Lngstc Brvty ;)

Linguistic brevity. This is the most salient symptom of the age of electronic communication in popular culture and communications. It seems as though people are trying to say more, with less. The concept of "less is more" has been around for some time, but the actual practise of brevity in textual communications has assumed almost absurd dimensions.



Mobile phone "txt" messaging is perhaps the most striking example of the compression of language into smaller and smaller functional elements. Vowels often disappear entirely and the receiver of the message is left to replace them - a process which (like any) becomes simpler (more compressed!) with practise as the mind acclimatises to running through all the possible combinations of letters in a word. Although the notional reason for all of this syntactical compression is that it is faster to write a message with less letters, it is symptomatic of a general trend in culture and communication which we may first observe in an axiomatic manner in the Minimalism movement in art and architecture and which reaches its logical conclusion in digital textual compression technologies in this computer world of ours.



The trend towards compression and diminishing volume has a darker (unconscious) side to it. This is not to say that we say less because we have less to say and it reveals a shallower, narrower mindset in our globalised e-consciousness. It is more the case that the more we diminish our messages - the more we rely on a vaster and vaster array of external conventions, concepts, abbreviations and symbols. This paradoxical process of reducing one thing (the message content) actually tends to more concretely anchor the message and the messager into a broader matrix of culture and symbolism. This was evident in the Minimalism movement in art and architecture where the structure of object would be simplified or stylistically diminished but there was a concurrent expansion in the density of textual manifestos, reviews and general media interest and authoring about the topic. There is in this something of a corollary to Newton's Third Law of Motion ("to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.") The more we compress things, the more we depend on a wider and denser complexity of networked references and connections in a wider cultural and technological matrix. The more we shrink the content of our messages, the larger they become - even if only through their participation in a vaster system of reference, meaning and symbol-making. Some people, of course, have very little interesting or new to say and their simple connection to a vaster system (a paradigm ?) of connections and communication through cultural artefacts like SMS messaging allows them some form of notional significance in a world which, as we all should know, affords every single one of us less and less significance every day.