I'm part of the problem.

I can't read an article over 1,000 words without wandering over to YouTube at least once to check out car chases or something equally kick-ass. If there was no Jon Stewart, I doubt I would know the name of the House minority leader. And if it ain't sexy, funny or enraging, I don't want to hear it, read it or repeat it.

Is any of this familiar to you? Are we dumbing down together?

Real World Example: I run my own Web site. It's a stupid affair full of goofy links and occasional commentary. The links themselves are the sort of lowest-common denominator stuff that attracts Web traffic anyway, but I do this trick occasionally where I post a picture of a scantily clad woman next to the links. And you know what happens? My Web traffic goes through the roof. Brilliant Web traffic move, or grease on the slope of culture?

FYI, the mention of "grease" just made me horny, and the mention of "horny" just made twice as many people read this.

After prayerful consideration and two minutes of composing, I give you Gordon Keith's Rule of Modern Media: If it doesn't make us horny, angry or full of schadenfreude, it isn't going to sell. You want your newscast to get good ratings? You better have a story about a rich guy who just got a huge bonus (outrage), a story about a cheerleader sex-tape scandal (horny) and a story about a celebrity who got dumped or denied a perk (schadenfreude). That stuff is our mental heroin, and in today's culture of immediacy, we want to get high as quickly as possible.

We used to blog stuff that no one wanted to read, now we tweet it. Why? Because it's quicker. The positive consequence is that people with nothing to say now have less space to say it in. But it shows how quickly our attention spans are contracting.

There are some who argue that Twitter is wonderful for the English language because it forces us to be concise and develop clean, direct, informative sentences. These people are wrong. The language of Twitter often looks like a monkey stole a few moments on a QWERTY keyboard. I wonder if there will come a day when we don't know what STFU, OMG or WTH stand for, but we know what they mean. Kinda like scuba and CPR. I'm even beginning to think my name is @gordonkeith.

As I said, I am part of the problem, IMHO.

Hear Gordon on "The Ticket" KTCK-AM (1310) weekdays from 5:30 to 10 a.m. E-mail him at gordon@ gordonkeith.com.

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