The lng and the shooort of it

I do not tweet. I am not a twit. I do not believe that anything I do, which is of real enough significance that it needs to be shared with the rest of the world can be encapsulated in 140 or fewer characters.

Is this the result of an overly developed ego (an accusation heretofore unheard of in my life)? Do I have an overly inflated sense of self importance, convinced that my comings and goings, inherently important, require a minimum of expression which surpasses an SMS text?

I think that that's not it. I think that it might be that I am a product of a bygone era. I mean, who isn't. Almost all of us were born in the past, and those of you born in the future can hold your computerized prosthetic tongues. I write in long, discursive sentences, building ideas in a complex tapestry of phrase. When I write memos I write layered paragraphs, each one more important than the last (though by that logic, one would only need read the final paragraph). People have to read what I write to unlock the secrets. A subtle argument cannot be distilled into a single sentence, nor should it.

Sure, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet could become a twitter post (boy meets girl, families object, elope, double suicide, fin); the Gettysburg Address could be reduced to "87 years ago good guys died. Let's do good by them"; the Warren Commission report doesn't need much space at all (Lee Harvey? Maybe, Maybe not). But shouldn't we resist buying into the writing style which enables the MTV short-attention-span theater approach to pop culture? Shouldn't we cherish the time and energy it takes to engage the written word, unpack meaning, and consider ideas?

Why are we accepting that the brief summary is better than understanding the drawn out process by which a conclusion is reached? Sure, sometimes a bottom line, upshot driven approach is efficient and necessary, but often communication evolves and matures even over the course of a single conversation. Should we deemphasize reading and discernment skills?

I will continue to write too much (possibly to say too little). If you want some pithy sound bite which sums up a difficult idea in 7 words, look elsewhere.