After the colon: the desperate attempts of the computing and publishing industries to lay claim to our fleeting attention spans and make us more efficient.
Or...two very interesting articles in the Times today.
This piece intersects with some of my recent meandering about technology and memory. It expresses resentment toward the endless drive for efficiency that is destroying our ability to concentrate in the name of making us skilled multitaskers. Scattered and shallow baby, that's the future.
This piece is more entertaining for those whose livelihood is tied to books. It discusses the ubiquity of subtitles in today's publishing industry. Publishers must grab our attention with informative and entertaining subtitles. It truly has gotten out of hand and the author offers a number of amusing examples. What he does not mention, but which is evident to me as a lapsed graduate student, is that the trend is not simply imposed from the top down. Doctoral candidates regulary give their dissertations subtitles of their own design. In grad school I heard these subtitles referred to as "postcolonics." And there were some doozies. In fact in all the years I spent in grad school, I cannot remember a single dissertation without a subtitle--usually of ridiculous proportions. As a publishing trend it strikes me as somewhat counterintuitive: shouldn't people who read have, relatively speaking, the healthiest attention spans amongst consumers?
