MediaVidea

A verbose age?

Twitter, Blogs, SMS/Text, IM, people glued to their cell phones – are these signs of a verbose age?

Are we more talkative than ever before?
Talk in these times comes in many flavors and is not limited to spoken words.

There is something poetic about bloggers discussing the merits of the 140 characters limit by the uber/tool of the moment Twitter.

In his ‘lovenote’#2 (Nick Carr’s term) for Twitter, J. Governor he takes on my deliberate rant against Twitter, where he says, with some merit, I should add, that it is indeed possible to say all that you want in 140 characters, adding that there are far too many words in circulation.

For your consideration, here is a Hemingway short story in less than 10 words:
"For sale. Baby shoes, Never worn".

If you are sure that you can beat Hemingway in 140 characters, you are indeed entitled to complain about the excess words to the Oxford dictionary people.

However, Nick Carr has taken up issue, saying that rather than signaling a society that goes for brevity, Twitter is actually a signal that people are more verbose than ever before.

And I often wonder how people argue on micro-publishing tools like Twitter. It would require more than half a dozen messages to get one point across.

P.S. This is a faster age too- I read a BBC story yesterday about people in cities talking faster than ever before.

Labels: blogging, twitter

posted by Pramit Singh @ 5:00 PM