Is smlr bttr?
March 2nd, 2008 by Chris Ellis in How to Read![[Post to Twitter]](http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/tweet-this-small.png)
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My attention span is fading. I can only read short articles. I get most of my news from RSS headlines. My world has been compressed. There are no semicolons. No colons. No em dashes. Sometimes not even a period. Small. Sharp. Headlines.
RSS 1.0 Title (Max. characters): 100
Twitter (Max. characters): 140
FaceBook status (Max. characters): 160
SMS (Max. characters): 160
I’ve been trying without luck to find any study that will relate the average sentence length to the marching progression of technology. I would love to illustrate this relationship, with a nice and logical logarithmic curve. The further we trample on into the bramble bush of gadgetry and hyper socialization, the smaller and smaller our communiqués get…
But there is nothing! No data. No bean counter has published statistics about our shrinking medium of chatter.
So the above graph is a theory, nothing more nothing less.
I am about to label myself with my next statement, but bear with me. There was a great Star Trek episode which indirectly discussed the idea of technology and personal communication. The example being the Bynars, a race whose members are modified at birth communicate only via binary computer code to increase efficiency. Effectively they use a computerized buffer to help deal with the mass amounts of data they exchange during any given conversation. The keyword in this was “efficiency.”
Is all of our micro-messaging making communication more efficient, or are we doing it for the sake of our natural need to socialize? The other question that led me to write this post is: Are shorter forms of communication actually efficient or do they just create greater chances of interpretive mistakes?
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Posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 9:39 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.
March 3rd, 2008 at 11:38 am
I think that, when North America went with seven-digit numbers instead of eight it was based on some huge difference in what we can remember.
The whole reason, to me, that 140/160 is ideal is not that it replaces or transforms attention but rather fits into an emerging system where immediate communication is possible about key themes and ideas that are happening _right now_. If it is interesting to us we can follow up and read more. Since I am not a determinist I don’t really believe and I haven’t found in my academic research into technology and culture that technology shapes us in a way that can ever be shown on a graph.
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I’d say what’s happening now is that our eyes and ears are being overworked, while our hands and mouths are getting lazy. Mcluhan would says it’s a rebalancing of our sense ratios. But are we being re-balanced or UNbalanced? Emerging from the written society into the total electric field society or somesuch balderdash.
I guess we don’t need to be able to explain things anymore; that’s what hyperlinks are for. In the future all essays will consist of titles followed by a series of footnotes - why bother to explain something yourself when google has the answer? Just creates extra info no one has the bandwidth to process… We’re getting back to our caveman roots - and grunting and pointing is the new black.
March 3rd, 2008 at 3:54 pm
I wouldn’t consider the above graph a determinist theory, as it end in 2008. If it went off into the future, possibly. I would slug this one under a bit of discourse theory - though not describing the change in words and meaning, but more the length of the medium we use to communicate.
I seem to remember someone telling me about the phone number being 7 digits. Something about it being easier to remember a broken sequence of odd number and then even… three digits then two two digits, or one four sequence.