Deborah Tannen writes about a phenomenon I myself had been noticing recently in Did You Catch That?. I really started to notice this trend toward fast-forward speech this past year. It's been painfully apparent in movie trailer ads, and in shows like the Gilmore Girls. I'm thankful for my TIVO and closed captioning, to catch some of what is said very quickly on shows like the West Wing. And she mentions EXACTLY what I'd been thinking: "Hollywood producers, according to the Wall Street Journal article, think people seem smarter if they talk faster."

I've been noticing with alarm the increasing trend to dismiss people as unintelligent if they speak with a regional accent of any kind, and if they speak at less than a breath-taking pace. While accents and slower speech have always been a cause for stereotyping a person or region as stupid, it's happening more and more and one needs less and less of an accent to qualify for a stupidity label. Anchor-person speech is the only truly acceptable accent, and quick speech is equated with quick thinking - and thus intelligence. Pauses are seen as dullness and not deliberation and thoughtfulness. Tannen mentions nearly every single thing I'd been pondering lately, and then some.

I wonder what this means for the written word? In my anthropology class we've read a number of original pieces of 19th century thinkers like Spencer. Some of the pieces felt plodding because the writers would include a bazillion examples for a single point. The idea, one of my professors explained, was to overwhelm the reader with examples. Apparently Victorian era readers were impressed by that and took it as a sign that the writer was more intelligent and that his ideas were more sound.

Fast-forward (no pun intended) to today. I'm finding that few people take the time to read longer, thoughtful and thorough posts to listservs. They simply react to keywords and never bother to fully read the ideas presented in something larger. (Usually this means that they miss the point or get it wrong entirely.) Most blogs are compilations of short-and-sweet bits. Very few are essay-long entries every day, and in fact I've seen people complain about email or posts that are "too long". Has our reduced attention span gotten so bad that we can barely take the time to read a full page or listen to someone speak in sentences longer than a few words? Have we gotten so used to rapid communication through satellites, cell phones, and instant messaging that we just can't pause to think about what someone said before responding?

I find this both fascinating and somewhat disturbing, since I'm the kind of person who writes reams and reams. It gives me pause and I wonder what it means for the future of my own writing or teaching techniques. And too, I wonder what will happen as the height of the Baby Boom population tips this nation's age-scale over toward the elderly. So much of technology is built for the fast, the quick, the nimble fingered and sharp of eye-sight, there's sure to be an elderly backlash.

UCP UNVEILS ACCESSIBLE COMPUTERS FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES
United Cerebral Palsy of Central Pennsylvania announced that it is installing Internet workstations accessible to the disabled in dozens of public libraries across the region. The PCs will be networked into a local demonstration lab, allowing disabled to receive specially tailored IT training. The initiative, officially known as the Accessible Internet Workstation and Infrastructure Technology Project, is funded by the US Department of Commerce's Technology Opportunities Program (TOP). UCP received approximately $344,000 for the initiative. (SOURCE: Yahoo! Finance, AUTHOR: UCP Central Pennsylvania]

Conferees in Congress Bar Using a Pentagon Project on Americans
By ADAM CLYMER, New York Times
A project intended to find terrorists by monitoring e-mail and commercial databases cannot be used against Americans.

MMA wants to close down cyber cafes
By Abdullah Iqbal, Lahore
At a time when, on the orders of the federal minister for information technology, the Pakistan Telecommunications Corporation Ltd (PTCL) is filtering the Internet for anti-Pakistan and pornographic material, resulting in drastically reduced speed for Internet Service Providers (ISPS) and users across the country, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) said it would like to see cyber cafes banned. With home computers still in limited use because of their cost, most Internet users rely on cafes, which now exist in even small towns and villagers. As such, a closure of these cafes would drastically reduce Internet usage. Commenting on this, a spokesman for the MMA in Lahore said: "We think in cafes the Internet is not used for education, but only for recreation or immoral activity, so this would not adversely impact anyone." He also held that while the move to filter the Internet was "good" it was not enough and more needed to be done. [More at web site]

SHARP CREATES TINY TV DESIGNED FOR DOLL HOUSES
Takara Company, a toy maker in Tokyo, is planning to sell a dollhouse whose furniture includes a postage-stamp-size real TV manufactured by Sharp. The tiny but real TV has a 1.5-inch display, volume and channel controls, video recording capability, and liquid crystal display technology, and it hooks up to a video game machine. (AP/San Jose Mercury News 19 Feb 2003)

I'll admit it... I want one of these mini-TV's. Hey, I LOVE dollhouses and just wiring them up for lights fascinates me.

More stuff: A fascinating (if somewhat morbid) bit about the donor end of organ donation. And from the BBC: In pictures: Pakistan and India's harsh weather. (The snow pictures are precious.)

Oh, and on this Day, February 20th, in 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. In other space news, NASA's Mars Odyssey Points To Melting Snow As Cause Of Gullies and NASA advances space station lifeboat.

This article is a bit old (February 5th) but interesting still. NASA is taking great care to respect the different religions of the Columbia astronauts and their families in the recovery process. "Five of the seven crew members were adherents of major world religions -- Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism -- whose traditions for funeral rites have added a sensitive layer to the Columbia investigation." I believe remains of all the astronauts have been recovered and identified at this point.

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