Read an interesting article today one of my sis-friends sent to me. The article is called The Captioning of America and is about the editorial trend toward less content and more captions and sound bites. Being a fellow “wordsmither” myself, I found the distinction they draw between captions and sound bites to be rather interesting.

…captions aim to reveal, while slogans and sound bites tend to conceal.

Apparently, we are all getting to busy to read anything of length so the media’s response to this is less and less content. Which is all fine and well when we are talking about captions- that funny commentary accompanying a picture of a cat in sunglasses. But when we talk about sound bites, that’s sort of scary. Are we not demanding the media get to the point and thereby effectively giving them permission to tell us what they want us to hear?

To the average American, content itself is becoming obsolete. The world is increasingly just an index of what’s in it, conversation a distant derivative of things someone heard that someone read that someone said.

I mean really, how many times do we see people create controversy in response to a slogan or sound bite that is so brief it is out of context? All because we demand brevity. And how many times, have we done that? I am certainly guilty as charged, feeling like I get bombarded with so much information on a daily basis that it is a survival mechanism just to be able to filter thru it. When I get an email, for example, if it is very long, it automatically gets filed in the “Read Later” box, which most of the time doesn’t ever get read until my attention is called to it. Sometimes, I feel like I could spend my whole day just checking email. Unfortunately, that doesn’t pay very well.

So herein lies a problem. Where is the balance point between getting information in context and being able to digest it? Has the media not crossed an invisible line? And have we not crossed an invisible line on the other side of the spectrum? Do we not have somewhat of a “chicken and the egg” scenario here? Is this a classic case of the media’s response to our demands-demands that only when they are met we realize that is not really what we meant? Or is out-of context brevity the media’s extortion of our demands? Perhaps this is just merely the media’s attempt to compete for our attention in an over-cluttered, over-stimulated world?

I don’t really know, but perhaps the problem is even more fundamental than that. With all of the brilliant minds in this world, we might have quite simply just over-flooded the minds of consumers with too many choices. But whose responsibility does it become to adjust to this reality? Should we get better at filtering or should the media get better at filtering for us?

I don’t know. Perhaps a mind more brilliant than mine can put this all in context for me. But, I just can’t bring my commentary to a close without sharing the best part of the article with you.

A proposed replacement for the SAT, a test that assesses broader creative skills allegedly more predictive of college success, includes a section on caption writing. Brilliant idea. Writing funny captions for cartoons or photos calls on a wide variety of skills, among them the ability to read facial expressions, infer a situation’s emotional content, and express it in plausible, colloquial language that makes folks laugh out loud. These are far more useful life skills than correctly answering questions about a short essay on papaya production.

Maybe, just maybe, the problem is we are educating our nation on theories with not enough balance spent in practicum experiencing the application of those theories in the real world?

Maybe the problem is more complex than just one issue?

Your thoughts?