Douwe Osinga's Blog: Blogging on Cellphones

Sunday, June 26, 2005

A couple of days ago I had a little time to kill and I had my cell phone with me. So I thought I'd give blogging a retry. Now I didn't go online or anything, I just fired up mobile word and starting typing or rather tapping away. It went pretty well and when the tram came, I had composed the following post:



They teach children literature in school, even though less and less people read books let alone literature. It makes you wonder if this time wouldn´t be spend more productive on teaching children about things they´ll actually will be doing like watching TV.


Film is of course an accepted art form, so teaching cinema might be a first step. Seinfeld of course could be another class. But in general I do think that watching TV is an acquired skill and I don´t mean the optimization of the zap process. You get a lot of information offered - processing it the right way is non-trivial. The EU is working on legislation to limit advertising aimed at children, but wouldn´t it be better to strengthen childrens immune system against misinformation, rather than to merely postpone the inevitable moment of confrontation?


I kinda stand by the content, but after pasting it in my normal blog editor, I realized it is a lot shorter than most of my posts on subjects like this. This probably has to do with the fact that the screen is smaller and it is harder to enter text, which seems obvious at some level, but it also means that my brain is perfectly willing to compress an argument because of a medium without telling me.


If you look at the books of philosophers you kinda get the same thing; Artistotles wrote a lot of books, but they're very short; his complete works fill about half a book of Kant. Probably back then writing books was a lot of physical work so they kept them short. Come to think of it, probably not such a bad idea. Everybody should just write books on cell phones and we call could read a lot more books in the same time.

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