Weighty tomes in a world where the young ‘twitter’
The world revolves ever faster and faster – or at least that part of it known as the Internet. No sooner do we think we are getting familiar with a novelty called “email” than the world revolves faster and email is overtaken by another novelty. This latest Internet craze is called – if you can believe it – “twitter”. It allows users to “micro-blog”: to post a message of just 140 characters to their network of contacts. Researchers say this is “a seismic shift in how people are using the Internet”.
The vocabulary is significant: “twitter”, “micro-blog”, and “just 140 characters”. Pity those who learnt to write with pens dipped in inkwells – and pity all the more those who have scarcely progressed beyond that stage. How to cope with such a frenetic world? Historians’ interest centres around timelessness, and they are more familiar with eras measured in centuries and recorded in (gasp!) books – or even (shock horror!) weighty tomes. What must concern us is the longer-term effect a world of twittering and micro-blogs will have on future historians.
A linked development is a recent claim that the young find it hard to concentrate for long periods – which may not come as a total surprise to many teachers. The claim is based on research showing that “connections between developing brain cells form most effectively when the brain is given regular breaks”. Such is the weight given in certain educational circles that pupils in some schools are being taught in lessons lasting just eight minutes, interspersed with breaks of 10 minutes for word games, or dribbling a football, or something similar.
Those of us educated in former “unenlightened” schools will be left marvelling that we managed to achieve our education by – erm – being educated. The question that sits up and begs to be answered though, is precisely the same one posed by the advent of twittering and micro-blogs. That is, ‘What will be the long-term effect on scholars of the future?’
John Fairweather Tall
