My wife and I are both reading F451 and we like it. I’m especially enjoying Ray Bradbury’s succinct writing style and character development. Plus the alternative future history is pretty interesting (though not necessarily as interesting/fantastical as Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep which I just finished).
One quote though really struck home with me:
“Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”…
“Classics cut to fit fifteen minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume…” (pg 86)
Sounds like the history of online communication: web pages, blogs, twitter. Information summed up in 140 characters or less. I’m not saying that we’re living in a world remotely like that of the scarcy, information deprived world of Montag the “fireman”, but it’s interesting that Bradbury was at least part-way right with his forward thinking. Information will become more and more bite-sized…
Thank goodness we still have books available to inform our posts, pages and tweets.
An important point to note, however, that there is more information available now than in other time in history.
Our attention span isn’t getting smaller, rather the demand for our attention is getting greater.
How do you compensate? You communicate with less. But our shorter messages carry more weight because of their hyper linked associations.
Where would twitter be without tinyurl.com? It’s an interesting question, but the url shortener services that have sprung up are revealing.
The availability of more information, depth and meaning is always just a click and or google search away!
…or a search.twitter.com away…
yes! let me tweet that 🙂