The dark side of short-form content
I've been thinking lately about the dark side of short-form content, after reading this blog post which touched on it briefly. Consuming content in little bursts --- scrolling through something only a few sentences long --- just makes me feel like I'm depriving myself of the thing that I want through the way in which I'm trying to get it. Meadow describes it as "feeling dirty, like my mind is heavy, my spirit somehow tainted by the experience," which is apt. What I want when skipping around the internet is to read something simultaneously witty and extensive, something intellectually stimulating and also deeply entertaining. And something that there's more of. Features like infinite scroll, and the vast hoards of content all across the web, promise that there will always be "more of" whatever it is you want, but the quality always goes down as soon as you look for more things like that if your interests are niche. The shortness of the content form, in and of itself, fractures the attention span. It trains you to be constantly flighty, looking for the next interesting thing.
The witty insight that I crave is like sugar, where you can appreciate it at the end of a meal, as a first bite or last bite, but when you are just consuming pointed little barbs or meaningless drivel you start to feel a dulled lack of enjoyment, the same way the remainder of a large bowl of ice cream after the few bites have gone aren't enjoyed, they're just eaten.
The meat of my internet consumption, the only thing I find in my everyday browsings that feels like a filling meal, is articles that go deep. Articles that tell an interesting story and have some detail, some depth, that are told in an interesting way. Things written in that clever interesting vibrant style that makes them be the thing I want to read.
I try to fill these "best of the internet" sections with links to stories like these. I find them, sometimes, at places like Damn Interesting, which exclusively does long-form articles that also work as podcasts, or at The American Scholar, which publishes work by essayists. These articles feel like a reward to read because you can enjoy them for a little while, you can follow them on their winding trajectories like a boat drifting down a river. They don't end immediately just as you become interested, leaving you constantly unfulfilled but primed to seek the next rush. They take you there slowly and gracefully, like a respectful romance.