I've long thought that, over time, our job changes us. Likely our leisure time activities do too. Television, I read on Jim Curley’s blog, makes us “more slothful and stupid”. I think blogging tends to make us more “slothful and cynical”. I’ve learned way too much on blogs to think they’ve made me stupid, but they've also moved my cynic meter up a notch.
Most blogs tend to be polemical. Not all blogs certainly – Dylan, to name only one of many, does a yeoman’s job in trying to uplift us with poetry and spiritual quotations. But what is it that makes us resistant to blogs that tarry awhile, that rest and smell the poetry? I don’t like reading lengthy things on a screen but what of shorter poems? On workdays I rarely seem to be in the mood for reflection or idyll or muse. News is sort of drug-like despite there’s rarely anything truly new in the news. There’s a reason that the Drudge Report is far more popular than the Arts & Lit page. Drudge understands our psychology: we want to “information snack” as Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezo says:
We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it changed us dramatically. Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s invention led to a significant step-change in the cost of books. Physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and learning. Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry—I’m convinced it makes me more productive—but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it. Nor do I want to read something hundreds of pages long on my desktop computer or my laptop. As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading.
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