The Kids of Today

I travel to work by bus. Today I sat near the back. On the back seat were three school age teenagers. I'd guess about 15 years of age. I couldn't help but listen to their conversation as they were, as is the nature of groups of teenagers, quite loud. They chatted about the usual teenage stuff. Who's seeing who? who fancies who? who's dumped who? What caught my attention wasn't what they were talking about. It was how they communicated. The conversation consisted almost entirely of short sporadic staccato-like sentences. Just like this post so far.

Okay, enough of the silly stuff but if you've read anything from this blog to date you'll realise that I don't write, talk or think in this way. I'm much more verbose which I'm sure that to a teenager equates to very, very boring. I don't think that I used to talk like the teenagers of today so what's changed?

MTV? SMS? Sound bytes? Short attention spans? Directors like Paul Greengrass using an average shot length of 2 seconds in the Jason Bourne films? Well all of these I suppose, but the one that interests me most is SMS. Personally speaking I never really liked SMS'ing until I had a phone with a QWERTY keyboard. I just couldn't get past the frustration of three letters on a key in an unfamiliar layout. That didn't stop it becoming a massive global hit. Even my mum wanted to learn how to text. It's another one of the accidental heroes like UNIX that was never designed for adoption by the mass market. However as the world's desire for Smartphones, typically adopting QWERTY hard or soft keyboards, booms I wander what the future holds for the short attention span generation. Will they be a passing phase? Probably not, but I live in hope.