Think back to an event that happened in your life or a movie you just watched. Try to remember what happened. Does that retelling seem remarkably like a comic strip?

I’m reading an article called “Movies in the Mind’s Eye” for my media psychology class. The authors, Hochberg and Brooks, argue that we remember movies in comic strip form. They add “Comic strips may be popular because they approximate the ways in which we think about the visual world.” It’s a technique to help us remember the salient moments without storing the unimportant data. 

I’d never really thought about this before, but now that I have I can’t help seeing it as a fairly accurate way to describe memories. Does knowing this affect how we should write? Design advertisements or commercials? Then again maybe we’re already using these techniques — think about storyboarding for movies and advertisements.

There’s been this idea for some time now that the internet is democratizing communication. Anyone can have a blog and their ideas with the world. Anyone can be a journalist. It’s easy; it takes 30 seconds to post something. But should it?

I wonder if the ease of communication is making what we’re saying shallow. If I can post on my blog whenever, do I spend as much time on each post? There’s very little opportunity cost to communicating online — clearly that leads to more quanitity — but is it decreasing quality? Mark Slouka, author of War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the Hi-tech Assault on Reality, says in a Harper’s Magazine forum “there’s an incredible shallowness to most on-line communication. I realize that there are good things being said on the net, but by and large the medium seems to encourage quickness over depth, and rapid response over reflection.” Do you think before you type?

Do you read articles written by professional journalists or hobbyists? I find this new form of citizen jouralism most helpful when it comes to tech news/blogging. Before, you would have had to subscribe to a magazine that would have become obsolete by the time it comes out. Now, I subscribe to RSS feeds of the top tech blogs and I know when a new product comes out instantly. Even if the posts aren’t always top-quality writing, what I care about is the news, the annoucement, the main idea — not who wrote it.  But who’s doing the long-term journalism projects? Who’s writing long thoughtful pieces about, well, almost anything? And does anyone read them, if they do exist? I find myself only reading the first page of articles and then skimming the rest. Is this change in journalism a demand or supply problem (or both)? We don’t have the attention span to read the long articles and so the newspapers aren’t writing them anymore.  Is this a change we’re okay with? Do we have a choice?