Deepa Agashe wrote on 1/4/19 2:01 AM January 4, 2019:
So I too am converging on the idea that the current crop of kids just don’t write long-form. Perhaps I am paranoid, but I worry that a lot of interesting views will be lost over time because nobody is bothering to expound on them. A century from now, can historians piece together our narratives from the shards of twitter?
I've been thinking a lot recently about the effects of technology on generations, particularly the Millennials and the Zedheads (Generation Z). The Millennials are the Internet generation, in that they've always had access to the Internet, while the Zedheads are the cellular generation.
My own current crop (3 Millennials and a Zedhead) contains 3 writers and one non-writer. They rarely post to social media, preferring smaller, more private venues like texts, game boards, shared interest forums, and blogs. They also spend a fair amount of time in private chat rooms (Discord, Slack), which might be the place for those mid-size thoughts that our generation (ahem) would expound upon in email.
They use email for school or work. Rarely for sending documents. While I was composing this email, my Millennial son sent me a document via Discord. I asked my daughter to send me a recipe out of a cookbook I'd passed on to her. She texted a photo of the recipe to me instead of typing it into an email.
It is possible to transmit longer thoughts via text or chat or Twitter, but they come in staccato bursts. They feel telegraphic to me. There's an increased immediacy to them. The reader has a greater responsibility to piece them together.
Some months ago, a friend asked me why I think so many Millennials are transgender.
"Because they can!" I replied at the time, "It's an option for them in a way it wasn't for us."
The question recurs for me. Sometimes I wonder if it's environmental pollution in the form of plastics, hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals. Is human sexuality being altered the same way certain types of pollution change the sexes of fish?
This is the Internet generation, though, and the Internet does a wonderful job of transmitting ideas. A young transgender person of my day was an oddball who had to wing it. A young transgender Millennial can go online and find endless descriptions and flavors of gender experience and expression.
The Boomers were the television generation. I've often wondered why the tumult of the 60s isn't more often explained by the driving technology of the time. TV offers a strict timetable, a limited range of choices, and broad appeal. Boomers are really good at changing the channel when they don't like the reality that's playing, but they lack imagination. They're passive and they live inside the box.
I don't know much about the radio generation or the telephone generation or even the early automobile generation.
In many ways, the Zedheads remind me of the telegraph generation. Their communication is limited by the tiny boxes they hold in their hands. They communicate with images (hello SnapChat) and short cryptic messages. (Just try typing an essay on a standard phone). Friend circles overlay semantics on words and emojis, so the messages are public, but the communication is private.
The early telegraph operators did it all with dots and dashes. They got so good at Morse code that they could tap out messages to one another at conversation speed even when they were in the same room. They'd go to a boring family event and tap private messages to one another on the arms of their chairs.
The Millennials might use the same tiny boxes, but they were shaped by the Internet on computers. Their vision is more expansive, and they are interested in categories, textures, communities. They are native to the balkanized Internet, and they surf it with ease. They broadcast more than Zedheads do, and they use more words to express themselves.
(My Zedhead is a prolific writer; he churns out novel- and screenplay-length works weekly. On a good day, he writes 140 pages of text. After I checked his written output totals with him, he asked about this conversation and then immediately reported on it to his friend circle on SnapChat. It took him 10 seconds, max, to report on the adorable doings of the dolties.)
I was going somewhere when I started this email, but writing often takes me in unexpected directions.
Technology does that. Humans create these new technologies and then are astonished at where they take people. Could Gutenberg have predicted that the printing press would break the Church's monopoly on information? (And yet the Catholic church is still by far the wealthiest organization on the planet, all these hundreds of years later.)
Young people will lose some of what we had because they have gained so many things we didn't have. They have their mix of environmental conditions, and they do the best they possibly can with them.
When I arrived at cell phone ownership (very late, in 2016), the sense of victory I felt when tapping a message in on the tiny virtual keyboard utterly eclipsed the banality of the resulting text. Even now, when I have a slightly larger phone and better texting skills, I reach for a device with a keyboard whenever I can.
I am of the pre-graphics computer generationback to the days of having to spell out the UUCP path. It's text all the way, baby. I can construct entire universes out of ASCII characters. I don't need no stinking images, no movies, no audio. The Internet was better when it was a non-commercial sea of plain text, she says with a curmudgeonly snort.
That day is gone, the day of Usenet and mailing lists, and it's not coming back.
I wonder if my sons will ever learn to drive. Perhaps self-driving cars will obviate that particular rite of passage.
Email programs continue to get worse. The color of my text changed somewhere mid-email, and some update got rid of all of the menu options to change the appearance of text in email. A judicious copy-paste fixed it, but I wonder what functionality will go next. Not only do I get to look forward to the loss of functionality in my human body, but I also get to experience it in my virtual life.
-- Heather Madrone ([email protected]) http://www.knitfitter.com/category/personal/ The Goddess moves mountains -- bring a shovel.
