Some thoughts on deliberate versus constant communication

In my teens I was a pen pal with other teens sharing my interest in the Amiga
computer. We exchanged floppies with demos and some of us wrote letters
accompanying the disks, writing about whatever we found interesting. I always
looked forward to getting the next disks and letters.

The decades have passed, and now I get constant drips of some of the same
stimulation through micro blogging services and messaging systems. The
deliberate packages have been replaced with small droplets of information
flowing constantly. Instead of a nice meal three times a day, it's constant
snacking.

The telegraph linked the world together, making instant communication a fact.
The telephone added a chat service. It is not necessary with a lot of bandwidth
to communicate a simple fact. It is not necessary with very low latency to share
something nice.

What I am trying to say is instant communication of a handful of sentences in my
life seems to have replaced the deliberate act of creating something a little
less trivial I hoped somebody would enjoy. I am writing this essay, blog entry,
text as a way reflect a little upon deliberate communication versus chatter. I
am not in any way claiming chatter is bad, to exchange small nothings with
mainly implied meaning is an important and enjoyable activity for a human, but
in my life it seems shouting into the void in short form has almost totally
replaced the longer, deliberate forms.

When I open a text today, one of the first question I implicitly ask is "Why
should I care?" That's a defence mechanism against information overload, a
problem I never really thought about as a teen in a pre-internet world. This
makes me prioritize information dense non-fiction and almost exclusively read
masterpieces of fiction, cherry-picking my way through 6000 years of written
history. This is part luxury, part unhealthy over-consumption, because it leaves
little room for the dillettante. I strongly doubt I would have read this text if
written by somebody else. It does not present its conclusion clearly before then
succinctly presenting its arguments and any references. It just goes on while
the writer searches for words. This is a dillettante in clear need of a stricter
editor!

With a 9600 bps transfer, you can fill a normal 2000 character terminal screen
in a couple of seconds, far faster than an average person can read it. Still, to
read a web page with no higher information density, one is expected to bring
forth a multi-Mbps connection, and computation capacity dwarfing the
supercomputers of my teenage years. This is the perfect vehicle for constant
chatter, packaging the few sentences (or pictures) transmitted, in a large
package of bubble wrap. Therefore, I wonder whether low-bandwidth services might
bring back some of the deliberate in the act of writing an open letter to
unknown recipients. Limitations may make you think about every byte you expect
the recipient to read, listen to or view.

That's all, folks. I really just I don't spend enough time writing long-form.

Steinar Knutsen, 20210815T094839Z