[lbo-talk] dustup revisited

shag shag at cleandraws.com
Fri Jul 25 16:27:03 PDT 2008


At 04:42 PM 7/25/2008, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>Doug:
>
>It's odd (as Steve Wasserman pointed out in his piece on the decline
>of the book review) that in a medium with theoretically no length
>limit, essays are shorter than ever.
>
>...............
>
>
>But there's a limit (or so the Internet mystics say) to our patience
>for long pieces, 'published' online.
>
>Tumblr -- the newly hailed answer to blog excess -- is reportedly at
>the vanguard of screen-presented minimalism.
>
>
>The unspoken fantasy is that we'll eventually be able to efficiently
>communicate via burst transmission: information dense but kilobyte
>light. A sort of hypertextual Hemingway-ism.

and facebook seems like another example. admittedly, i only joined to see if i could help perelman upload files to his page, but my observation thus far is that it's kinda like putting sticky notes up for your "status". E.g. Doug's current status is "rethinking his opposition to these things after having read Verlyn Klinkenborg on the subject."

whatever 'these things' are, i do not, but could ask.

it kinda reminds me of what happens when someone writes a serious ass, long blog post but, because they are reading from work, they don't have time so post some snippet as a response, feeling obligated or something.

i mean, nothing wrong with that, but it reduces everything to this wham-bam-thank-ya-ma'am world were you jump from one thing to the next as fast as a cable news program jumbs from story to story. no actual consideration of a topic, no long interesting exchanges.

as i think i likened it way back when, it's like being ina crowded bar and someone spills beer on someone and a fight breaks out and the crowd tumbles outward expanding away from the center until you are stumbling outside the back door of the bar, surrounded by the stench of piss and stale beer wondering what happened.

http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)



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