Last night I watched nine webisodes of Ark. It made me think again about the medium being the message. People bitch about the change to e-readers and PDFs. But reading screens feels no different to me than any other text encounter. I still love novels in paper form, but I like--and read as deeply--having journal articles on a screen. People also bitch about the limitations of the length of tweets, and texting, and FB status updates. But that’s a misleading argument in a couple ways. First, because people have always exchanged short written notes in class or in meetings, and across longer periods of time have swapped marginalia and edits. Verbally, people have also had ongoing conversations, phatic and otherwise, throughout a day. Now these can more easily include people on other continents, not just at the next desk or down the hall. The second way the argument about length is misleading is that half the value of tweets is that they often actually lead you to full-length articles, movies, web pages, etc. So the short tweet itself is not always the endpoint. An interactive change I do see, however, is the one created by streaming media. First the Tivo time shift affect, then the on demand and Hulu type access puts viewing on a less rigid viewing schedule. Now the prevalence of both youtube type access as well as series in web form (The Guild, Ark, etc.) have made visual narratives a small-dose, self-timed affair. I’m not going to claim it either creates or is the result of shortened attention span, but I am going to note that it allows one to use TV viewing--to incorporate it into one’s life--in different ways. It fits into different places than devoting a 30 or 60-minute chunk at the same time each week, at a single, tethered device.
