Honey, I Shrunk The #Words
Culture, Digital“Flash fiction,” as an example of miniature literature, is not new, and antedates social media. But, the advent of Facebook and Twitter, and its clones, may have, fanned the trend toward pithiness. They have fostered a written culture where brevity trumps it all.
Ornate, mammoth sentences à la Virginia Woolf, have fallen by the wayside of history. Modern thoughts are conveyed in far, less long-winded constructions. This, in itself, is not a worrisome development. Whittling down a piece of text, from size 18 to size 2, without losing its essence, calls for talent and finesse.
Go to the blogging platform, Tumblr, and one will find oneself witnessing an endless parade of pictures. Imbecilic, solipsistic, intelligent, grungy, sentimental, graphic, gastronomic, scenic, artistic, aesthetic, idyllic, the range of still-photographs and cinegraphs, arrayed, is limitless.
But—barring those posted by news organizations, a slim fraction has captions. What they do have, however, are tags.
An image draped in nothing but a few hashtagged words, feels deficient, de-contextualized, and disembodied. Admittedly, they are a wonderfully efficient way to sort, but do a poor task of informing the viewer of the content.
And, as if to compensate for the absence of any sort of descriptive element, tags have gotten ridiculously longer, some sentence-length.
I recently came across a few, which stood out for their sheer monstrosity.
“Too early in the morning for this,” went one.
“Your lips make me cry,” read another.
Both accompanied a set of animated GIFs that shows a platinum-haired teen furiously gesticulating—over and over again. These tags are wordy, but reveal nothing. They answer none of a thinking person’s queries: What is this? Who is this? What does it show?
To express oneself, in writing, through a bunch of tags, is analogous, I feel, to reading cereal boxes, as opposed to books. If one has the leisure to craft a protracted tag, then, surely, that person also has the time to write a proper sentence.
Now, take a gander at the virtual pinboard, Pinterest, touted to be the hottest social network of the day. An infinitely more aesthetically pleasing sight than Tumblr, it is a collage of “pins” of stuffed tomatoes brimming with cheese, a tastefully decorated breakfast nook, a lush backyard grotto, a Darth Vader-inspired desk lamp, and more dainties, curios, doodads, and bling.
The act of “pinning” is addictively simple. Each time one plucks out a shiny and thumbtacks it, one is served a small “Description” box, in which to type out, well, a description. Inconveniently enough, a scant few do. The “pinners” choose instead, to let others know about how they feel about it, typically in single-word expressions like “want,” “perfect,” “yum.”
Perhaps, all this is the equivalent of the “lazy web” phenomenon, where Internet consumers, too lazy to summon even a search engine, outsource their assorted queries to their social networks.
[…] ZOUCH, April 30, 2012. […]