Are we becoming a Nation of Headlines? I’ve said it before, and I’ve heard a lot of other people say it too: “I know what you mean – I saw that article too, I didn’t READ it, but I saw the headline.” Of course we’re talking about the internet, mostly Google and especially Facebook and Twitter. We’ll read a Text maybe on our smartphone, but that’s short and pithy, kind of like an abbreviated headline.
So we get a lot of information this way, we get a lot of facts, well, almost facts anyway, but at least we kind of know what’s going on and what is important. It’s like driving down the highway. There are billboards all over the roadside (at least in America, most civilized societies have abolished them). The key thing about the billboard is the amount of information it squeeses. Sometimes you will see one that is covered with print and you can’t read it as you go by. You don’t know what it said. The billboard experts will help you with your that. They will condense it to no more than eight words. That’s all that most people can read whizzing past at highway speed. 
Then there are Bumper Stickers. Same thing. Designed to grab shattered attention. Not to explain but to exult. Squeeing more in aggregate than in distinction, and the value is measured not in output but in Goob’ls, or voluminous intake of squees occasionally followed by Got-its, a sense of primitive communication and quietly screamed in the manner of a grunt.
Well, the wheels of time turn, grinding very fine or perhaps not so fine at all, especially if you don’t have time to grind, barely even time to turn, certainly not to explain yourself, because the person you are squeeing at already understands and knows. But it still helps to be herd. I mean heard.
