More Talk, Less To Say

 

 

Communications technology has proven beyond doubt that having the ability to say more does not mean that you have more to say.

 

The old ways of communication were slow and limited, forcing judgments on what was worth a slice of a limited delivery pie. Newspapers had the daily “news hole,” the space left over after the ads. Broadcast journalists had a time slot governed by both the clock and the sales staff ‘s success in finding sponsors. Even those of us who did our print journalism for wire services were constrained by 66-words-per-minute printers.

 

The result was that a lot of stories died when someone said there wasn’t enough space in the paper, or on the newscast, or on the wire for something that trivial.

 

That sometimes excluded the Obscure But Important. For the most part, it defended us all against the Obscure And Deservedly So.

 

No more. The steady clack of an old wire service machine that managed to work a full 24 hours without a break or breakdown could deliver just a tad more than 95,000 English words in a 24-hour day.  That’s about 4.5 million bits in a digital world – or slightly less than a broadband home internet connection can transmit in a second.

 

And that’s nothing like higher speeds now in professional use. So what does this communication bounty bring us?

 

n  From Granite City, IL, comes the news that a man and his daughter were arrested after a fight involving some folks she brought home from a bar. This is clearly worthy of attention because no other fights after bar visits have ever been recorded in Granite City or elsewhere.

 

n  A Massachusetts medical device maker has gone bankrupt, so arrangements are being made to dispose of the nine cadavers it used for training. The knee-slapper is that they were listed among the company’s assets in bankruptcy proceedings, clearly making it worth worldwide dissemination.

 

n  A rural Taiwanese man got bitten by a snake when he tried to use his toilet. And yes, it bit him there, which news helped mankind’s advance in ways not immediately apparent.

 

n  A lawsuit involving a man who may or may not have been deliberately kicked by a stripper after he may or may not have slapped her bottom too hard is clearly an important part of covering the nation’s judicial system, not to mention the behinds of all parties involved.

 

There are so many more examples available every day that it’s difficult to resist the impulse to scream – until you realize that doing so would cause someone to file 250 words on it for breathless (and brainless) relay around the world.

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