The larger question for me is the long-term effect of rapidly vanishing attention spans in our population. The short-form format across tweets, tiktok, much on youtube, instagram, SMS vs. voicemail -- even email is often considered "too long" for newer generations -- what is the likely consequence of this? It seems dangerous in the long-term, but maybe not. Is it just a temporary cultural shift, or is it resulting in a permanent shift to humanity's ability to concentrate?
There are much more things to consume.
There were of course books and newspapers in the past (in fact even more press and higher quality than now), but I think for average person there was much less of everything - you had one book, one newspaper, few tv channels to choose from.
So people want the essence. Also the quality of modern writing is often poor - you dont learn much from articles, since the people who write them must pump few per day
That's an interesting observation -- perhaps the proliferation of quantity is encouraging audiences to care less about engagement time so they can maximize exploration of all that is available.
The ability to speed up the playback speed of Netflix content would be an example of this.
I worry about the same thing. I will say, however, that I worry more about this in the context of news articles, conversation, and other shorter-duration activities. Books are a big commitment, and it is highly disappointing to find out someone stretched a 50 page book into 250 pages to get it published. Sometimes it helps to instill the idea, or provides useful elaboration, but sometimes it is filler with no discernible benefit to the reader. Our time is important and as such, I think there ought to be a referendum against wasting it. That is not to say all content should be short, but that it should be no longer than it needs to be, and that information density should be as high as is tolerable.
I too used to believe that, but I've since met too many children who have told me they don't like going to the movies because you have to pay attention for two continuous hours during which you aren't allowed to use your phone.
If we take fanfiction as indication of how younger people produce and consume content then the effect is that chapters get shorter while books get longer.
Of course take that with a grain of salt because *waves wagely at the statement full of issues*. But it tracks with other trends in social media. Many people will be able to tell you more about their favorite tik-toker than their favorite long-form-content producer. The length of the snippets doesn't dictate the depth of the story
You could even draw a comparison to the rising popularity of series over movies. People now prefer 6 45 minute segments over one 3 hour installment.
> If we take fanfiction as indication of how younger people produce and consume content then the effect is that chapters get shorter while books get longer.
Except, that assumption might not be true.
To set a baseline I looked at LOR statistics:
62 chapters
1255 pages
381103 words
7759 words/chapter
20 page/chapter
Then I looked at the 100 most bookmarked fanfics on AO3 in one of the most popular fandoms (Harry Potter):
218401 average word count
33 average chapters
9435 average words/chapter
Now 15 of the 100 fanfics are one-shots with only one chapter, if we exclude those we get the following numbers:
253386 average word count excluding one-shots
39 average chapters excluding one-shots
7544 average words/chapter excluding one-shots
For reproduction, I used the following for scraping and processed the data further in vim:
lynx -dump 'link to ao3 filter page' | grep -A2 'Words\|Chapters' | tr -d '\n,-' | sed 's/\[[0-9]*\]//g;s/ */ /g;s/Words/\nWords/g'
On the other hand, you have people binge watching long series. Which is something that would not exist a generation ago. A movie used to be 2 hours. Now it is something unserious, serious stories have one mega story over 20 hours of a watching time.
