If you read English and have an internet connection, sooner or later you’re going to run across the strange acronymn TL;DR which stands for “Too long, didn’t read”.

If you look over on the sidebar under the heading “Blogposts about this Blog” and actually click on all the links, you’ll find several which say (approximately) “Hey this article I’m linking to is long but worth reading anyway”.

I am now currently in the process of writing a book in Romanian, a collection of stories and anecdotes and everyone’s advice has been the same – keep it short.

I also (occasionally) read Romanian blogs, some of which are linked on my sidebar and some others not, and they universally seem to have posts of about 3-4 paragraphs at most.

As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, on the bus ride from Bucharest to Cluj, the only newspapers I saw people reading were the “gossip” or tabloid papers, filled with photos and short articles with punchy titles like “Celebrity X did Y!”.

I’m not disrespecting Romania – on the same bus ride, I also saw two people reading full-length books – but there does seem to be a trend towards shorter pieces. Maintaining the reader’s attention past that point is too difficult.

I have to wonder where this trend is coming from and why. I thought about this quite a lot as I am a person who writes for a living (wow!) and the last thing I ever want to do is alienate a reader simply because what I write is too long.

I also have to keep in mind that I myself am an avid reader, including of very long books, as I come from a family where reading is an ordinary, daily activity. Clearly we’re all “out of the ordinary” in terms of how much we read compared to the general public.

Secondly, I also have no editor. Or I am my own editor, which means I am less reluctant to cut my own words than (theoretically) a more objective person would be. I don’t know if you can see the statistics on these web posts but almost every single one has been edited 3-5 times and sometimes more. Yet it still may not be enough.

And then I remembered an interesting discussion I had with someone at the bar last week, in which a guy told me he had to throw out his television because if it was in his house, he’d watch it until his eyes were burning. I believe his exact words were something akin to, “Some people can’t have beer in their house and I’m just like that, only with TV.”

I understood that sentiment exactly because I too am like that. I have not owned a television in years and one of the principle reasons I enjoy my life in Romania so much is that I can go to grocery stores, restaurants, bars and cafes and not see a television.

Even better, I can go visit friends in their homes and it’s still completely normal to sit around and talk and not have the television turned on.

When I grew up, television was everywhere and the debate was always what kind of programming is “best” for people – how much “educational” programming should there be, what hour at night is it okay to start showing “adult” shows, what cuss words are forbidden and how much violence (a lot) or sex (almost none) is allowed.

The debate was never is this thing killing our brains?

When I was a young adult, living on my own for the first time and going out in the world and meeting people, I did a survey of my closest friends and discovered we all had one thing in common – as children, we watched little to no television.

One good friend of mine grew up in a very rural area of America where television reception was poor (via an antenna) and cable/satellite only came much later.

Another friend of mine grew up as a child of a government official who implemented projects in “Third World” countries. Therefore any TV programming was in a variety of foreign languages and/or non-existent.

Whatever the reason, all of the people I liked the best grew up without spending a lot of time watching television.

Does that matter? Was it just a coincidence or a fluke? Or does watching a lot of television impact your ability to do other things, such as communicate and read/write?

I think it does. In fact, I know it does. Some of the happiest hours I’ve ever spent in this country were just sitting around, talking to people (and eating good food, of course). And this is a nation where most of those people grew up with little to no television.

When I finally got the strength (back in America) to remove my television, and then friends would come over, a very odd thing would always occur. People would sit around, looking this way and that, unsure what to do or what to say. And then after that moment of awkwardness, the conversations would begin and the next thing we knew, hours had flown by.

And yet even back in the days when I greatly enjoyed watching television shows with my friends, I noticed that there was barely any conversation going on. Sure we might groan or gasp together at something or laugh at a funny joke or line, but the conversation was “stunted”.

I learned this one day when my friends and I bought a video camera and began filming just about everything while playing around with it. I filmed my friend watching a TV show (unbeknownst to him) and had nearly five minutes of uninterrupted footage of his slack, unmoving face. He looked exactly like what he was – a man in a trance.

Next time someone you know is watching TV, walk in the room and look at their face. You’ll see exactly what I mean.

Every single time you speak to an actual human being, you get better at talking. That’s an absurdly simple truth and yet it’s an important one. It’s a strange thing to be grateful for in Romania (where it’s common) and yet in USA I have had tens of thousands of hours of conversations more than most Americans my age.

If you and I were both of equal “natural” skill when playing golf and I went out to the links and played 10,000 holes of golf while you sat at home, watching TV shows about golf, which of us is going to be the better player?

The same is true with reading (and writing). The more you do it, the better you’re going to get at it. In 2011, we are all surrounded by a virtually infinite amount of information, the vast majority of which is written down. Being able to read and understand all of that is the key to the kingdom, folks.

Is it hard? Yeah sometimes it is. Believe me, I’ve plowed my way through Kierkegaard (in English though, thank goodness). I’ve written government manuals. I understand that it’s hard. But sometimes it’s worth it.

Watching TV on the other hand nets you nothing more than a long litany of anecdotes about parts of episodes that you can remember.