Saturday, April 9, 2011
Social Media and the Shortened Thought.
I have noticed recently that from time to time, a thought will occur to me, and rather than jumping straight into a conversation with whoever is near me, i sit on it and ponder. Gradually, as i am thinking about it, i am fine-tuning the phrasing, taking it from a full-thought to a single sentence. I realized today that what i am doing is cramming my thought into the tiny bracket allowed me by the facebook, or the twitter. It feels like our culture is dominated by the sound-byte, 160 digits or less, or it doesn't matter. Leaders, for years now, even before the spread of mass media, have been trimming the average length of their sentences, so as to make tidy headlines and quotations. I Just can't help but wonder if this a step forward for the English language, streamlining it into a more effective form of communication, or if what this really means is that our language is in the decline? What are your thoughts on the matter?
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I agree that with the ability to sputter out random thoughts as pearls of wisdom a lot of our conversations (and I am guilty of it too) have turned into one way sound bites. Taking time to slow down and actually ruminate those thoughts before sharing them but even more importantly listening to each other is becoming more challenging. Interestingly blogs are an outlet for our more "elaborate" thoughts. Thanks for sharing :-)
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