Re: stringer, Blogging and decent money

**"* M* <B*@verizon.net>**

JF, good question, where did the super short attention span come from? The 
telegram? Morse code? Smoke signals?

Literature had Hemingway dumping Victorian prose flourishes long before MTV 
came along. It was shocking back then.

In the 'eighties, email messages were sent and received via phone 
modem--tones were turned into onscreen text (usually while the sender was 
watching MTV). There was a recognizable whining sound when you had a solid 
connection but it might not last. Messages came through with garbled 
spelling and funny marks if they came through at all. Today's computer 
masters, kids then, don't care about spelling and punctuation but they value 
brevity.

Could be that we're abbreviating ourselves right back to the stone age.

--Betty

Delaware County, PA, too much snow here, too.

 ----- Original Message ----- 
From: <FRIELSTER@aol.com>
To: <gardenwriters@lists.ibiblio.org>

> Betty, that phrase hit home. Short and twittery is a hard style to  learn.
> More accurately, one might say, writing in English is hard to UNlearn.
> Like anything else, it's interesting to track back and try to pinpoint 
> where
> such things began. Text messaging -- sorry, texting -- is an obvious
> influence on today's truncated prose. But did it begin with USA Today, 
> where
> everything had to be reduced to a few phrases and hardly any stories were 
> permitted
> to jump to an inside page? Did the national attention span begin to 
> shrink
> when MTV begat vertigo-inducing jump-cut editing? Or were those just 
> symptoms
> of a trend we were ready for, primed for by the ever-increasing demands 
> on our
> eyes and ears?
> The sentence is dead. Long live the bullet point.
>
> --  JF in snowbound Lanc. Co. PA . Snowing all night and the  first plow
> finally went by just a minute ago.
> > ---
> Everything old must be rewritten in the short new twittery  style. > --  
> Betty Mackey

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