Would you prefer to read this column as a string of tweets? After a New York Times reporter forgot his pen and tweeted a report about tornado-ravaged Joplin, Mo., you might think that the future of storytelling had arrived, and that it came in increments. Is it Twitter speech or is it writing, asked the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard? Are articles now luxuries, wondered Internet guru Jeff Jarvis? Would the State Department turn Twitter into a propaganda tool, worried Read Write Web?
With exquisite timing, Pew released a study June 1 showing that Twitter use has increased significantly (although users still comprise only 13 percent of adults online), and Voice of America began to reimagine itself as, if not quite Tweets of America, then as a multiplatform digital service. Twitter also produced the kind of political farce that would be difficult to swallow in fiction, with Rep. Anthony Weiner’s sexting shenanigans turning him into the putz that launched a thousand puns.
But is Twitter really a revolutionary medium or does it just formalize a relationship to reading that we’ve had all along? Once upon a time, we scanned the headlines, got the gist of the story and moved on without reading. We just didn’t share the process through a virtual water cooler and sanctify it with theological significance. In 1898, during the Spanish American War, new high-speed printing presses allowed William Randolph Hearst to churn out dozens of editions a day, each quickly displacing the previous with breathless additions to the story. News has always been breaking, and technology that enables it to be quickly broken into digestible bits has always been enthusiastically embraced.
Indeed, the point — or rather the pointlessness — of wasting time and space on news that could be told in a couple of sentences was driven home by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist James Stewart in his 1998 book “Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction.”
Stewart made what on the face of it seems a blindingly obvious point: If you can tell the story in a headline and subhead, why torture the reader with dragging it out for 5,000 words? But that doesn’t mean all stories can be told in a couple of lines, or that we should go with the flow of the Heraclitan stream of digital news.
“My problem with speed journalism,” says Stewart, “is that information doesn’t surface in a coherent order.” Take the financial crisis, he says, which was increasingly confusing as it unfolded. People are just going to throw their hands up and give up on news if it’s just one incremental bit of the story after another. “A Jackson Pollock journalism — where you just throw details at the canvas” is pointless, he says. “Events need to be put into a coherent order for deeper truths to emerge.”
The question is whether technology is diminishing our appetite or capacity for this kind of storytelling. Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, noted in her 2008 book “Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World” how she for many years has shown a 1980s BBC documentary “The Story of English” to her graduate classes. Whereas a decade ago this was a highlight for students, its leisurely narration is now an endurance test of concentration. “Students’ notions of how long it should take to tell a story,” she writes, “had drastically shrunk.”
“Think of the way most newspapers format their online editions,“ which is all many younger readers encounter these days, she says in an email. “A headline, a couple of sentences, and you’re done unless you click to read more. Or think of students in school (I can vouch for college level) who, instead of reading an article or chapter (or, heaven help us, an entire book) just search on a key term or two, write up their assignments, and then move on.”
Reading has become “hit-and run,” she says. "We have neither time nor patience for connected prose.”
When one considers that the National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that only a quarter of college graduates were proficient in literary skills in 2003, as the first generation of social networking sites were just arriving, the full impact of communication technologies on reading has yet to be measured.
The critical issue about all online and mobile forms of text, whether news or tweets, is that they are ephemeral in nature rather than durable in format, Baron says. “I’m just now beginning to gather data of the attitudes of university students towards reading onscreen versus in hard copy. Many students say they don’t remember as much when they read onscreen, that they are more likely to be multitasking when they read onscreen.”
Storytelling is the original and longest-running software program in recorded history, the original information technology; and the richer it became, the deeper we got. Which is why the loss of storytelling, whether through the absence of time or the dominance of any given technology should give us some pause for reflection — if, that is, you’re still reading.
With exquisite timing, Pew released a study June 1 showing that Twitter use has increased significantly (although users still comprise only 13 percent of adults online), and Voice of America began to reimagine itself as, if not quite Tweets of America, then as a multiplatform digital service. Twitter also produced the kind of political farce that would be difficult to swallow in fiction, with Rep. Anthony Weiner’s sexting shenanigans turning him into the putz that launched a thousand puns.
But is Twitter really a revolutionary medium or does it just formalize a relationship to reading that we’ve had all along? Once upon a time, we scanned the headlines, got the gist of the story and moved on without reading. We just didn’t share the process through a virtual water cooler and sanctify it with theological significance. In 1898, during the Spanish American War, new high-speed printing presses allowed William Randolph Hearst to churn out dozens of editions a day, each quickly displacing the previous with breathless additions to the story. News has always been breaking, and technology that enables it to be quickly broken into digestible bits has always been enthusiastically embraced.
Indeed, the point — or rather the pointlessness — of wasting time and space on news that could be told in a couple of sentences was driven home by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist James Stewart in his 1998 book “Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction.”
Stewart made what on the face of it seems a blindingly obvious point: If you can tell the story in a headline and subhead, why torture the reader with dragging it out for 5,000 words? But that doesn’t mean all stories can be told in a couple of lines, or that we should go with the flow of the Heraclitan stream of digital news.
“My problem with speed journalism,” says Stewart, “is that information doesn’t surface in a coherent order.” Take the financial crisis, he says, which was increasingly confusing as it unfolded. People are just going to throw their hands up and give up on news if it’s just one incremental bit of the story after another. “A Jackson Pollock journalism — where you just throw details at the canvas” is pointless, he says. “Events need to be put into a coherent order for deeper truths to emerge.”
The question is whether technology is diminishing our appetite or capacity for this kind of storytelling. Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, noted in her 2008 book “Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World” how she for many years has shown a 1980s BBC documentary “The Story of English” to her graduate classes. Whereas a decade ago this was a highlight for students, its leisurely narration is now an endurance test of concentration. “Students’ notions of how long it should take to tell a story,” she writes, “had drastically shrunk.”
“Think of the way most newspapers format their online editions,“ which is all many younger readers encounter these days, she says in an email. “A headline, a couple of sentences, and you’re done unless you click to read more. Or think of students in school (I can vouch for college level) who, instead of reading an article or chapter (or, heaven help us, an entire book) just search on a key term or two, write up their assignments, and then move on.”
Reading has become “hit-and run,” she says. "We have neither time nor patience for connected prose.”
When one considers that the National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that only a quarter of college graduates were proficient in literary skills in 2003, as the first generation of social networking sites were just arriving, the full impact of communication technologies on reading has yet to be measured.
The critical issue about all online and mobile forms of text, whether news or tweets, is that they are ephemeral in nature rather than durable in format, Baron says. “I’m just now beginning to gather data of the attitudes of university students towards reading onscreen versus in hard copy. Many students say they don’t remember as much when they read onscreen, that they are more likely to be multitasking when they read onscreen.”
Storytelling is the original and longest-running software program in recorded history, the original information technology; and the richer it became, the deeper we got. Which is why the loss of storytelling, whether through the absence of time or the dominance of any given technology should give us some pause for reflection — if, that is, you’re still reading.
