STORY STAR
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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: General Interest
- Published: 06/07/2022
The last article.
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I was probably the only person alive who actually read it. Everyone else was on Social Media Platforms of some kind or another. I still had paper, pen, and envelopes to write people…but no one to write to. I received a notice saying that the last Article ever written on Paper would be posted…online…on December 1st, 2029. I put that date in my Calendar app.
If you didn’t want to wait until December, you could just buy the last Newspaper ever printed. Thousands of us bought that last issue of the “Hartford Courant” formally the “Connecticut Courant”. A Newspaper older than our country. The first issue was only four pages…the last…one article. Probably none of us living know that “Courant” is an obsolete word that used to refer to Newspapers- Heraldry, it means to romp, chase, or gossip when used as an intransitive verb. When used as an adjective…it means “running.”
Now the very paper named after “Courant” is obsolete.
I will get to the Article itself in a moment, but let me digress for a moment. I need to tell you some facts:
The longest sentence in the English Language belongs to none other than Faulkner in his work: “Absalom! Absalom!” That sentence counted a mind numbing 1,292 words in its structure. The shortest sentence, still in use today is: “No.” Which nudges out: “Yes. Oh. Wow. And…”Maybe.” For the most used sentence in writing. Probably it would win as the most used word in Speech too.
Setting all that aside for the moment, long sentences, like this one, are a thing of the past…the long past; and this isn’t even a long sentence by the standards of just fifty years ago. Back then sentences regularly ran to seventy words …or more. Sometimes sentences filled five or six lines of printed text which more akin to their cousin: "the paragraph," then they were to mere sentences.
The average sentence in the year 2020 was down to less than fifteen words. Now? Five words suffice for most. Five word sentences. Five. On average. No commas, no semi-colons, no colons, no punctuation needed outside of a period. Period.
Attention spans have dropped from around three to four minutes on a single subject, to less than ten seconds, or a hundred characters, to several emojis. We have lost the ability to focus on anything not entertaining, brief, or novel. Vision takes up most of our brain…so visual stimulation like Tik Tok, Instagram, or Youtube clips has a head start of dry printed words of any kind.
This created the perfect storm for the end of not only cursive writing, block print, and any form of Calligraphy…but it spelled doom for calm, considerate, pondering and deliberation. No more reading a well founded idea and examining that new thought in your own mind. Perhaps even dwelling on it as you consider the permutations, possibilities, and profound implications. Those are all lost to the thirst for instant entertaining information, or gossip. Start a meme off of someone else’s creativity, originality or spark of imagination. Copy cats become more popular than the cat that thought the meme up.
But I digress to much, on to many tangents, so let me return to the actual article. In its entirety:
Dear Reader,
One must be direct now. Our paper is done. Finished. Over. Not many read long articles. Not any more. We were unable to maintain Headlines that steered one away from the “click bait” dilemma faced by all on Social Media. Paper is expensive. Journalists even more so. Subscriptions are rarer than people without a Social Media account.
Politicians are elected off of soundbites, tweets, and thirty second orchestrated spots: with appropriate analytics incorporated into the commercial itself. Loud. Brash. Hateful. Trump any of the deeper dives into complicated issues. With that in mind we wrote this last article for you:
Stop. Think. Consider. Ponder.
If you can.
Sincerely,
The Editors
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