“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” –T.S. Eliot

Many people think back to their juvenile literature classes and remember that Farenheit 451 was a cautionary tale.  They then assume to remember that it’s a cautionary tale against oppressive governments that burn books.  I would proffer that this ‘oppressive fascist regime’ interpretation is a remnant of post-war public school social engineering.  I think that Bradbury might just as much have been lamenting the death of the book as a medium.  The populous of his future dystopia voluntarily stopped reading– preferring abridged versions to formal novels, then pamphlets, and finally, a small steady diet of word-pablum from the government.

I am a few days into Twitter so far, and I am starting to think that we may be one step closer: books became articles several decades ago.  The web shortened those further to summaries, and RSS shortened the news even further.  On a personal level, publishing has exploded; everyone’s an author, a film critic, a technomaven, a pop-diva queen.  However, the publishing medium is getting shorter and shorter.  Back in the day, we had to code our HTML by hand (dammit).  Soon enough, we publi-shit-izens [yes, intentional] realized we could get attention and traffic by simply uploading pictures of our cat, or describing the toast we had that morning.  TypePad made this all too easy.  Blogs got shorter.  Now we’ve come to twitter, and we’re down to a simple 160 characters.  Services now can simply ping each other’s mobile phones and tell you if a friend is within 500 feet (physically).

My money is on the iPhone app that can sense your mood from your body heat and movement while it sits in your pants pocket– and broadcasts out to all your peeps when it judges that you’re likely in heat.

Mind you, I’m not passing judgment one way or the other on this.  It’s not evil or good– the text is just getting progressively shorter.  I am still trying to figure out if it’s because the reader attention-span is getting shorter, or because 99.9% of the masses have anything viable to say beyond 160 characters.  I suspect the latter.

This post took me ten minutes to write.  I still haven’t said jack that has not been said a thousand times previously.  Do you feel smarter now that you’re at the end?  This post was really just a way to get my twitter address out: @davejenk1ns

note: that is a real photo of a real book burning in 2007 New Mexico, United States.  Some Christians think Harry Potter is evil.