Thursday, August 12, 2010

After microblogging...?

With due respect to those who still find the motivation to put their thoughts on paper and keep those thoughts tucked away in a chest of drawers and other hideaways, it seems keeping a journal or penning thoughts in a diary have joined the list of archaic human habits.

The pervasive growth of the internet and I guess the inevitable conflation of web and logging seem to have rendered this habit nonexistent among the Echo Boomers and archaic among the Baby Boomers.

It is a curious thing to me that the web gurus who coined the word blogging didn’t conjoin ‘web’ with ‘write’ to form ‘brite’ (or maybe even WWWrite or Webnotes…Botes???) but instead chose a rather blasé word, log. Is it a subtle indication that fingers’ furiously striking the keyboard is nonchalant compared to the art of putting ink on paper? Or did they foresee that whatever was conjoined with the Web would become infectious?

Whatever was the thought behind that choice it sure has made handwriting an antiquated art. And now there microblogging is doing the same to blogging. 'Say what you have to to, in 140 characters' is the new mantra! It is the ‘pressed-for-time-but-have-a-lot-to-say- and-share’ amongst us who have further evolved blogging into mircoblogging. I am debating what would come next?

Nanoblogging, maybe?

I think that would be the next phase of blogging. Human minds would soon find 140 characters limit too much to fill in and so may blog in Morse codes ? Not because of the stealth factor of a coded language but because we can then communicate at lightning speed and we don’t need to practice our ABCs.

Any thoughts there?

1 comment:

  1. Been thinking a lot about the same thing too...simply because of the emphasis that is placed on handwriting even now in all Indian schools. Give kids computers and let them use their creativity to invent the language of the future. :)

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