Brave the Brevity
I‘ll be honest: I can’t stand social media and its total dependence on hyper-truncated ideas, discussions, or emotions.
Facebook? You have 782 Friends? No, you don’t — I promise you don’t. Not if your definition of “friend” means anything more than a friendly stranger online who will pat you on the back or make you laugh occasionally. Sure, people have real family and friends on Facebook but overall the medium is hugely overrated IMO. Twitter? Get your “important” thought across in 141 characters or less? Get the F out. Not possible, Wally.
It’s not surprising most people under the age of 35 can’t be asked to read an email that’s even 5 or 6 lines long. ADD with heavy social reinforcement much, America? Today most people seem to have the attention span of a squirrel on speed, and everything around us seems to reinforce the frenetic pace. Our jobs, our phones, our friends… can a brother get a 10 minute TV time-out for some serious thought?
I accept that for better or worse (worse), this is the world as it is. Be brief or lose the audience is now normal, sad as it is. Even as a writer trying to provide useful ideas, you have to battle with a generation of readers who expect your copy to be boiled down onto the proverbial pan, most of the context and subtle feel of the idea evaporated away in the name of “we’re too busy.” Except we’re not too busy because as a nation we spend something like 4–5 hours a day putzing around on our phones and watching Netflix. There is time… for most everyone… we just have to admit to ourselves we’re filling a lot of “busy” time with aimless surfing, random comments on social media and text, and mostly worthless TV shows.
So I was laying there at 4:19 yesterday, face smushed awkwardly into my pillow, irritated that I couldn’t fall back asleep, and it hits me like a brick: the only way this blog can work, is to simultaneously keep it real but fit my ideas into the world’s “template.” Although here at Medium we tend to cheat a bit on the brevity. *slow motion fist pump*
That said, brevity scares the hell out of me. I feel like stuff always gets lost and my point is never made quite right. Something is always sacrificed. Humor, extra facts, even well-placed anger. Yes, it is fair to say I have a mild learning disability when it comes to brevity. Over the years I have beat my head against the desk more times than I care to admit trying to get the important thoughts down coherently, then realizing at the end it’s still too long by societal standards.
So in the spirit of making a true effort, I’ve renamed my Publication with the idea that instead pointing out the interconnected horrors of American new media, politics, and people gone haywire in long, winding stories, I’ll (try to) pick one annoying splinter of a topic and try to crush it like a bug in “3 minutes or less.” I noticed Medium lists a reading time with each story (interesting).
Three minutes or less — that’s Everest for me.
