The Dumbing of America - Twitter Edition

Great, if a couple of American college students have their way, the next big thing will be Twitterature. Two freshmen from the University of Chicago are planning to take a collection of classics from English literature - including works by Dante, Shakespeare and James Joyce - and boil them down to 20 or fewer tweets. So if you can't commit to reading the Cliff Notes version of King Lear or Ulysses, soon you should be able to plow through the Twitterlit version in about five minutes.

Sorry, but I think this just helps to make my point from this post: "What Would George Orwell Think of Twitter?" I wrote a couple of weeks ago - namely that the truncated tweets, which by design must be 140 characters or less, do not provide enough space to express complex thoughts and ideas; a bad thing in today's increasingly complex world.

Sure, Twitterature is a gimmick by two aspiring writers who, apparently, have no original ideas of their own. But the point of reading a novel isn't just the mechanical transfer of information, it is suppose to be an enriching experience, something I don't think it's possible to get in 2,800 characters.

It would be ironic to read the Twitterlit version of 1984 though...