A million tweets a day. That's 140 million characters. 3.5 billion text messages a day. That's 560 billion characters. All together, there are 700 billion individual letters being sent through the ether. You'd think with so many monkeys typing, that the new Shakespeare would emerge through sheer random chance. And yet, there you have it: New Moon, what not to say on a first date, and with whom everybody is watching Grey's Anatomy. Not to mention all those Facebook posts about breakfast, TV, and pictures of us eating breakfast and watching TV.
How many phone calls, texts, and postings are made just to tell someone where we are, where we're going, like miniature Gauguins? U, me, 2, 4, dinner, bar, drink, l8r, lol, wow, ok, gnite. We are requiring ourselves to say so little in such tiny ways. In the December 2009 issue of Vanity Fair Jim Windolf writes about how we are "Addicted to Cute," citing the popularity of cat videos on YouTube and the scientific evidence suggesting we are wired to respond protectively to cute things. By extension, he proposes that the demoralized American populace is taking refuge in infantile big eyed snuggies, hoping that someone will snuggle us through the bad times. Like little bleeting lambs, little tweeting birds, everybody is talking baby talk: repetitive, monosyllabic, and insipid.
