Talk To Me, But Only In 25 Words Or Less
by Mad Dog

   Blame technology and computers. It’s either that or we all woke up one morning having caught ADHD during the night only no one cared because it didn’t come from a pig, didn’t start in Mexico, and most of all, it wasn’t a slow news day. Short of adding Ritalin to the municipal drinking water, I fear there’s not much we can do about it. Unlike hemlines, when attention spans shorten they never go back.

   You can trace the problem back to the first word processor that added a toolbar button to create a bulleted list. Okay, you can trace it back if you’re one of those rare people who can look back at something that happened more than five minutes ago without the aid of a Decade in Review article or the Top Ten Critically Important Events of the Last Century in Ten Words or Less. Suddenly there was no reason to write sentences with subjects, predicates, and other hazy terms you vaguely remember from high school which had to connect in a logical, flowing manner when you could instead make a list of random mini-thoughts and non sequiturs. I mean, really. Why use a sentence when a clause or fragment will do? Yes, bullet points rule.

• They’re quick.
• Easy to read.
• No messy detail.
• Easier to digest than a baby bird’s breakfast.

   Then along came PowerPoint, the Kodak Carousel of the 21st Century. Now business reports, presentations, and lame jokes that everyone passes around but no one laughs at are created in PowerPoint because it turns out that, in spite of what we said each time someone put us to sleep looking at photographs of their vacation, we miss slide shows.

   A PowerPoint presentation is supposed to be supportive, a display of visual notes to look at while someone rambles on—I mean, elaborates on—like a public outline. But not anymore. Nowadays the PowerPoint is all you take in because you’re too busy checking email and Facebook on your cell phone to listen to someone talk. Hey, whoever’s giving the presentation should be damned happy you’re even glancing up and pretending to read the five words they typed in for each slide.

   But wait! There’s less! Writing letters went out and emails came in, and except for a few select grandparents who actually put dates, salutations, capitalization, punctuation, and closings in their emails, communication became shorter and shorter until the perfect email evolved—one that has all the information contained in the Subject line.

   I wouldn’t be surprised if you can get an SMS version of Moby Dick sent to you now. Of course it will be easy to recognize, it’s the one that came from “clfsnts” and reads: “Whale bites man. Man hunts whale. Whale kills man.” At that rate you could fit all of Melville’s books in a tweet and still have room to learn what he ate for lunch when he wrote Billy Budd.

   So imagine how it feels to be writing 800 words or so here. That’s more than 35 tweets, which is fewer than the average daily output of someone on Twitter who wishes people cared about what he reads, sees laying on the sidewalk, and thinks about his new mouthwash. It makes this feel like a filibuster, like something as bloated as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade that’s eaten baked beans for a month.

   But hey, if I’m nothing, I’m adaptable. I can keep things down to 140 characters if I have to. But where will it end? We can cut out all vowels (thnx), use a number to replace several letters (gr8t), and use LOL as often as possible because it has one less keystroke than a smiley face emoticon, but if we’re really going to shorten communication we need to take it down to its essence, to the one character that gives you the feel without any of that icky, extraneous, boring content. Yes, punctuation. Plain and simple.

   !

   Got it?

©2009 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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