlinearity of the World Wide Web.
EDIT 2: Someone else wrote a criticism of this same quote, primarily from an SMS/mobiletexting-centric focus, for the Apache Pow Wow newspaper of Tyler Junior College.
