So maybe you hadn’t heard, but Whitney Houston died the other day …
Oh wait, unless you lived in a van down by the river or on a South Pacific island with no phone, no lights, no motor car and not a single luxury, you already knew that. It was broadcast on every TV and radio station, mentioned on nearly every website and Facebook page, and was a trending topic on Twitter that even managed to eclipse #LinSanity. In short, it was the biggest thing since … well … the last big thing.
Remember it was just two months ago when we were being barraged with Lindsay Lohan’s Playboy pics?
Sure. Been there, saw that, now pass the eye bleach.
Remember five months ago when the big TV story was that “Two and a Half Men” was premiering without Charlie Sheen, who was off #winning in his roast on Comedy Central?
Well, now that you mention it, yes—how’s that tiger blood thing working out for him?
Remember ten months when the world was buzzing about Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding?
Wait, that was less than a year ago—has Pippa posed nekkid anywhere yet?
Remember a year ago when we were all agog over Lady Gaga’s bizarre Grammy entrance?
Uh, only vaguely. Didn’t she rip that off from the San Diego Chicken?
Remember two years ago when Jesse James’ affair with the tattooed Michelle “Bombshell” McGee blindsided Sandra Bullock and the whole world?
Wait, are you sure Sandy was involved with those trailer park refugees? Pretty sure that it was Courtney Love.
Finally, remember three years ago when Chris Brown beat the ever-loving snot out of Rihanna, and sent her to the hospital?
Not even remotely. But neither did the Grammy committee or the American public. Whatev.
Still, this is par for the current American course. Our attention spans have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter. Life is very busy in the 21st century, and with all the media and electronic devices screaming for our attention, we just seem incapable of paying attention for more than a few minutes at a clip. We fastforward through TV shows, we read just the home page of most websites, check only the most recent statuses of our Facebook friends. If it’s not at the top of our feed, we won’t see it, and once it’s on the second page, it’s pretty much gone forever, lost in the seemingly infinite cyber cacophony.
In short, we only seem to be able to absorb what’s here, right now, and as long as it’s in small easily digestible portions.
Let’s be totally honest—there’s a very good chance (especially if you’re CC) that you’re even skipping through this fairly short post, just scanning or stopping to read the stand-alone sentences or the shorter paragraphs. It’s how we’re evolving.
The phenomena is amazing to me. I was recently talking to my friend Ro, who is a brilliant professor of media studies at SCSU, and she brought up an article that I had written last year for Connecticut Magazine in which I had interviewed her. She told me that she uses it for her class in critical thinking (scary, right?), but the thing that I took away from it was that even though the piece was only 600 words long—or about 5 or 6 moderate paragraphs—she said that it was a challenge for her students to digest it all in one class sitting. 600 words! This whole paragraph, including this very sentence, is a total of 149 words, so imagine three more paragraphs about this length after it, and not being able to pay attention long enough to read and comprehend it all in under an hour.
Scary, right?
I blame myself, I guess. I’m part of the problem. I was recently looking through some back issues of Connecticut Magazine—like from the 1970s and 1980s—and comparing it to our current ones, and one of the things that jumps out is not only how short the stories are, but even how short the paragraphs are now. I’m guilty of it even right now, trying to keep this post short and sweet and “readable” even though the intrawebz provide almost unlimited space to write.
Maybe this is helps explain the appeal of Twitter—trying to boil our thoughts into 140 character-sized electronic bites. Or is that bytes? (Speaking of—shameless pimping: You can follow me on Twitter @RayBendici, by the way … Or if you can’t be bothered to read all that: U can follow me @RayBendici, BTW.)
At one point, Ernest Hemingway supposedly wrote that the most perfect story might be one only six words long: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” There has been debate whether Papa Hemingway ever actually did this, but the idea seems to fit where we’re headed.
Writing concisely is tough—there’s an old adage: “I would’ve written less, but I didn’t have the time,” the idea being that it takes a lot of work to craft sentences to convey the most critical ideas and thoughts in the fewest amount of words possible.
Still, there’s another old saying: “Less is more,” and it certainly looks as though that’s where we’re headed. Because as short as the individual messages are getting—in length, in content, in public consciousness, in ability to engage our ever-shortening attention spans—the overall amount of content being hurled at us screaming to be acknowledged is increasing exponentially.
So yeah, you may not remember reading this post in 10 minutes, but it won’t be because it wasn’t well written or thought out (although that may be the case). You will forget reading this because you’ve already been trained by our ever-evolving world to forget it.
Now when do those nekkid pictures of Pippa come out?