From Gettysburg to tweet tower

Blame President Abraham Lincoln, not President Donald Trump, for Twitter and the 1 billion tweets that it sends across the world every 48 hours, including from Tweet Tower.

Yes, Abraham Lincoln may have begun the process, with none other than his Gettysburg Address, which is simultaneously the most famous speech in American history and one of the shortest addresses in history, a mere 270 words.

In 1863, when Lincoln delivered the address, there was no imperative to shorten speech into sound bytes. But Lincoln created some of the most famous eye-bytes in history.

In fact, the most celebrated orator of the day, Edward Everett, spoke immediately before President Lincoln at Gettysburg and everyone expected his speech to be great and to be long.

And long it was. (Great it was not.)

A tent with a urinal in it was erected near the speaker so he could discretely answer the call of nature during his trademark hours-long oration.

Not only was the speech long, but it was filled with Greek and Latin phrases, flourishes expected by audiences in orations of the day. One modern literary critic has pointed out that the first sentence of Everett’s speech alone was 52 words long, nearly one-fifth the length of Lincoln’s entire Gettysburg Address..

Could you say then that 144 years ago President Abraham Lincoln started the trend of shortening orations and gutting them of fancy flourishes?

Was Honest Abe, the rail splitter, also have been Eloquent Abe the baloney cutter?

Lincoln’s eloquence at Gettysburg is almost the heartbeat of our democracy: “Of the people, by the people, and for the people ...”

It is not only eminently quotable but it is also immediately understandable by even a thirdgrader, the highest grade which Lincoln himself reached in school.

His second Inaugural Address in 1865 is equally quotable: “With malice toward none, with charity for all” and “the better angels of our nature” are just two of Lincoln’s pre-television-age sound bytes uttered on that occasion.

Lincoln’s 1863 speech at Gettysburg took two and a half minutes to deliver, compared with Everett’s two full hours: There certainly was no need for the short-winded president to use that privacy tent.

At the moment Lincoln was in the process of sitting back down after concluding that 2 ½ minute speech with what has become one of the most famous quotes in the history of American democracy (“shall not perish from the Earth”) many members of the audience were just waking up from Edward Everett’s two-hour eye-glazer.

They were expecting — because he held the greatest office in the land — that President Lincoln would speak at even greater length than the eloquent windbag who spoke first . They had missed the president’s entire address in the process.

What Lincoln knew with his third-grade public education is the same thing that President Trump knows intuitively — most people aren’t paying attention; they’re distracted.

The difference is that Trump responds to short attention spans by trying to grab his audience with fire-breathing tweets.

Lincoln on the other hand, was writing for the ages. His words were chisels applied to marble, not blow-torch tweets scorching the eye.

Lincoln’s words were aiming for the stars, not coming from a star.

Have we actually traveled downward these 144 years to a world that can barely concentrate for a two minute speech and needs a 140-character tweet?

Have we become dumber as a nation of listeners and readers than the Gettysburg grievers?

Or have our brains changed to adapt to this world of increasing distractions as we evolved from an agrarian society to an industrial society and now to a digital society?

Our public schools in 2017 label children as having Attention Deficit Disorder when they can’t pay attention in class. But maybe what they have is Plastic Brain Syndrome — brains midway in evolving between President Lincoln’s 270-word Gettysburg attention span, and President Trump’s 140 character Twitter attention span.

Tweeting 1 billion tweets every 48 hours may actually be scientific data. It may be a kind of emerging evolutionary evidence that our plastic brains are attempting to refashion themselves in order to cope with a world of constant distractions.