Have you ever watched a Ken Burns documentary film? I could watch his Civil War documentary every day. He sprinkles in eye witness accounts of the events that occurred, usually from personal letters and it never ceases to amaze me the beauty and poetic nature of the letters. Did people actually talk that way back then? Or are the letters that he quotes three standard deviations from the norm of "Cot me anuther polecat last nite an' fried it up wit duh grits." (my attempt at hick in print) I don't know, but a well worded letter is a truly endangered art form. I can't remember the last time I sent an actual personal letter.
Of course this is nothing new. Email was only the beginning. It wasn't fast enough so it got replaced with Instant Messaging, which still wasn't good enough because people might not be at their desk, so Text Messaging took over. Newspapers were replaced with blogs, which were replaced with Facebook, which was replaced with Twitter. The world has moved to an immediate information fulfillment economy. The problem with this is that in our quest for ever faster information, we have lost something. The elegance of speech has been replaced with crazy contractions and emoticons. Once words were woven into a textured tapestry. Now they are blurted and spurted into existence for all the world to digest like a Chicken McNugget. We are captivated by sound bites instead listening to a speech in its entirety. What passes for noteworthy is often banal and our thoughts have become so raw and unformed that Twitter, with its 140 word limit, is probably the best place for information. The world has ADHD.
And what is the cure? Feel free to speculate on it in the comments while I check on my phone for updates...
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