OMG, I MANI TWIT THEEZ DAYZ!

     Sure you do. I’m so thrilled you found a format as wide and deep as your thought processes. And excuse me for reading it as ‘I’M A NITWIT…’
    Seriously, I have a feeling lately much like back when we snuck into movies in the middle of the screening. At a certain point someone would say ‘I think this is where we came in.’ and we’d know it was probably time to exit.
     The same could apply to on-line communication. From an early start limited by band-width and other tech issues, messages via the net evolved to the stage of thoughtful full replies. Letters which addressed each point in sequence. Obviously composed by someone sitting at a human-sized keyboard, a PC you could set a cup of coffee on, and a quiet environment.
     I’m not sure who started the current degenerative rot. SMS, IM, Xanga Pulse(?)
No, it was probably Twitter, along with wrist-phones Buck Rodgers would never have accepted. Twitter, with no sense of shame, calling today’s pronouncements ‘Tweets’. Yeah, that’s what I’d call ’em too, but as a pejorative, a curse-word.
And I get all too many e-mails which just drip ‘composed and sent by pecking at a small piece of plastic and silicon.’
When I was more active on Morse Code, we had heartfelt conversations from all over the globe, even within the limits of 30 words per minute and interference a couple hundred cycles per second on either side of us. I’m very much for a return to that medium, but what do I know?
    No, the main ‘insult’ is to the richness of expression. Were I to attempt to condense this post, for example, into 138 sleazy characters, I’d have to, like, mebbe keep the title, add ‘SUX, HUH?’ and then check if there was room to add ‘DAD WUZ RITE!”
    My father, bless his memory, tolerated several attempts by his children to bring him into the ‘real world’ of e-mail. Born in 1919, he had this thing for ink on paper… as a signifier that something real had been said by someone. Among us kids, I may have gotten as close as ‘progress’ allowed by patiently showing him how to at least print out each message. Something to hold in his hand. He then wrote the reply long-hand, and likely fretted over the loss of character as he laboriously translated the text into bits and bytes. Nowadays I assume that there are services where one can send a facsimile of the ‘original’, with all its potent curlicues. A market awaits.
     I myself have learned to depend on the ‘Delete’ button, instead of hand-crossing-out ‘scumbag’ in favor of ‘my esteemed colleague’.
At any rate, I do feel I’ve been witness to the idiotization of the means of communication, and it may be time to sneak out of the theatre, leaving the plastic stars to tweet each other in vapid peace.
‘I HAZ MANI TWITS’, they twitter, and frankly, my dears ‘I DNT GVE A DAM’