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Hallo again to all.
As tweets are stupefyingly short, our traditional 'front page letter' — that which you're reading right now — can be be downright loquacious. The words on this page average 600. And given that the typical word length is seven letters, that's a whole lotta tweets. But perhaps in this world of decreasing attention spans, our more meditative prose is increasingly archaic: 500 or 600 words? With no subheads? No embedded video? (The AO front-page letter may be becoming more like the 1662 Book of Common Prayer than we know.) So in the midst of all this brooding about text length, we decided to take the last five years of front-page letters written about this time of year — that would be The Season of the Endless Sundays After Trinity* — and see if we could summarize each in a tweet. Here beginneth the time machine of tweets:
Well, that exercise quite fails — which we rather
suspected. But then, unlike these front-page letters from which
we've tried to backwards-derive a tweet†, a true tweet is
purpose-written and born anew multiple times each day. The Anglicans Online letter is indeed purpose-written, but parturiated a mere once-a-week. We think hard before we write (Ready, aim, fire!) rather than write before we, well, think. (Fire, ready, aim!) Whether that's a valuable effort to make in this blink! world we live in, is a question worth raising. The Anglicans Online website, minus this letter, serves as a vast repository of 30,000+ links to Everything Anglican. Many of our readers have told us how valuable those links are. Those links would still be there, of course, even if this home page were blank. Or a photo. Or a tweet. What do you think? Do these mini-essays have a place in a world of micro-blogging? Or have they become vestigial, like printed newspapers? Tell us your thoughts, if you would. (You're not limited to 140 characters.) We're listening. We're thinking. And, most likely,
we'll keep writing. |
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We've been thinking about tweets. Most of you probably
know that the term means 'brief messages', limited to 140
characters (including spaces), which are the p