There’s a lot of blogging advice out there that claim the short blog post is the best kind. And generally I agree. But I’ve also been rethinking the implications of why we like short blog posts. Here are some reasons I came up with.
The Nature of Screen Reading
I don’t know about you, but the nature of reading anything on a screen lends itself to shorter, scannable material. After a while, my eyes start to bug out when I read for too long on a computer screen.
The Nature of Internet Usage
People don’t generally use the Internet for deep study. The fact that it’s called surfing the web is indicative of our attitudes and approach to online activity. Rather than go deep, we skim along the surface, moving from blog to blog, or website to website.
The (Changing) Nature of Our Minds
There has been a lot of speculation out there as to how the Internet is rewiring the way our brain works. The famous article on this is Nicholas Carr’s, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I certainly can feel my ability to focus and sustain hard thinking is slipping away. It seems that the web is rewiring our brains to be predisposed to short, pithy statements rather than long, well-thought out arguments.
The Nature of Information
Because there is so much information to be processed in a day, we tend to move through it as quickly as possible. After all we are finite beings working with a finite amount of time. The amount of information that barrages us lends to a kind of schizophrenia. The goal is to move from one topic to the next, getting just as much information as we need for our own purposes rather than to explore the rabbit trails that information leads to. Always at the back of our mind is the thought that there may be a better and more relevant piece of information we should be focusing on.
The Nature of Humans
It is human nature to take the path of least resistance. Arguably, it is much easier to read a short, pithy blog post than to commit the time and effort it takes to process a long and involved one. And it’s takes much less effort to write shorter posts, as well.
The Long and Short of It
The question is not whether short posts are better in a consumeristic sense, but are they good for our soul. I posted this killer quote by J.I. Packer yesterday, but I’ll share it again:
“I’m amazed at the amount of time people spend on the internet. I’m not against technology, but all tools should be used to their best advantage. We should be spending our time on things that have staying power, instead of on the latest thought of the latest blogger—and then moving on quickly to the next blogger. That makes us more superficial, not more thoughtful.”
This morning I was talking with some fellow Praxis staff, and we knocked around this idea of superficiality that our culture seems to thrive on. Here was our question:
Is it the Churches job to create content that meets people where they are at (i.e. – short, pithy sound bites), or to try and redeem the culture of superficiality and help people rediscover deep thinking and contemplation?
At the end of the day, we know short blogs are better in a pragmatic sense…but are the better in a cosmic sense? Or are they major contributors to a fundamental change in our ability to think deeply?
What do you think?
[Photo by Will Lion]