Instant gratification takes too long.
Sp sayeth the prophet Suzanne Vale in “Postcards From The Edge,” the semi-autobiographical novel by Princess Leia that seems even more prescient now than it did when it was published in 1987 … long before the advent of blogs, nevermind Twitter, or goodness knows what comes next.
The obsession and addiction of Vale’s world was the state of induced nirvana brought about by drugs, not the pulsating rush of pumping out short witticisms to 500,000,000 of you closest friends across the Facebook universe. But the premise holds, and even though Carrie Fisher had Suzanne expouse her frustration at waiting during one of her many passages of rehab, consider it the same pause button as waiting for someone to return e-mail.
You remember e-mail, don’t you? That’s how we used to communicate before the advent of social networks and instant messaging portals that make the arrival of the “You Have Mail!” announcer seem as quaint as a dog barking down the street as the letter carrier made his rounds.
E-mail has fallen behind networking and game-playing as a reason for being on the computer. According to research from the Neilsen folks (who need something to do since no one watches television anymore), Americans devote 29% of their monthly computer time to social networks, blogs and instant messaging. E-mail — despuite the endless supply of company reports, spam and pleas from long-lost cousins in Nigeria – lags with a paltry 8 percent.
Sanity, as we learned in 1949 in “1984,” is not statistical, so it’s of little surprise that we’re allowing the incredible shrinking forms of communication to lull us into an ignorantly blissing state of groupthink. Internet groups are filled with notations such as “this” and “QFT” (Quoted for Truth) which signal agreement without having to actually, you know, add to the discussion. Gratification in less than an instant.
Twitter, meanwhile passed the 20,000,000,000 tweet mark over the weekend … HAZZAH! … as someone in Japan named ”GGGGGG_Lets_GO” coined this immortal phrase: “So that means the barrage might come back later all at once.”
Well, if you’re considering Tweets or Facebook posts, they do all seem to come back later at the same time; so, maybe GGGGGG_Lets_Go was onto something.
As for the lonely e-mail, one of the many I received this week — probably from a spambot bopa-a-lu a whop bam boo — was Zen-like in its simplicity … “116″ was all it said. A cryptic message about January 16 or November 6, perhaps. That would take too long to figure out. Instead, I decided it was a reminder to turn to Shakespeare, and sonnet 116:
Love’s not Time’s fool, sayeth the Bard … instant gratification need not apply, or hit the send button.
