Here are a series of well-worn and familiar statements that also happen to be wrong: the internet is destroying attention spans; the web is killing off deep, extended writing; and new technology is about distraction rather than edification. Or at least, they’re wrong if a flurry of new applications and services dedicated to long-form writing is a sign of anything.
If the trend had a starting point, it was likely the launch of a simple little Twitter account called Longreads in April 2009. Since its start, it has listed a few links to longer articles every day, and on its website, even notes the approximate time each piece will take you to read. The service currently has 22,000 followers on Twitter and is steadily growing. Clearly, there is a hunger for depth out there.
But it’s likely no coincidence that long-form online reading really started to take off when devices like the iPad and the Kindle arrived. Not only were their forms far better suited to sustained, focused reading than a computer, they were also backed by online stores that provided a way for people to pay for individual pieces of writing rather than an entire magazine or journal.
It’s that combination of an infrastructure and a reading device that enable things like last week’s article-cum-app, The Final Hours of Portal 2. Created by games journalist Geoff Keighley, it’s a 15,000 word opus that details the making of the sequel to Portal, one of the smartest, most inventive video games of the last few years. Beyond the writing, there are interactive elements involving photos and music and even polls for readers to vote in. If for years we’ve been hearing about immersive, multimedia forms that expand the capacity for storytelling and journalism, with the tablet it seems they are finally here.
There are also services like recently launched The Atavist, which bills itself as a boutique publishing house that focuses on original, longer pieces of non-fiction that you can read on an iPad, iPhone or Kindle. They are sold individually for two or three dollars each, and can seamlessly switch back and forth between an audio or text version while the story keeps your place. The first story, titled “Before the Swarm”, is emblematically weird and fascinating: it details the complexities of a massive society of ants and what its intricacies may reveal about humans.
It’s just that kind of uniqueness that seems to be the selling point of The Atavist, or similar platforms like Kindle Singles, which uses the same model to peddle short fiction too. Meanwhile, newcomer Byliner recently made a splash by publishing Jon Krakauer’s debunking of philanthropist Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea. By selling individual stories, publishers and writers can afford to take risks in form, length and style, while readers with an interest in more in-depth writing can try it for very little money.
The thing is, long-form prose always need two things: a way to focus a reader’s attention; and what you might call an ‘editorial container’, like a magazine, a journal or a book to deliver those hand-selected stories to readers. While print made the former easy, the latter made it expensive and subject to the whims of the market.
The arrival of app stores, tablets and e-readers means that these new forms allow for a kind of atomised approach to writing, where readers pick and choose each article they’ll read rather than picking up a whole magazine. And by breaking the link between editorial entities and individual articles, writers and readers can delve into the odd, innovative and challenging relatively pain-free.
More to the point, far from the myth that the web is killing our desire for well-researched, complex writing, the proliferation and success of these services seems to suggest the internet is instead nurturing it, if perhaps in ways we didn’t forsee. The results may not look the same — and may not fit our definition for what an article or book is — but it’s hard to argue that a new home for deep, extensive, smart writing is anything but a net good.
