Blogging was supposed to be some shorthand way of expressing ideas that weren’t ready for the bigtime. In journalism, that would be a step below column. In law, that would be a giant leap below a law review article. While a column in a newspaper is nothing at all like a law review article, apparently journalists think columns are the epitome of quick and dirty journalistic thought. I didn’t realize this under I read this op-ed in Newsday by Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times.
Joel explains the declining scale of thought as expressed in the fewest possible characters:
The reason I wanted to be a columnist is that you don’t need any complex ideas to be one. So you can imagine how jealous I was when along came bloggers, who have it even easier than I do.
What I could not imagine – like Aristotle trying to contemplate an atom – was that ideas exist that are too small even for a blog post.
Yet Web writers – like Eskimos with a whale carcass – refuse to throw away these micro-thoughts. They’re publishing them via tumblr.com, which helps you broadcast your passing observations to the world. These are the kinds of thoughts you are about to share when you open your mouth and make a little noise and then decide not to bother.
He’s talking about tumble, which apparently is intended for people too long winded to twitter.
But a tumble isn’t even the smallest known unit of thought on the Web. You can Twitter, which are notes of up to 140 characters written from your computer or cell phone and sent to your friends as a feed or posted as the “update status” on your Facebook page.
This caught my eye in a peculiar way. Anne Reed at Deliberations is banging the Twitter drum again. Kevin O’Keefe too, noting that news of the China earthquake broke on twitter. While I don’t twitter, I may be the only one. But as trends go, twitter apparently isn’t the end of the road.
But what if you don’t have the energy to type a whole phrase? The quark of self-expression is the “current mood” emoticon on MySpace that says whether you’re angry, depressed, bored or embarrassed. It makes no sense to me that this system does not default to “embarrassed.”
One character, no waiting. Personally, I don’t give that much thought to my “mood” at any given moment, and it would take me long enough to twitter, maybe even tumble, to figure out which emoticon to use. So even this quark of the web would be burden to me.
But the trend is the point. Our thoughts are following our writing, increasingly smaller and inconsequential. What the government can’t do for us in controlling our ability to conceive full-blown ideas, technology is doing for it.
It seems like this onslaught of drivel is crowding bigger ideas out of the intellectual marketplace. But this new structure of thought categorization, I believe, actually is a form of mental rigor. Books can now be left to big thoughts instead of drawn-out ideas that are really just brilliant blog posts. And, yes, I’m talking to you, “Life After Humans” guy. I get it: Plants will grow and animals will come. Thanks. I figured that out about a week after I bought a house.
We are now forced to determine if our idea is worth a book or an article or a Twitter – just as poets once chose between an epic, a sonnet, a haiku or that crinkled Xeroxed pamphlet that old guy tries to hand you outside the Coffee Bean. If you can’t figure it out, the market quickly will let you know if your idea should have been a film, TV show or on YouTube.
My posts are often subject to subtle reminders that they are lengthier than most op-eds. I don’t start out with any length in mind, but just write until I’ve said what I have to say about a subject. It’s organic. But I don’t find many things worth posting about that can be done in 140 characters. And I don’t think there are many ideas worth sharing that don’t require a little more than that.
Will this be the next measure of attention span? Will any idea requiring more than 140 characters die for lack of interest? Or will the point be that folks like me, incapable of getting something on paper in less than 1000 words, will be too boring to be worth the bother? Maybe the lesson of tumble and twitter and the quarky thing is that we need to take the same degree of thought and find a way to express it in 20 words or less.
I don’t think I can do it. Nor do I think I want to do it. The subjects usually addressed here tend to be of sufficient value that they are worth more than 140 characters. If nothing else, I hope that the commentary on those subjects is worth more than that too. And whenever thoughts pop into my head that can be expressed in less than 140 characters, I keep them to myself. They just aren’t worth your time to read them.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I actually see these as merely different tools with different uses. E.g., on election night in Texas the Obama campaign supposedly used Twitter (or something similar) to let delegates at precinct conventions report caucus results. The example of spot reporting on natural disasters you already noted. (Basically it appears to be an issue of whether you’re from a generation that’s comfortable using text messages from your cell phone.)
Also, writing shorter is usually writing better. Brevity is not just the soul of wit, it’s also the heart of real insight. What American writer packed more punch into a few lines than Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard aphorisms? What verbose philosopher ever summed up the essence of morality more profoundly than the 11-word Golden Rule?
John Battelle has described the idea of “fully developed web writing,” where one’s prose is literally connected through anchor links to primary and secondary sources throughout the web, and thus many bloggers rely more on sources than their own opinion compared to a newspaper columnist.
Finally, re: law review articles, for the most part the “leap” below them leads to nothing but an abyss. 😉 Some thoughtful blog posts that link to their sources can provide more succinct, useful information much more readily than a logorrheic law review article. The greatest writers, H.L. Mencken comes to mind, could pack more high-level thought and good writing into a sentence than many law review articles achieve in 50 pages.
There is a lot of information out in the world available to anyone with Google, PACER, etc.. The goal of a nonfiction writer (or at least the good ones) should not to comprehensively compile that data, but to derive meaning from it. In that vein, I don’t see blogs as “below” law review articles or journalism, or Twitter as below blogs. Each are different media serving slightly different but related functions. Media is evolving before our eyes to capture all the ways people communicate, not just the more formal ones.
It’s funny that you say that. Aside from lawprofs, who tend to be a tad verbose by nature, I was thinking to myself as I was writing the post that the only blawger who writes longer posts than me is you.
Go figure.
Scott, it isn’t just about reducing what you have to say but engaging in brief ‘conversations.’ And these ‘tweets’ have helped me to meet people I would never otherwise have an opportunity to; exchanged information; been introduced to a broader base of bloggers and more.
You would do well there. Try it. You have nothing to lose if you decide it’s not your ideal tool.
I would, but I have no time since I’ve gotten caught up in this entirely new, really cool, means of communicating with people. I talk to them face to face. It’s so groovy!
Scott, you are so resistant to change.
How about I set up your Twitter account and Tweet for you…little pearls of wisdom they will attribute to you, drive traffic to your site you might otherwise not get….ideas, ideas :^)
(Only kidding!) But on a serious note, read my blog post tomorrow about protecting your name on all social media sites. Even if we don’t use them, don’t let someone else.
Now that’s an excellent point. You would have my deepest appreciation if you could lock me up on twitter, tumbler, fumbler, tweeter, and mosquiter if you could help me out with that.