An argument for long form
Long form: long-form journalism, long form online; you may have heard the term bandied about but a definition will prove elusive.
‘Long form’ makes me think of p-books1. In the same way we have e-books and p-books, we now have the short essay, the blog post and lately, the long-form essay. The fact that we can’t reach a consensus on the territory the long-form essay claims suggests that is it not an established term, and scrutiny may result in fraying around the edges.
When researching reading online, one is bound to come across the following ideas: long form onscreen is hard on the mind and the eye; it’s taxing and the reader is easily distracted; it is not suited to the digital medium. It is hard to say what will become of the long form, it is implied, when we cross the great divide into the wholly digital textual world.
Long form, I propose, means ‘essay’. It can include but is not limited to technology essays, academic essays, New Yorker essays. It is a term created to describe a form established and practiced pre-Internet.
Many internet audiences have come to accept that blog posts are short. Which is true, up until a point – but it depends what you’re selling and who your audience is. And audience is pivotal to this argument. (Again.)
Long form, suggests the New Yorker, ‘is something you want to sit with and not be distracted by. I don’t mean this in a spiritual way, but it’s a meditative experience. The Web is fundamentally a distracted experience’.
The New Yorker long-form essays, many available online, have helped to sell the ‘essay’ as a form, as well as the publication. New Yorker staff, however, don’t believe their targeted audience wants to read these online.
Does long-form journalism work online, inquired Jason Fry:
No, says Josh Tyrangiel, Time.com’s managing editor ‘long-form journalism … much as I wish it were thriving, is not’.
Yes, says Gerald Marzorati, editor of the New York Times Magazine, telling Times readers that ‘contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s our longest pieces that attract the most online traffic.’
[…]I’m sure both men are correct. But then they’re serving very different audiences.
Sites like longform.org (ostensibly a site created to sell the Instapaper app), hosts essay gems like 'What Happened When I Went Undercover at a Christian Gay-to-Straight Conversion Camp', or 'Living with a computer' (from the Atlantic Monthly, 1982!). They believe people do want to read on electronic devices, but probably are more inclined to do so on iPhones and Kindles rather than on one’s computer monitor.
Meanwhile, writers and academics like Jeff Watson argue:
What’s really going on here is in fact less a matter of ideological dispute than a linguistic discord brought about by category confusion – a semantic landslide shaken into being by instabilities in the definitions of the words online and reading. Furthermore, I argue that as the dust settles, the definitions for these words will expand and overlap one another as they stretch to take into account the dynamism and reach of the erupting technoculture; as a result, the distinction between so-called ‘media literacy’ and traditional capital-L Literacy will all but disappear.
Perhaps audiences are becoming more sophisticated at reading online; perhaps we are adapting as readers. And surely this is a question of where and how we’re rating distraction, distractions like those the New Yorker believes negatively impact upon your reading their magazine online. Reading a physical copy of their magazine doesn’t mean that your iPhone isn’t sitting next to you, or that you’re fully immersed in the reading experience.
(This moves into interesting territory about reading and literacy. 'Digital reading spaces: how expert readers handle books, the web and electronic paper' is a study that draws a correlation between ‘discontinuous and fragmented reading’ that we do online, and scholarly reading and research.)
So can long form survive online? Most of the arguments say no; but what is different about reading on a Kindle or an iPhone to reading onscreen? Doesn’t it simply come down to audience and form?
As designer and web provocateur David Sleight said last year:
'You can’t do long-form writing online.'
Really? It’s 2009 and we’re still having this conversation?
[…]Bottom line? It’s a bald fallacy of presumption to hold that presenting text on a webpage ipso facto induces peripatetic behavior in your audience. The content itself, and the design used to present it, are the leading factors in shaping success. Not pixels or points. The hands that matter are those of the writer and the designer. If you’re a Web designer, you have incredible power (and a responsibility) to help further the case for this medium.
No more lazy assumptions.
Long form production and consumption is audience-dependent, as it always has been. And not in a general amorphous reading public or reader-assumption kind of way – it’s about having a target-audience in mind.
As The Millions recently romanticised about the Atlantic: ‘They have always been here – figuring out how to deliver their authors to readers in every conceivable form’.
[1] We should resist the term ‘p-book’. Books were/are/continue to be printed. The e-book is the book’s electronic equal, not their understudy.
Very nice post.Thank you. I was reading an essay last night by George Steiner (from 1972) on the future of the book. He bemoans the demise of the hardback as the standard mode delivery of books, scorning the paperback and arguing that a library of paperbacks isn't a real library.
