DailyPost 978
SHORT TEXTS
Reading is a trait that manifests in wonderful ways if done persistently in areas of your interest and with clarity of purpose. Every single successful and path breaking breaking professional in any field has to fall back on this habit at some point / points in life or throughout his whole lifetime. The size of the texts like textbooks were standardised earlier and so were the articles and other resource material and there was no chance of reaching a professional level of without going through that practice.
The digital revolution changed it all. Magazine and newspapers left the human mindspace, followed by books and articles and anything original. The distinction between the original and duplicate or copied was lost as people slowly lost the look, feel and utility of the original. People who did not read books, read articles, who did not rread articles read blogs, people who did not read blogs, read facebook posts and so on so forth to the extent that Twitter slowly became one stop shop for the short mode of communication and reading.
If you don’t read, what do your write. What do you connect your thoughts to, from where does contextual intelligence come from, how do you decide relevance and can you even have a vision of anything. Twitter doubled the length of post allowed on the platform to 280 characters, still on 1% of the tweets reach that mark. Most of the tweets have a length of 33 characters. This is where we have come to. Short, shorter, shortest is what we read and that is what we write. Is this education, learning and useful output?
Yuval Noah Harari, world’s leading thinker and writer connecting different worlds successfully and making a sense of all that is happening today is convinced of the fact that short texts are antithetical to our academic / intellectual growth. He would not have been able to.write what he does so brilliantly had be fallen into that trap. Only original worthwhile texts can propel you into the growth trajectory of life. We live in the knowledge world.
SHORT TEXTS MAKE YOU SHORT SIGHTED.
Sanjay Sahay