Is Online Communication Shallow?
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?
[...] is brief and straight-to-the-point, this one is detailed and personal, and fairly lengthy. Usually, I can’t finish longer articles because even the most interesting topics can seem monotonous on a computer screen with long blocks [...]
@Megan – I think that there’s a lot of online content online that’s relatively shallow, but just because a post is short and holds your attention doesn’t mean that it is shallow. Seth Godin always has short posts, and yet I think more about his content than virtually any other blog. Certainly, that’s a gift he (and others – Chris Brogan comes to mind) have.
There’s a couple of solutions off the top of my head:
1.) Take a similar approach to Valeria Maltoni of Conversation Agent and start your conversation on Sunday/Monday and then let it progress throughout the week, adding something different each time. You may have some shorter posts, but they build off one another, explain one big idea, and culminate at the end.
2.) Mix in feature-length posts. I’m very guilty of having blog posts that are too long. I’m relatively long-winded, and many of my posts are well-researched, and I think all that content has to be packed in there when in reality I could start the conversation and let it finish in the comments section.
If most of your posts are short (and even a bit shallow), but then periodically you have a really long feature-length post your readers will also realize that it’s probably longer for a reason, and that is has additional depth.
Hope this is an avid contribution to your post!
[...] Megan Berry recently discussed the notion that online content and communication is progressively getting shallower. She admits to only reading the first page of an article and skimming the rest. I’ve been guilty of skimming articles that have a high word count as well, but this often has more to do with the quality than my attention span. Please allow me to continue the discussion Megan started. [...]