Welcome to the era of micro-communications

I’m a fan of brevity, and in the era of status updates, of witty online profiles, of Twitter and Snapchat (an app for images your recipient can only view for seconds), there’s plenty of brevity out there. As I write in my column about micro-communications:

Put down “Infinite Jest.” Turn off “Citizen Kane.” Yes, people still read novels and watch movies (I do), but this is an age that’s increasingly enthralled with and defined by — very, very brief communications. Fueled by the prospect of a mega-audience of online followers, today’s micro-communicators spin out their pithy phrases and status updates at a mind-boggling clip.

And is it all junk? I don’t think so. As I say, “It’s easy enough to deride this, to see it as a sign of everything wrong with our culture. But let’s put that sort of thinking aside and agree on this: Among all of the dreck, all of those idiotic rants and pointless observations, you’ll find any number of micro-communication masters — writers, in particular — who are making the most of these new forms by crafting personas ideally suited to the online world.”

And if you’re wondering about Snapchat? Well, I wrote about that app, and other new photo-sharing tools, in another recent column.