blog.tylerball

The Internet and Storytelling

Whenever I happen upon an article like this one—that seems to happen more often these days—I sigh and hope for a valid argument. Luckily, Ben Macintyre has some great points.

I agree with him that the average length of each “piece” of knowledge we consume may be shortening. People are getting their information in smaller bursts from Wikipedia pages, link-blogs and tweets. Is this any different than the millions of people who skim through the morning paper everyday?

Macintyre is also correct that the computer is not the place for reading. For me it is impossible to do long form reading on a computer of the traditional sense. Look at that page the article appears on. There are three external ads, classifieds, comments, tags and countless links to other Times content. How tragic his piece becomes, placed in this context.

Herein lies the problem with Macintyre’s observation. He views the internet from the perspective of the old media and sees the internet as a web-browser that goes to Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

I feel we’re in a transitional period in reading. The internet’s trend for the past 15 years has been the gradual distillation and concentration of information. This a natural byproduct of computers that multitask and compile information so easily. I’m hoping the advent of single purpose devices like the Kindle and applications like Instapaper will make it easier for everyone to read on a screen again. The internet has not replaced the book because we are only now reaching a similar form factor, mobility and ease of use. The devices that are close are still expensive and hard to use in comparison.

As a personal aside, I’ve been doing much more long-form reading with Instapaper than I have in the past few years without it. At the end of the day I crawl into bed and dig into some truly enlightening and informative material.

I know you’re saying that nobody knows what Instapaper is, or a Kindle for that matter, but when the Egyptians figured out how to make papyrus nobody knew how to read. These technologies are only growing in use.

Macintyre is crying over the lowest common denominator. The people that receive their information on facebook statuses and have twitter pages full of meaningless hashtags aren’t the type that ever read a novel outside of Oprah’s Book Club anyway. It’s unfortunate, but nobody can make an argument that the internet is making it harder for them to find writing and storytelling. They will continue to find narratives in Macintyre’s examples of reality TV the news media. At least they are literate.

I’m not going to argue that the internet is replacing old forms of expression, or whether that’s even possible or worth worrying about. Because it isn’t. The point is that the internet is still so young. The average joe is still very far from understanding how it all works, but trust me, the edges of a storytelling revolution on the internet are starting to show. As soon as the television stops barking the word Twitter at us as the main form of expression on the internet, the better off we’ll be. Macintyre isn’t helping by falling behind the mainstream cry over our shortening attention spans.