Communication Minimisation

I'm too young to really remember much of the 90s, and what I can remember isn't particularly related to pop culture, but I'm informed enough about the changes between the last decade and this one to have noticed something.
Since the start of the 21st century, the ways in which we communicate have become increasingly abbreviated. Just think about it.

Text messaging. I'd wager that at the turn of the century, the ratio of people who had mobiles to those who didn't in the UK was probably about 50-50, possibly even higher in favour of not having one. But now, a mobile phone is an essential, the replacement for the Swiss Army knife. And the primary use of mobile phones now is text messaging. Text messaging has had its advent this decade. Short, succinct messages relayed almost instantly. And they've even spawned their own minimalsic language of few vowels and many abbreviations.

Twitter. 2009 has really been Twitter's year. Again, we have precise, 140-character-limited bytes of information being tweeted onto the internet, providing glimpses of snapshots of peoples' lives. The same goes for most social networking sites in certain degrees.

It's also reflected in the music industry now. The 21st century has seen the birth of the mp3's popularity, and many would say that now we have the ability to instantly download individual tracks, the album is a dead medium, a relic of the past to be onsigned to the history books. A massive percentage of online mp3 purchases are for single tracks, rarely are whole albums downloaded online. We now have brevity in the form of music we download! We pick and choose track for track, which is even more minimal than going out and buying a single, which has been made even more obsolete than albums! (I don't think albums are obsolete, far from it. But, sadly, singles largely are) Even when we do download whole albums from the internet, it is a much more minimal activity than going to the record store, buying a physical copy of the album, savouring the case, the cover notes, the reality of possessing something physical of music. And the advent on single mp3 downloading is making local record shops and communication with the people who work therein, who know their stuff about music and, when you bother to talk to them, usually but you on to new, exciting bands similar to what you can in looking for in the first place. But now, even that is being eradicated with things such as "similar artists" features on Spotify.

The minimisation of communication is an interesting feature of the century we have yet to travel 10% into. I'm not saying it's bad necessarily. I love the brevity of tweets on Twitter, the convenience of text messaging, the opportunities new bands gain by putting new tracks up on the internet. But it has obvious downsides I'm sure you're intelligent enough to work out without me listing them. It's gonna be fascinating watching how communication develops throughout the rest of the 21st century.