The audiovisual revolution’s become a lot more than just a revolution.It’s become an evolution. Exciting,scintilatting pictures are beginning to keep books perpetually on shelves as every child would rather he watched Ben10, Avengers or Spiderman than spend time reading a dreary black/white Achebe or Enid Blyton literature book. The TV with it’s limited number of channels used to be a distraction. But then there came CableTV and now CableTv on Mobiles. Children are not the only victims of this sweep. Nigeria, for instance, happens to be a major blackberry phone consumer in Africa. Many adults are beginning to acquire this gadget for themselves…the numbers are rising by the sec and these phones come with free facebook and twitter apps that tempt adolescents and adults to seek lost and old friends and followers. This has no doubt helped Nigeria to number 31 on the Facebook Most Users in the World list with more than 5 million subscribers. Blackberry even has chat facility to spice things up. So ours is a generation with an attention span evolving into something shorter. WAEC essays must be getting increasingly difficult to write. I used to think that Facebook and it’s acronyms were making issues bad, what with the LOLs, TGIFs, SMHs, LMFAOs and so many short forms and acronyms of words that would have been written in full in a conventional snail mail letter until Twitter showed up on the block with a stiffer restriction to how long a tweet should be (shorter than a Facebook post). The saying used to be “as short as a miniskirt” but tweets are perhaps shorter than minis…we’re onto an eDarwin era.
