What is quite obviously happening is that the number of things that are available for short attention are increasing. But, so is the ability to consume complicated, long-form information. I think the fact that Nate Silver’s site in the recent election—Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com—became a breakout hit was a kind of a testimony to a hunger in people for taking in information in long, large, complex ways. It was just a crazy amount of information that Silver followed. One of the things the Internet does by removing the old constraints—it’s really the first thing ever invented worthy of the name media, because it’s the first general purpose media we’ve ever had—is it almost never moves us from a world of one effect to another effect. It almost always increases the range of all effects. So, I think that, you know, it’s certainly been a boon for, you know, short-form blogging and Twittering and so forth. But, it also means that someone who’s especially interested in a certain kind of content can actually get much, much more access to it than possible.

So, I think it has increased long attention span where that is what people find rewarding and increased short attention span where that’s been found rewarding. My seven-year-old, who is absolutely obsessed with every aspect of the New York transportation system, has found on Wikipedia more information than his parents who have lived in New York for twenty and forty years, respectively, could possibly have provided him. And, he’s just happy to be on Wikipedia, pulling this information down and adding it up. And there’s so much reward there for long attention spans and I think we haven’t noticed it in part because the narrative that we tell ourselves about media is ‘the past is always better than the future,’ that we kind of missed the fact that, actually, the range of effects is opening up.

RJ: Would you say that the main effect of the Internet or the Web on media consumption is that it has facilitated a wider range of accessibility from the really short-term to the really long-term to the really in-depth—

CS: Yeah, absolutely. Everyone who’s dealt with publishing constraints—who has the experience of knowing “Oh, I’m sorry, this is a 10,000 word article we’ve commissioned, or a 5,000 word article, and we’re going to get rid of all this extra writing stuff”—has seen places where long-form writing, because there’s no bottom of the page, where long-form writing can thrive. One of the most important essays ever published in the technology world was The Cathedrals and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond’s long-form musing on open-source software and how it works. That thing comes in, at I think, 20,000 words. If that had been sent through The New York Times Magazine’s editorial process, it would have been slashed to ribbons. And yet it changed the world.

But we don’t tell stories about long-form writing that couldn’t have thrived in the existing constraints of print media because print media squishes things down to be too short because it doesn’t match this narrative that was first set up for TV, which is “Oh, all this new media is shortening people’s attention spans and distracting them.” To which you can, you know, you can only reply, “Yes, that’s true,” except where it’s not true. There’s no inkling of that of that explanation in the success of, say, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. And the length of that essay was, in part, of one of things that made it successful.

RJ: Why do so many people seem focused on this idea that the Web has cut our attention spans down? What’s responsible for that phenomenon?

CS: So many people think that the Web is shortening attention spans?

RJ: Yeah.

CS: You know, “Life was better when I was younger” is always an acceptable narrative. Right? And so for anybody who was brought up genuflecting to the literary culture and the virtues of reading Tolstoy—and essentially Tolstoy is a trope in these things, War and Peace is the longest novel in the sort of Euro-centric canon—you could always make the argument that the present is worse than the past by simply pointing to the virtues of the past. And so, what the Web does is that it does what all amateur increases do, which is it decreases the average quality of what’s available. It is exactly, precisely, the complaint made about the printing press. So, the only thing surprising about the Web, in a way, is that it’s been a long time since we’ve had a medium that increased the amount of production of written material this dramatically.

But people made the same complaint about comic books, they made the same complaint about paperbacks, and they made the same complaint about the vulgarity of the printing press. Whenever you let more people in, things get vulgar by definition. And people who benefited under the old system or who dislike or distrust vulgarity as a process always have room to complain. But, the interesting thing is, when you say so many people believe this, in fact almost no one believes this, right? There’s a tiny, tiny slice of the chattering classes for whom “Life was better when I was younger” is an acceptable complaint to make, and they have these little conferences or whatever and agree with one another about that phenomenon. But when you look at the actual use of the Web, it is through the roof. And it has continued in an unbroken growth from the early ’90s until now. So, in fact, almost everybody thinks it’s a good idea because they’re embracing it and they’re experimenting with it and they don’t really care what we think.