West London Girl

WLG on our sound bite culture

April
16

We’re a generation that blurs boundaries

We’re a generation lacking time, patience and satisfaction. We speed text, skim-read Facebook posts and tweets. We have deactivated the ‘deep-reading’ facility of our brains, which prevents us from engaging with serious book reading, according to cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf and other members of the Slow Reading Movement. In short, we have become a bumper sticker sound bite society.

Giles Coren has waded into the debate, perhaps going a step further by saying that journalists ‘are without question the least well-read people you will ever meet (unless you regularly meet chefs)’.

‘They spend all day “reading” newspapers, shorthand notes, filed copy, newswires, blogs, and when they come home they reckon they’ve done their “reading” for the day and now it’s time to drink cheap wine and watch Game of Thrones,’ he continued. Well that told his friends and colleagues.

This made me think of another things-aren’t-what-they-used-to-be rant. Some of Hot Danish’s friends are using dating app Tinder, ‘Surely men are losing the ability to chat girls up in bars,’ he said. I thought back to when I met HD in a club. I couldn’t actually hear his opening gambit above the din of the DJ. I do remember he repeated a joke at some point. ‘Call me old-fashioned but where’s the chase?’ he continued. ‘It’s just a hook-up app that doesn’t require any effort. I don’t think anyone’s using it to find lasting love,’ I responded.
‘I disagree. One of my friends is seeing someone he met on Tinder.’ The same friend isn’t only seeing one girl, I later learned.

I disagree with Giles Coren. We’re a generation that blurs boundaries. We read high-brow literature and low-brow gossip mags; we mix designer with high street fashion; see an exhibition on the Old Masters one week and one on street art the next. We dip in; dip out and when we’ve had our laughs on Tinder we flip over to something else.

What’s more, although instant communication can seem shallow and erode complex issues, a sound bite is the culmination of good writing and a good argument, as political writer Peggy Noonan once explained brilliantly.