If you can”t finish this column, we”re in big trouble.
By “we” I mean everyone who reads. Because we”re all in this together, 477 words or bust.
Let me explain. Last night, I was three sentences into a pretty dense short story when my eyes unfocused and began watering. I shook my head like a dog with water in his ear, mentally slapped myself and restarted the story at the beginning.
Two paragraphs later I went cross-eyed again. I stopped there and asked myself, quite sternly, what I had just read? I didn”t have an answer for me.
Reading is by necessity an exercise in schizophrenia, but interrupting yourself to check yourself for comprehension is a little abnormal. My attention span, which usually stretches from one snack to the next, snapped at a paltry 30 seconds of nose-in-book time. And I don”t think I”m the only one.
The modern day birthplace of new language, the Internet, has a name for the phenomena that afflicted me last night ? “Too long; didn”t read” (Tl;dr). The cyber slang is a handy response for any online reader confronted with a body of text more than a few sentences. Wikipedia article describing the function of an internal combustion engine? Tl;dr. Instruction manual for your slick new Porsche? Tl;dr.
Indictment for reckless driving? Tl;dr. It”s a phrase for a whole generation of readers used to consuming information in efficient, concise bites. It”s an abbreviation that calls out for abbreviation.
It”s no coincidence that tl;dr originated online. In a place where you can pick the collective brain of the human race, where hundreds of different ideas and people are spread out on a brightly glowing smorgasbord, why would you spend your time sampling just one? Our current lexicon is one that embraces brevity ? Twitter, texts and status updates have forced us to communicate in a new kind of digital haiku.
And tl;dr isn”t just limited to the Internet. Television shows are designed around seven-minute mini segments. Commercials are nothing if not one-minute stories. Billboards fly by, condensing complex ideas into a single phrase. Most of the information we see in our daily lives is designed to be processed with a cursory glance and does not tax us intellectually.
So back to me, on the couch, cross-eyed and yawning.
Why has reading gotten harder? My attention span has become a victim of the efficiency of modern language. Reading books and telling stories difficult exercise in organizing events, building impressions of characters and making predictions based on what”s been read.
Because I don”t do it enough, that part of my mind has atrophied.
So for those of you who skipped down to the bottom, I”ll leave you with two words of advice: Read more. And for the rest, who read every word, congratulations. I guess you didn”t need to.
Ben Mullin is a Lake County native and an English/journalism student attending California State University, Chico. He will spend his summer as a contributor to the Record-Bee. You can reach him at BenjaminMullin14@hotmail.com.
