As Communication Grows Ever More Brief, Do We Shrink Too?

Nicholas Carr wrote an interesting piece about the desire (or demand) for brevity in the brave new Internet world (derived from a Tim O’Reilly piece, which didn’t resonate as strongly), and how the medium is damaging the message.

Both strangely echo a Michael Fortin piece about the death of the long-form sales letter (which isn’t concerned with the cultural issues).

Carr’s take is that message is being subverted by medium – that long content is falling victim to short content because the Internet machine decrees it:

And that’s the danger here. The new medium doesn’t just promote the proliferation of small pieces; it devalues the long form. In fact, it doesn’t even make room for big, extended works. It’s actively biased against them, technologically and economically. More than that, though, it both reflects and reinforces our own increasing bias against anything that requires sustained attention or contemplation. As O’Reilly writes, the short form represents “the ADD style that today’s interrupt-driven technology is driving us towards.”

The big finish?

“The medium,” writes O’Reilly, echoing McLuhan, “changes the format in which content is delivered.” In so doing, it also changes us. We’re getting smaller, too.

Read the entire post at: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Honey, I shrunk the culture

I share some of his concerns. It’s not that short is bad. It’s that the medium is driving the message in a way that print never did, with content producers taking cues from software named “Google” instead of people named “readers.”

Carr continues:

O’Reilly notes that “small chunks” are also attractive today because they’re “modular.” They’re suited to what’s come to be called “social production,” in which a lot of people contribute a lot of chunks to create a big pile of chunks. But a big pile of chunks, whatever its merits, is different from and no substitute for a long or large work by a single hand.

It’s a dual-edged sword.

I believe that yesterday’s longer marketing conversations aren’t being shot down and left for dead, but are occurring in “chunks” over many touches (instead of one touch).

Simply put, the four-page sales letter you used to receive in the mail is being replicated in bite-sized chunks delivered over multiple contacts.

Given the hyper-linked nature of the Internet, it’s likely you’ll get a little from a search engine. A little more from an ad. A bigger chunk from a blog. And the biggest chunk from a Web site.

It’s one reason I’m a fan of engagement marketing, though that’s tangential to this discussion.

And of course, Carr isn’t concerned with commercial speech. He’s worried about the modern incarnation of what we used to call the “MTV-ing of our Youth.”

I believe he has a point. There’s no reason to be apocalyptic about something that appears inevitable, but the question remains.

Does a bite-sized attention span lead to a bite-sized intelligence?

[tags]writing, copywriting, internet, rough type, michael fortin[/tags]