The Death of Verse and Prose

Verse is dead and our grasp of Prose as we know it is probably slipping through our fingers at a rapidly-accelerating rate.

 

With the introduction of the sms-language, L33T speak, and fuelled by the mother-of-all-literary-evils, Twitter, the place for Verse and Prose grows increasingly sparse in our everyday lives. A hyperbole perhaps, but even in the best case scenario, Verse might not be dead, but probably still dying a a cancerous death, and Prose is undergoing a vile mutation; mutating into something almost undistinguishable from what it used to be prior to the Internet-generation.  

My opinion is that the underlying problem very much lies in the general lack of patience in the youths of today. Spoilt by the instant gratification of regular status updates through Facebook or Twitter - in this case, Twitter being the bigger sinner of the two, simply due to the 160 character limit that forces liberties to be taken with the language - the thought of sitting down to read something remotely close to being labelled as "properly written" becomes more and more remote; bringing to light the bigger point of the mind-set that the very act of "reading", as in actually reading as opposed to browsing or skimming through,  feels more and more deterring to seeds of the future.

More and more bloggers have abandoned ship over the last few months or years, and jumped on the "Instant Update" bandwagon, especially to those who used to blog as a means to updating their friends and keeping them in the loop. After all, why bother to blog an entire paragraph, one day at a time, reporting on your lunch, dinner and mood of the day, when you can now bombard your friends with the same information as and when it happens, right?

But perhaps the bottom-line is, they might have been missing the point all this while anyway. I mean, yes, the blog is a means to the end of informing your friends about your life, and keeping them in the loop and all, but more so than reporting your daily activities, a blog could (and probably should) be something beyond a blow-by-blow account of your battles with your bowl of Bak Chor Mee. It is a soapbox, an expression if you will, of oneself - involving one's thoughts and opinions.

A place for your friends, people who not only care about what you do, but also about what you think, to hear from and in the process, better understand you. To quote Descartes as and when I have the chance to, simply to make myself look more intellectual, "[we] think therefore [we are]", and a blog can be an avenue for people to know your inner workings, beyond your outer engagements; but in the best case scenario, to show a keen interest in both.

Whatever the case however, whether there will be a sudden realisation of the time and place for Verse and Prose following the maturity of the Internet-generation - the need to keep our literary skills honed and in a larger sense, to continued to be worthy of the term of being classified as "literate", amidst all the abbrevations, emoticons, shorthands and whatnot - still remains very much up in the air (though the cynic in me has a bag-and-a-half full of reservations).

In the meantime, for an old soul like myself, who still believes in the "olden tongue", I can only continue to write my "walls of text" as the rest of the generation passes me by. Oh, and just for the record, I still don't have a Twitter account.