Everyone is doing graphs these days -- a common one shows how much money Obama has added to the debt compared with other presidents. I've seen one showing how long the Afghanistan war is compared with our other wars. Here is mine:
The bar on the left represents the number of characters in an "average" 600-word newspaper story assuming the average word is five characters long. The second bar represents the number of characters in a one-minute TV news story, assuming a script that's 15 lines long at 70 characters each (that's the one-minute forumla I found online somewhere). The third represents the 140 characters in a Twitter tweet. At first, I tried to do a graph representing the number of characters in an average newspaper (24 pages with 60 percent ads and about 3.5 stories per page in the remaining space) and a half-hour newscast minus the eight minutes for commercials. But those numbers were so that the Twitter bar didn't even register. But you get the point, I trust.
I was moved to do the exercise by the story I saw in The New York Times (a newspaper) about the abbreviation of modern life:
Note to the Village People: The lyrics in your biggest hit need an update. The organization previously known as the Y.M.C.A. is henceforth to be called “the Y.”
One of the nation's most iconic nonprofit organizations, founded 166 years ago in England as the Young Men's Christian Association, is undergoing a major rebranding, adopting as its name the nickname everyone has used for generations.
“It's a way of being warmer, more genuine, more welcoming, when you call yourself what everyone else calls you,” said Kate Coleman, the organization's senior vice president and chief marketing officer.
Soon a special dictionary will be necessary to help navigate all the abbreviations being adopted as formal names by companies and charities alike: KFC. BP. Xe. AARP. A few months ago, National Public Radio sent a note to all its staff members asking everyone to refer to it as NPR.
“In many ways, we are just catching up to our audience,” said Dana David Rehm, NPR's senior vice president for marketing and communications.
Jonah Disend, chief executive of Redscout, a brand strategy company in New York, said adopting abbreviations in lieu of long names could make sense in an era of Twitter, with its 140-character diktat, and apps for mobile phones.
Remember all the ink that was spent lamenting our short attention spans in the "MTV generation"? The thing that's remarkable now is how godawful long those videos were.
