New York Juan: July 2009

Friday, July 31, 2009

the difficulty of putting thoughts down (or not)

damn, haven't blogged in a while. maybe the blog is largely dead.

ever since i started using a PC, my pencraft has completely deteriorated. i used to write prose and poetry with ink and paper. now i've done away with all of them (including the prose and poetry part).

blogging solved the itch to write somewhat, even if i was just doing it for myself (my comic blog has lots of funny gems - well, to me that is). but the volume of that does rival or exceed anything i wrote pre-computer era.

but at the same time, you run into the risk of not being able to put anything interesting (again, primarily to yourself) on your blog, with time considerations, and if it isn't your bread and butter. or you go into a funk and brood with writer's block.

recently, i've found myself reborn in a way with twitter, microblogging as much of my thoughts as i can. i had a great run tweeting inside an ER, and i was wondering if my friends were actually witnessing my death via the internet.

the loss of lengthy exposition, both in reading and writing, is pretty much the sign of the times. nothing much holds our attention span for so long, and we can't even write a decent email at times. i try to compensate by committing thoughts to the web, but even that requires you fire up the computer. in the last holdouts i see, my wife is fond of sending actual cards to family, even with just a few written words meant to connect somehow.

despite twitter's 140 character limit, i find myself not being hampered by it, and expanding my train of thoughts to several tweets. of course, this may be the issue with text messages, because you're actually paying for it, and thus are constrained to squeeze in as much info as you can in one message. which is crap because so much is lost in the message, you run the risk of being misunderstood, and also not to mention, you perpetuate the devolution of spelling, grammar and punctuation. i try not to fall into that trap with twitter.

perhaps soon we will just be down to communicating with mashed letters, numbers and symbols (u a$$!). the spoken word could devolve into grunting. oh, the irony.