The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I don’t tweet. I know, I’m being left in the digital dust and the future is moving away from me at the speed of Kardashian news. The President elect, who seems to think he’s president already, communicates primarily by tweetspeak. Short and to the point. Mostly to the Point. It’s a new paradigm for governing in this post-truth world we now live in.

Makes sense, I guess, if most of us citizens are capable of not much more than a text message, fat thumbs flying on tiny keyboards, words distilled to the fewest letters possible, paragraphs obsolete. Our attention spans are nicely compatible with the complexity of tweets these days and I don’t expect to see that expanding anytime in the near future. Can’t imagine why politics is reduced to soundbites and 30 second commercials.

We used to call this, at least where I come from, shallow thinking. These days it passes for research. But I know, I know, I’m just being curmudgeonly. The modern world moves a little too fast to stop and smell the newspaper ink. We don’t have the luxury of time anymore, not when we have to respond to text messages and update our Facebook page. Read a novel? Fat chance, Hemingway. Read a non-fiction book? Give me a break. Read beyond the first paragraph of a Yahoo news feed? Why bother?

No, I suspect we’ll actually shorten those attention spans a little more before I leave this mortal coil. Not sure how much shorter we can make them, but if watching friends text messaging while they’re in a conversation with me is any indication, I’d say there’s still some wiggle room. Just have to avoid those conversations with me to do it. I’ll sure miss those engaging discussions.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2016 at 3:29 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.