The horrifying (to a writer) meme ‘tl dr’ (too long, didn’t read) has yet to be joined by ‘tl dl’ and ‘tl dw’ (too long, didn’t listen; too long, didn’t watch), but it can only be a matter of time, because as many of us can attest, we’re already at the point of, for instance, dragging the scroll bar ahead when checking out a video on YouTube.
—
Simon Reynolds, Retromania (via airgordon)
Is this a meme, though? “Too long, didn’t watch” has been the philosophy for producing broadcast and online journalism for years, and the same goes for “tl;dr” with newspapers and magazines.
(I’m not to this point in Retromania unless my memory’s failed me, so I can’t speak to its context.)
(via katherinestasaph)
From my memory, Tl; dr is employed as a trollish rebuke of a long post on a message board, an overly wordy article, or whatever; it might be a philosophy, but that specific phrasing is more of a “nyah, nyah, I don’t care.” I picked the quote out because I liked Reynolds’ conjecture that it might soon be used by bratty teenagers to dismiss music and videos as well — the further shortening of our already shortened attention spans.
(via katherinestasaph)
