©2013  by  Raymond Alexander Kukkee

Snippets, the Kaleidoscope of Today's Media

Have you noticed?  Snippets are everywhere.  In the newspaper. On the internet.  Running across the bottom of your cable television like an endless, mindless parade,  140 Twitter-Times-Roman ants carrying urgent-bits and info-bits. Little bits. Peppy bits. Warning bits. Tornado hits, tragic tracks, Hillary tidbits, Harper hooey-bits, Obama pipeline pips in bits and pieces. Trials, Tensions, Texting.   All in color.  Erratic, frantic, frenetically. Almost enthusiastically.  Artificial, hyper-newsbits. Digest them quickly.  More are on the way. Everything is now magically a mini-headline demanding only a few seconds of your attention span. No thinking required. Don't forget the commercials. At times snippets are indeed colourful, a dime-store kaleidoscope of today, but never meaningful, cohesive, or  thoughtfully arranged.

Go ahead, try it, rearrange the Snippets

Go ahead, be a brave  reader writer doozer, turn the gadget. Give life a twist. Yes, you can rearrange life and the snippets too. The view changes, but alas, the point of view through the tiny peep-hole remains the same. The delusion changes to a breathtaking new delusional rearranged view of bureaucratically-approved news life. Sometimes the view appears to be geometrically perfect. Different perspective, different arrangement, the media is great at commanding attention-- but does it change the facts and offer more information? No. At best, more pre-arranged snippets.  Rearranged or not, snippets offer little but entertainment and  illusion akin to reruns of old cable movies. Hundreds of channels but the same fare, over and over. Pass the popcorn.  Snippets persist, procreate, and proliferate. Everywhere. Sadly stuffed with frenetic news bits, we seldom hear 'the rest of the story'.  Each new day offers dozens of new snippets suffocated with reruns and stale popcorn. The trend to Snippets challenges real life As writers, we're aware it may be simple to create 4 or 5-word snippets.  "Boy finds cat",  'Volcano in Mexico erupts',  'Pizza truck catches fire',  'Dog does homework',  'Late Pizza Overcooked, lawsuit filed ' ,  Maple Leafs win Stanley Cup , "Dick and Jane see Spot run" . Wait. Just a a minute, that sounds familiar,  wasn't that an OLD Grade One public school reader? ' News"about ...Dick and Jane, Sally, Puff, and Spot? Is our media teaching us to read at Grade 1 level, making it simple, dumbing the populace down to distract and  discouraging interest in reality, abstract, persistent thought and  critical thinking?  Grab the attention of the reader in the first thirty seconds for what?   To see Spot run?  Few other details are offered to suggest otherwise. How about reading and writing about real life, which involves the simple necessity to think logically?   Be forewarned, --such endevours may include actually reading and writing long sentences, maybe ten or eleven words in a row. A real challenge. Maybe a baker's  dozen. Think about it. Do you like snippets?  Do you write snippets? Are snippets affecting how you read and your ability to write? How you think?  Has constant exposure to snippets done anything to your attention span?    How are snippets affecting you?  See Spot Run.... # Is that Incoming I hear?