Hope you can make it through this one, it's kinda long!:)

Sometimes, actually mos’times (new word I’m creating now only needs one “t” because it’s a contraction) we have the attention span of a gnat. Our social media is a great example of this as our communication has been reduced to one or two sentence updates (fb) or [hopefully they are] pithy one-liners (tweet-tweet). Now, this isn’t entirely negative, I just think it is kind of interesting to think of the ramifications, especially in communication and discourse outside of the realm or “social networking.”

News sources are fast changing to a digital medium over printed. Stories also tend to be shorter, more condensed and I wonder if it has to do with the fact that long pieces or articles are viewed as being too daunting to individuals who are used to reading one status update and moving on. Be honest, if you just started reading this blog (not that I’m actually reporting “news” or anything), you read the shortest post first to see if the longer ones would be worth the time. I’m not offended, that is exactly what I do, but one would be remiss to generalize all brevity as a sign of shallowness, or lack of profundity (I’m having fun with big words today).

When I consider my reading taste, the best description would be eclectic. I read the Bible, classics, commentaries, cook-books, novels, informational books, comics, blogs, grammar books, and status updates:). Now, some would consider reading comic book fiction as inane compared to classical literature (I’m using these two “extremes” to demonstrate a point, so just give me a few moments). Both are fiction, tell a story, are classified by a specific genre within their respective mediums and would be subject to the same critical analysis of structure, execution of story-telling, plot, characterization, etc. So is the length of one or presence of pictures in the other that makes either one better? One thing interesting about length is many classics were released in a serialized fashion (Sherlock Holmes), meaning the length many equate to greatness was not really visible at the time of release. I tend to “prefer” the serialized approach of storytelling, not necessarily because I lack the attention span, I enjoy the cliff-hanger or hook that brings me back for the next installment.

The problem doesn’t really hang on the idea of attention span or in the length and form of media. I was a pretty smart kid, but you ask me to sit still longer than ten seconds and I would fidget up a storm, not for lack of intelligence but because I was a boy. The problem is actually in the content (not speaking of morality in this instance) and subsequent expression. For example, many people communicate on facebook, or via text message, and do not seem to know how to form a coherent sentence, much less spell a word that contains more than five or six letters. It often seems as if people can only handle tiny snippets of reality or intelligibility, or become overwhelmed.

I don’t believe the advent of digital, social media is a purely negative occurrence. In earlier centuries, great minds took care to be voracious readers and turn hours of reading into short, pithy statements. The danger in todays world is too many people bypassing the voracious reading to go directly to short statements lacking pith. “There’s nothing going in, and the same thing is coming out.”

Go be not stupid. And make sure you put something good in your brain (this time I am referring to moral content).