I happened to be at the New York Tech Meetup last night. Apart from the bevy of intriguing social media apps (Dynamite for those who want to share selfie-videos anonymously or Addicaid for addicts, Tribute for collaborative videos and Vynl for collaborative playlists) I was particularly struck by two products that will help our modern war on the written word. It seems like we have collectively indicated to the tech world that we really don't want to read much. No more than 140 characters perhaps (for the Twitter crowd) or really not at all if possible (for the Facebook crowd - why read when you can like). We'd much rather see the proverbial movie (without subtitles, of course) than read the book.
Anyway, the first such project is TL;DR - "too long, didn't read" - an abbreviation for our collective desire for abbreviations. This is the name wisely chosen by a group of students from Stuyvesant High School who've come up with this fascinating idea that takes long boring articles ("something about Israel" as a teenager expressed in the demo, to much cheer) and summarizes them by ranking the paragraphs in the order of significance. You can then choose the number of significant paragraphs you want to read - starting with 0 (only the headline) and going up to say 5. You also have the option to highlight just the key terms. That turns any word in the article with a Wikipedia entry into a hyperlink! Brilliant! I can definitely see this coming to an Instapaper clone near us soon.
Next up is Wibbitz - that opens a new line of attack against word lovers. This service takes an article and makes it into a video. Yes, it takes the content and pulls relevant public or syndicated footage of both videos and photos from all over the web and turns words into speech - all with fancy animations narrated in a Siri-like voice and there you go - look Ma, no words!
So so there you go. Two relatively simple ideas than can help precipitate the demise of the written word. Combine these two - and maybe one day we can choose how many significant bite-sized "episodes" of a long article we want to watch.
Maybe this will finally end my "The New Yorker Guilt": the crippling affliction of not having read the full magazine before the new one is out.