#words not read

I am fascinated by the changes wrought upon written communications by the Internet.

Once there was a definite structure and a clear and difficult path to being worthy of being published, whereupon an audience was virtually guaranteed.

Nowadays anyone can publish but it’s very difficult to rise above the noise and get read by more than a handful of friends.

It’s also possible that the concentration span of the average reader is suffering a form of Zeno’s paradox, i.e. heading inexorably towards an infinitesimally small tweetish-like length.

I have a number of potentially mutually exclusive hypotheses as to the future of the written word:

1. That the worthy will get read anyway, especially after a short period when all the social media and online publishing technologies settle down, and control by the middlemen emerges again, and

2. The worthy will have to work harder to get read, but will have to suck up less as well. They will be more tired but feel better about themselves, and

3. The length of the intelligent tome will expand or shrink (depends on where you are coming from) to become a super-pamphlet; everything else will be considered as marketing or a boat anchor.

4. A form of never-ending reading will emerge – non-linear stories and information that flow with the reader’s interests. Unconstrained by the paper book format there is no reason why every reader should get the same words. Or why a story should even stop.

5. The never-ending stories might come in increments of 140 characters or 14,000 characters – it depends on what the reader can stomach.

6. Reading will always trump hearing (including videos) – because it is so much quicker. And time is increasingly of the essence.

7. I fear the rise of automated writing. Starting with remixes, this trend will emerge to challenge human writers. It has already started in fact.

8. Every format of the written word will be littered with ads. Off to the side, surveys between chapters, buried in the text, you name it … this is the price we pay for not having any upfront fee.