We are just learning to read differently, perhaps read more, and inhabit the reading space differently. Online reading is perhaps distracted because we often sit at a desk, or some other uncomfortable spot reading badly-formatted print on a glowing screen. Reading a hardcopy book I could be in the bath, in bed, in a hammock, on the grass, on the beach. Technology for delivering lots of e-text to read, is still rubbish. The hardcopy book is a brilliant design, and I'm guessing that the ebook reader will come to more closely mimic it. Then perhaps the 'distracted' reading associated with the Net might disappear. And long-forms, short-forms, whatever-forms, will proliferate. Its early days yet for the Internet and for eBooks.
And I assume the 'expert readers' of the comparative study were expert in hardcopy text. They'd certainly need expert eyes to be able to read the tiny font the study's text is displayed in.
Stephen Wright
06 May at 01:44PM
Tl;dr.
(I'm joking. A very interesting post, although the existence of the above acronym does suggest that the problem is real.)
Jon Walker
06 May at 02:28PM
I read a lot online. If I read something long, I usually do it in piecemeal, browsing between it and whatever else I happen to be doing at the time. I fear this dilutes my comprehension, so if I really want to "not be distracted by" something, I do what I do when I write - take the internet away from myself. This usually means printing the piece out and reading it on the train.
As for long form's future online, I have come across some great journalism that takes "long form" up a level and uses the internet's capabilities - The child in the window and The truth rundown, both by the St. Petersburg Times (links below), are examples - by including supplementary videos, audio and follow-up stories. This certainly seems like one way of at least expanding on the traditional form.
http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article750838.ece
http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2009/reports/project/
TF
06 May at 02:30PM
I agree with most of the article, except to express surprise that it has no reference to the EXCELLENT arcLabs Readability service.
I read quite a bit on my iPhone, and pretty much found it impossible on my laptop due to designs which were more focused on promoting other content and advertising rather then ensuring the content was easy to use.
Then I discovered readability. Anything longer than a few paragraphs is now read exclusively using this service.
Not only does it give you the opportunity to design how you want to read the piece, it removes the distractions you refer to.
I'm sure websites hate it, but for me, it's a godsend.
franksting
06 May at 04:46PM
Thanks to Frank for mentioning Readability, which can be found at arc90.com
It can be printed from as well.
And thank you, Jacinda, for the article from First Monday, a journal we read often during my info management studies.
It does seem incongruous that you continue to express concern about screen reading of longer pieces of writing when so much academic work is now chiefly subscribed to by university libraries in electronic formats, and students spend their days reading on screens, using zoom keys, or printing out longer pieces.
One of the things I have always found paper better for, paradoxically, is reading several things at once. Screens tend to have a bottleneck effect when you are working from several essays at a time, and I think some people get around this by having a couple of screens, don't they? at a desktop, anyhow.
genevieve
06 May at 07:53PM
Thanks for the post, Jacinda.
I find the main difference between online and hard copy reading is the permeability of the former. Articles and essays using hyperlinks result in productive distraction(depth)at best and endless digression at worst. I agree that web page design, especially the Flash heavy variety, can be visually noisy and not nearly as serene as stark text on paper. Thanks for the arcLabs tip Genevieve.
Unlike Stephen, I'm comforatable with the idea of reading on a iPad or similar device in diverse locations but I do agree that the technology still has a way to go to reach the fully functional level. Inevitably, it will.
The most important feature of the long form, in whatever delivery platform, is its capacity for exploring the nooks and crannies of an idea. The essential task for educators, including parents, is to nurture the powers of concentration of their charges in order to antidote the unidimensional model of information that dominates contemporary, especially popular, culture.
Boris Kelly
07 May at 06:22PM
Bravo. As essays editor of the online literary quarterly Wag's Revue, I've thought a great deal about whether long pieces can exist online. And I agree, they totally can. Arguments against this stance seem to be more symptomatic of the general (misguided) belief that the death of print is the death of writing. Of course the Internet has spawned new conventions - many of which are rather short-form, think 140 characters - but to argue that the Net is empirically anti-long content isn't only rather sheepish, but counterintuitive. Think of it: to print on paper, you need to fell trees, process and bleach them into paper, ink, ship by weight, etc. It's a costly process, one that should (theoretically) encourage concision. The Net on the other hand, economically provides endless publishable space. It's only a matter of time before writers and editors figure out how to not only take advantage of this possibly more advantageous medium, but to also to experiment with the relationship between space and content itself. Now that more content is going digital, I'd say it's only a matter of time before people start writing in ways that take advantage of the internet's malleability to end the age old battle between writers and editors regarding piece length. Robert Moor imagines this scenario in the end of a long hypertext profile of Robert Coover in our latest issue: http://www.wagsrevue.com/Issue_5/index_coover.php#/80
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