Thursday, January 07, 2016

A case against 'short and sweet'

The current trend of excessive fondness for 'short and sweet' content is quite disturbing. As soon as people see four or more lines of text, they start frowning and squirming. 
Don't get me wrong: Brevity is good, but in its proper place. Excessive verbiage must be avoided. However, there's something wrong when witty one-liners start replacing a paragraph of meaningful thoughts. This seems indicative of shorter attention spans.
Shakespeare didn't become The Great Bard by spewing out catchy quotes; he had to write reams and reams of poems, sonnets and plays. Einstein didn't become The Genius of 20th Century by simply declaring E=mc^2 and walking away; he had to solve pages and pages of differential equations and tensor calculus to prove his theories. Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent the World Wide Web by casually typing WWW one fine morning; he had to support it with a markup language and protocol specifications and stuff.
As a junior software programmer, you need to hammer out scrollbars and scrollbars of code before you get to become a CTO or possibly even a CEO where you can demand one-page executive summary.
You can get away with a "Hey hi, what's up, b'bye", and still call it 'being social'… But the real conversation happens when both the parties have the depth and breadth to carry on the dialog beyond that.
TLDR: If you want to do some real reading or get some actual work done, then 'short and sweet' is probably not the best approach to go about it.