Of course, Seth Godin always says it best, so I won’t repeat him. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the growing popularity of short-form writing. Many would point to this tendency as a sure sign of societal decline, but I have to disagree.
Instead of grousing about the decreasing attention spans of the culture at large, I’d rather imagine that we have finally reached a point where the short message is valued by virtue of saying exactly what needs to be said and no more. Our attention spans are not “short” but “concise.”
Care to elaborate?
Probably that would be a good idea.
For example. Right now I’m reading a book for class. I became bored with it rather quickly. At first, I thought it was my ‘problem:’ this is a widely regarded book, and if I’m bored it’s because I have a short attention span. Then I started to think, ‘well, why am I bored with this book?’ And it’s not because I have a short attention span, but because the author goes about saying the same thing over and over again. Where the book is concerned, it could be condensed to a blog post and I would have as much of a takeaway.
Now that I think of it, if it were turned into a blog post, I think the author could link to the content that I find excessive and it would be just fine.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is: when I read something, I want to get to the heart of what is being written about. I want it to be concise. If I need to do some more research about the topic, or you need to link to things within the article to build a bigger picture, that is fine. But let’s not confuse that hunger for concise writing with merely a ‘short attention span.’
Agree? Disagree? Make sense? None?