A crisis of meaning, goals and time management fueled by inefficient communication. You have been programmed to read no more than 140 characters, with an optimum length of ….
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(you have stopped there) 80. You will only go beyond this if there is a clear provocation, scandal, insult or controversy.
It affects everything. Small businesses are run by people with no technical training to understand they need to read the whole e-mail from potential partners. Most middle to upper managers and even small company owners read the first two lines of any e-mail. They reply with what a few years ago would not be acceptable from a bad intern learning to write commercial letters.
People expect you to reply to anything within minutes or seconds. Twenty years ago, replying to an e-mail in two days was considered pretty fast. I still do.
One of my best friends wrote me today in deep anxiety over this. He is a fitness celebrity, one of the few with merit to be one. He is swamped with “urgent” messages and e-mails and he hasn’t found an efficient manner to filter them. He is also known to publish 200-500 word dense texts on social media about nutritional facts and advice, and now he is trapped into public expectation over this oracle-like service to his followers.
Education has suffered to a level that there is no consensus on what to do with it. I don’t know what to do with it. I continue to write as I did before. I receive a small amount of “likes” to my social media posts, unless my text is under 140 characters long, has obvious controversy in it, picture or video. But I am satisfied with my role as an educator, in shifting forms. As for lifting… Well, everyone who matters knows I do. Who, exactly, needs more? Companies? No: my partners and clients are satisfied. My followers and students? They are also satisfied with youtube, website, pages.
I would like to help more, but I have to pick my battles. Like you do, like everyone does.