by Jennifer Doneske

Created on: August 05, 2008

"Do you expect me to read all that?!"

That's the question I've probably heard more often in online community forums than any other question in the history of questiondom. It seems that, for the vast majority of forum readers and posters, any post longer than two sentences produces immediate attacks of migraines and sudden onsets of ADD. Granted, I do tend to write quite a lot - I'm infamous for my Epic Posts(tm) which string together anywhere from three to thirteen (my current record) fully-packed posts into one super-uber-mega post - but the level of utter impatience and unwillingness to read even a little bit paints an incredibly discouraging picture of Generations X and Y.

What I find most fascinating is that in this new era, tentatively titled both the Information Age and the Communication Age, young people growing up today seem the most unwilling to take in new information (unless it comes in the form of an easily digestible music video or a super-trendy cable documentary of a guy with a neat accent pissing off crocs for an hour), and level of communication in the Communication Age seems to be degrading, making that era name a little too ironic for my comfort.

The Internet, even with its Flash web content and its snazzy graphics and the lightning-fast broadband connections to download it all at eye-blink speed, is still primarily a textual medium - e-communication, by its very definition, is text-based. We have e-mail (which is text), chat rooms (which are text), instant messaging (which is text), message boards (which are text), and, of course-the lifeblood of the Internet - websites (which, no matter how much Macromedia or Dreamweaver or PhotoShop play a part, are still primarily text). But the more a fixture the Internet becomes, and the more children and adolescents grow toward adulthood surfing its ubiquitous tides, the less tolerant of text they seem to become. They want an idea summed up in ten words or less, no matter how much is lost or how useless the idea becomes when dumbed-down and trickled out to that bite-sized a level. They want ideas fed to them, instead of having to exert a bit of effort to attain them (even the simple and readily available effort of just reading - an ability they ought to be thankful for, considering how extremely widespread illiteracy used to be even just less than a century ago).

On top of this, the impatient, "I want it right now in ten words or less" people have begun to develop a marked impatience with words themselves.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>