The short and unsweet

My sister tells me, dude, blog posts should be short. That is the nature of blogs. Don't ramble on ad infinitum ad nauseum. True. Anything more than five thousand characters and eyes roll up and their owners either faint, drop dead or both. Who needs cyanide these days? Just feed the sucker a ten thousand character blog post and that's that. The perfect crime!

What is in the nature of human beings that has changed over the last decade that makes for such impatience? What in the change in the mindset of our collective selves that lords brevity over verbosity? Why vote for paucity over poesy? What, in a nutshell causes us to think "if it can't be said in 144 characters it is not worth saying at all?". In a nutshell, the answer is 511. Too much info. Actually, too much irrelevant info.

By the time one has glanced through the morning newspapers (read: FB posts), rolled one's eyes, responded in brief bursts at the same level of shallow thinking that the poster uses, whipped one's eyes across the news blogs, worked one's way through suggested reads (one really doesn't want to read anything these days that someone else has not "liked" right?), one's day is done. The rest of the day is spent responding to tweets and texts.

Long sentences? brain freeze. Email? too quaint, too old fashioned. Yahoo news? blah. Research documents? blech - unless you are there for the modern past time of plagiarizing since we are too awash in external info to really think things through for ourselves right? Copulation? Iffy unless the duration of an act is less than three minutes and the number of partners is greater than three. Per day. Eating? Overrated unless its some nameless thing that can be stuffed into one's face without too much involvement on one's part.  Who cares what it is so long as someone else has "liked" the heck out of it. If 50 trillion flies say they like eating excrement it really can't be that bad right? 50 trillion is a big number of "likes" you see and we are, at many levels, flies, nibbling here, sniffing there, buzzing, tweeting and texting all over the place with a zing that is burning up the wires and polluting the world with mindless noise.

Now, this would be a terrible state of affair if it didn't actually work at some level. Question: Does it? Answer: It does. With this many options, opinions, likes and dislikes that we are forced to be "up close and personal" with on a daily basis, we have, strictly for survivals sake, decided to digest our info in short bursts over a long period of time where we assume that time will sift out the grain from the chaff and we would, at the end of it all, be in possession of a few genuine nuggets to take home, like, tweet about or blog into.

What is the fallacy of that argument? At the level of flies, from phonocation to fornication, none that I can see. At the level of human beings who like to consume something less processed than excrement? everything. Human beings by definition are capable of coming to their own conclusions without the help of a hundred opinions made by people whose opinions are less based on considerations of validity and more on how impatient their S-pen, trigger finger or mouse wielding paws are.

Since the peopled earth is in fact more trigger happy than thought happy, those aforementioned nuggets will necessarily be rare. So, I'd rather talk to the thinkers than the likers. I'd rather my blogs establish a problem, break it down, analyze it, dissect it and, over 100,000 characters attempt to outline at least a framework for a solution if not a solution itself. To put it as mildly as I possibly can, I'd rather a carefully baked cake than any kind of quick 'n easy spam. For the rest, well, let the posts be the equivalent of swallowing cyanide. We would be less a few ten thousand "likes" on a matter of no concern to the less concerned.

Still, when all is said and said and said, I like this bunch of curmudgeonly online "friends" who pop up here and there and massage my ego with their naysays and yaysays. Regardless of the fact that they flit from bus to bus, taking non-rides to nowhere from no place to every place, regardless of the number of road kills that result from such activity and regardless of the fact that in essence, such activities ensure that they miss all buses, they are human, after a fashion, and they are subject to human failings, after a fashion.

4,345 characters. hmm... not bad. Not bad at all *winks*