On Brevity

Okay. I’ll try to keep this short (but I probably will fail)

Brevity is king. Between, sound bites on CNN, the death of newspapers and the rise of such sites as Twitter , YouTube and Facebook , the era of patience is over.

And if I haven’t grabbed you by now, you’ve probably already clicked somewhere else.

We used to have a lot of time. Before the age of mass media, whole communities would gather to hear speeches lasting many hours, and read books which were both long and complex. However, with the introduction of television, came competition for our attention.

If you don’t like what is on, you simply switch to another channel. Holding your attention was easy when there were only three networks but soon there were fifty, then five hundred and now, with the rise of the internet, the number of “channels” is essentially infinite.

This is not a revolution. Revolutions are fought by visionaries with particular ideologies. The internet age has had it’s visionaries, to be sure: Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google , Craig Newmark of CraigsList or Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia to name just a few. However, the genius of their vision was to stand aside and allow their customers to create what they wanted. The same is true of Facebook , flickr , Twitter and YouTube . In other words, they might’ve started the ball rolling but the resulting new economy of information, just happened through natural selection.

In other words, this is not a revolution. This is evolution.

In some ways I think this is a good thing. Competition breeds quality and infinite choices means no one, no matter how powerful or well established, can afford to take their audience or users for granted.

We’ve already seen how much faster Twitter is than traditional news sources and how much more variety there is onYouTube than on the networks. However, we are also losing something and I believe that loss might be very dangerous.

First of all, there are no moderate sound-bites.

If you want to get noticed you have to be extreme. Whether it’s the daily news round up on MSNBC or your latest post on Twitter , no one is interested in the middle ground. That means there is a natural tendency towards polarization in new media. No one will re-tweet that I have mild misgivings with a particular policy, or event. If I want an audience, I have to say that it is the “worst fucking thing I’ve ever heard of in my entire life.” or, better yet, “people who support (blank) are baby raping devil worshipers.” That’s the way to get noticed and that is frequently what is broadcast, followed and repeated.

The result is that the perception of polarization is much greater, and, in this interactive age, perception and reality are symbiotically connected.

Another consequence, and I believe a far more dangerous one, is that while certain ideas are easy to express in a few words, some ideas, frequently the best ones, take time.

Even our briefest speeches, such as The Gettysburg address (278 words) or Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech (1675 words), are too long and complex for todays appetites. Is it possible to compress Lincoln’s Second Inaugural or Eisenhower’s Farewell Address into a sound-byte or tweet? No.

And those speeches are still relatively short. How will Dostoyevsky’s ruminations on God and Morality play in the modern era? Where is the time for Plato’s dialogues or even Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ? Could you tell the stories of Hamlet or Lawrence of Arabia in a few seconds? Yes. Would the stories be better? No.

The way we get information today is unbelievably broad and incredibly varied but it is often dangerously shallow. You simply can’t run a government, discuss the intricacies of human society or dig deep into personal emotion in a few seconds.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fan of Web 2.0. I believe the socialization of media has democratized information and given new power and influence to the general public. It has fostered new ideas and new collaborations. However, this transformation does not come without a price and I am concerned that deep, difficult and complex ideas will be lost in the tidal wave of brevity.

After all, revolutions can be fought but evolution is inevitable.