Matt links to Nicholas Carr expressing concern over the diminishing length of the texts he consumes. Is the internet killing our collective attention span? C’mon, sing along if you know the words.
Well, as Matt says, probably yes, in the aggregate. That’s probably okay, though. It’s easier to consume stuff, there’s more of it to consume, and so we’re going to adopt strategies and purchasing criteria that maximize our opportunities. But this won’t come exclusively at the cost of intellectual depth — there’s plenty of fat to be trimmed. Books and albums are typically somewhat padded in order to make consumers feel that they’re getting their money’s worth. As the digital age makes media cheaper (and physical delivery methods less relevant), that concern will diminish. More novellas, short films that actually succeed, mass-market EPs, nonfiction books that top out at 150 pages. That’s all sounds fine by me.
But the larger point I want to make speaks to what Matt says at the end of his post: on an individual level it’s not clear to me that this progression is a steady or irreversible one. Matt says he’s meticulously rereading The Brothers Karamazov, despite a level of online immersion that should have left him unable to finish sentences, much less books. For my part, I’m currently reading a lot more novels and long-form articles than I have since I was being graded on it.
Part of this is about getting older. But a big part of it is also about a cycle of getting bored with the internet, which I believe to be an underappreciated phenomenon. I think there’s an infradian rhythm to internet use — a repeating cycle of enthusiasm, engagement and consumption; boredom, disillusionment and retreat. The period of this cycle is different for everyone, and depends on their age, professional situation, technological sophistication and who knows how many other factors. In itself this is not so different from waxing and waning enthusiasm for any other pursuit. But, crucially, for a large proportion of online citizens/proponents, these rhythms were more-or-less synchronized at the beginning of this decade, during a time marked by (if not causally related to) the explosion of blogging.
That synchronicity led to a lot of shared enthusiasm, unsustainable cordiality and utopian dreaming. Now our cycles are drifting ever further out of sync, sometimes in waves and sometimes individually. This leads to reflections like James Joyner’s much-blogged observations about the changing nature of the political blogosphere, and to more meetings where people like me shift uncomfortably in their seats as junior associates suggest that creating a Facebook application for a client will change everything, man.
Of course it’s important for people like myself, who (at the moment) feel a little burned out on the net, to realize that their lack of enthusiasm isn’t necessarily more rational or sophisticated than the alternative. There’s a tendency to complain:
“The internet was supposed to change everything, man.”
“It did change everything. It is.”
“Yeah, I guess. So what?”
But that’s self-evidently dumb. Those heady early days are gone, but their collapse was inevitable. A roiling convection of enthusiasm and burn-out is probably healthier, ultimately. For those of us drifting back to the bottom of the pot, the only solution is to read some books and unillustrated articles in badly laid-out magazines (the sorts that one could never explicitly name as being badly laid-out, lest one invite lengthy, godawful discussions of typography). The people riding the upward current will handle building widgets and integrating with social networks and reading everything via RSS for a while; I’m confident we’ll rejoin or replace them soon enough.
The concept of you shifting uncomfortably at the comments of coworkers younger than yourself makes me feel immeasurably old.
I think one of the losses from smaller/shorter books, movies, and LPs will be the loss of whatever we gain from the greater introspection/self-absorption that the longer works inspire.
Imagine if Tolkein had done the Lord of the Rings as a bunch of novellas, rather than three (or six, depending on how you count) books. Then we wouldn’t have the whole elvish language cottage industry we have now.
[...] I’m convinced that online society has a rhythm. A while ago, I proposed a lifecycle for social networks. I’m pretty sure that that latter hypothesis will prove to be hopeless, that those considering the question won’t be able to draw any firmer conclusions about the fall of Friendster than historians have about the fall of the Roman Empire. But there’s no doubt in my mind that these systems are fundamentally dynamic, and subject to entropic forces even beyond their maintainers’ sinister efforts at profit-maximization. [...]