The Manila Times

Beware of illiterate­s online... they’re all over the place

- NOEL F. LIM

YUP… a “WALL OF TEX”. That’s what online idiots call a post, which is more than 3 paragraphs long. It’s deregatory in nature. It’s gibberish… too much words or informatio­n for the mentally a “WALL OF TEX”.

If you stop to think about it, that’s actually an interestin­g metaphor. A wall made out of words. A wall is something that obstructs or something that must be climbed. Something to be bested! (For nonreaders, I’ll save you a trip to Google. It simply means to be defeated. Why use the term bested? Because I can. LoL).

Obviously the slang WALL OF TEX was coined by someone who doesn’t like to read. A reader such as myself would have given it terms like, A Symphony of words, Themassing of terribly delicious ideas, The congregati­on of alphabets, A continent of thoughts. A gathering of de

But...NO! It’s a WALL OF TEX..DUH! NO SH*T!

What imaginatio­n! No surprise there. Illiterate­s have a limited vocabulary. Much less the mental skills to use them. Most people dislike reading? Well you can trace that back to our primordial origins.

Our ancestors acquired visual acumen early on. See they needed it to survive the harsh environmen­t. Survival comes first. “SEE THAT ANIMAL.. ME WANT TO EAT... SEE THAT FRUIT, LOOKS DELICOUS.. ME WANT TO EAT.. SEE THAT CAVEWOMAN... ME WANT TO EAT....” Get the picture? ( Pun intended)

Those are the basic needs that must be met to ensure that the human race survives and propogate.

Reading and writing are skills that where acquired and developed afterwards. When survival took a backseat to developing a civilizati­on and interactin­g & communicat­ing with each other. The first form of writing was developed by the Sumerians ( Why do I know this? Because I like to read!) So painting on cavewalls went out, and scrawling letters on tablets were in. Then it was on papyrus. Then goat skin. And finally, paper! Funny enough, were back to scrawling on tablets again, this time with a dreaded power supply. Now back to reading... It takes a lot of brainpower usage to read and most importantl­y TO COMPREHEND than to look at a picture. A picture paints a 1000 words. That’s true. What a writer takes two paragraphs to describe is equivalent to one image. Easy! No wonder

most people don’t like reading anymore. Oh yes, they can read but they read mostly BLURBS, CAPTIONS… AND GOD FORBID, MEMES!

Anything that exceeds 10 sentences -- their brains shut down. Comprehens­ion levels shoot off and go into the red. Their internal processors in the head burn out. And they end up with a stupid look on their faces and utter, “...huh?”

There are still readers out there but their numbers are dwindling as faster connection­s and high- end providers materializ­e. Reading has been a disappeari­ng art form decades before the rise of digital technology. I was encounteri­ng people whose reading list were a bunch of gossip magazines & Sunday comics. But now it’s worst! Back then I’d see paperback books carried by hand or underneath a stack of notebooks. Now you hardly see them at all. I’d like to think that with the advent of digital books & Kindle, they’re most probably stored on phones and laptops. But recent net behavior shows that reading long form is indeed on the way out.

Streaming videos are so popular because they are videos! Have you heard of streaming novels being a hit? Or streaming columns? Of course not. No such thing. But if there is, it wont be a big thing either. It will be labeled as a WALL OF TEX! Who wants to read about it when they can see a 4K resolution of a road mishap? Would you work your way to all those tedious adjectives, those taxing nouns, and vicious verbs when you can see bodies

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