All Important Rubbish Made to Publish Made to Last

It's that time of year again I allow myself to write the worst easiest kind of blog post.

The observant amongst the readership (a tiny minority within a tiny minority, so nobody) have probably noticed the slight drop in the total number of posts. Well, you have now that I've called attention to it. In preparation for coming in from the cold I cleaned up a couple of early posts and outright deleted a few. My intention to have reached 300 posts by now has, in addition to a slump in productivity, been set back. I did notice, however, that there are numerous entries that consist of nothing more than a link and a comment. Had Twitter been around in 2005, I would probably have had plenty to say - though whether it would have been of any substance at 140 characters is another matter. I like to think of Twitter as the second coming of the telegraph because it allows me to shoehorn an old quote:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

The substance of Twitter only exists in links to external articles or other media. Which really makes it a glorified mailing list, rather than a medium in its own right. It would be like turning on the TV and watching scrolling text of recommended reading material. As I found in trying the site, the medium is so restrictive that it actively interferes with communication - whether forcing one to condense text to fit the character limit or to work around it by fragmenting an observation across several posts. Just being aware of that cap affects expression. Something has to be dropped or otherwise modified to conform to the restriction. The medium influences thought.

On Blogger, I can think as I write. My last few posts have, due to a bout of writing block, been incomplete when I started working on the assemblage of observations. Without freedom from such technical impositions, I could never have followed those thoughts to conclusion. For me, the joy of writing is knowing you have communicated information as effectively as you wished to. At this point, I'm well aware that Twitter is more akin to conversation than discourse, but I've heard it credited for the Arab Spring one too many times and feel I have to hammer the point home.

Also, the blog is six years old today and I'm quite chuffed that my lengthier posts score under 30 (university graduate reading level) on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. If you find this blog too verbose, I'm sure Twitter can accommodate you.

Written July 2011
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