Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

America’s worsening attention span probl – Hey look, Pam just sent me a text…

Recently I have noticed a disturbing trend. People’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. In fact, if you’re like 85% of Americans under the age of 35, you lost interest after the words Recently I have noticed a disturbing trend. It’s an epidemic problem.

For the 15% of you still reading, let me explain. Thanks to texting, people now spell the words U and B4 because they don’t have the patience anymore to take the extra two seconds required to spell out you and before. God forbid the word might contain more than two syllables, such as a word like, well, syllables. People simply can’t be bothered – too many keystrokes. And when was the last time you wrote a personal handwritten letter? Let me guess. President Clinton was still dating Monica, right?

Thanks to Facebook, we have all become conditioned to posting micro comments on people’s “walls” which according to the Facebook Code of Condensed Communication Conduct (FCCCC) must not exceed 24 characters. Say your family dog passed away after 18 years, and you decided to express your grief with a message to your friends. Here is the response you would likely receive from one of your friends….

OMG! GR8 News. IC LOC has Twttr. Itz 4 Real. Deets B-low. TTYL RLWNM*

In the News Humor,Political humor,Pop culture humor

(* Translations for the TI – “Twitter-impaired”: OMG: “Oh My God”; GR8: “Great”; Twttr: “Twitter”; IC: “I see”; LOC: “Library of Congress”; Itz: “It’s”; 4: “for”; Deets: “Details”; TTYL: “Talk To You Later”; RLWNM: “Random Letters With No Meaning”)

In a critically important and bold act of government intervention, it was announced last week that the US Library of Congress (henceforth LOC) will soon be digitally archiving the entire collection of public tweets dating all the way back to Twitter’s inception in March 2006. How many tweets will that be? Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, many of which are vaguely intelligible, with the total to date numbering in the billions. It would take the average person reading 16 hours a day over six thousand years to read all the tweets posted to date or a long weekend to read all the ones having any remote historical significance.