The Shortification of Content

I've come up with a theory that's making me really excited, but I'm not sure whether what I'm about to describe is particular to me and I'm just finding a way to rationalize it, or whether this is real and I'm describing something that resonates with other people.  So I want you to tell me which it is, and help me figure out if this is really a theory, or I'm getting all excited for no reason.

From about, say, 2000 until 2006, although the decline probably started in more like 2004 or 2005, I sent and received a lot of pretty long e-mails.  I had a fair number of correspondences with people -- sometimes friends, sometimes strangers, sometimes strangers who became friends -- that involved long e-mails back and forth, often e-mails that were really about things.  Like, the way I kept in touch with friends, for the most part, was we would have intermittent e-mail correspondence back and forth, and it was substantive, and it was really nice, because people (and I'm definitely including myself here) seemed to feel more comfortable saying real things over e-mail and I often felt like I got to know friends a lot better through e-mail than even in person.  And I feel like this was able to happen once pretty much everyone was pretty much always online, starting in 2000 or so, and I feel like it played to my strengths and preferences as a person -- I'm much more engaged and engaging one-on-one than in groups, I can write fast, and I like being in touch with friends but find the generic small talk and occasional catching up with people to be pretty unrewarding and would much rather have a deeper conversation about something real going on in their heads.  And it was not hard for me to sort of transition a lot of the kinds of things I was writing to friends in e-mail back-and-forths in 2000 and 2001 into the beginnings of when I started blogging, when I started law school in 2002.

More and more, I feel like those long e-mail back and forths have gone away.  Almost completely at this point, although not entirely, but even when they do end up happening it seems harder and harder to sustain them and more and more unusual that we're actually exchanging long e-mails back and forth.  A couple of months ago, I responded to someone's post on a screenplay message board offering to read a script he was looking for feedback on.  We ended up exchanging some fairly long e-mails about writing, but at one point he wrote something like: "These are really long e-mails.  I don't usually write e-mails this long to anyone.  Do you?"  And I wrote back that yeah, I actually do, and this didn't seem particularly noteworthy to me... but pointing it out sort of killed the back and forth, and then I felt weird writing back some long e-mail about whatever movie-related thing we'd been talking about.

I feel like it used to be that the way to stay in touch with people was that we'd exchange e-mails every so often, and the form allowed for real depth, and I'd feel like I really knew what was going on in a bunch of my friends' lives and in their heads.  And that, sure, there were people who were better and worse over e-mail, but a lot of people were very good about communicating.

And then it got too easy.  It got too easy to stay in touch with people, with stuff like Facebook and gmail Chat, and I guess now the inanity of Twitter (a week using Twitter has given me the license to pretend I can now talk intelligently about Twitter...?).  I don't need to send Joe (I'm making up a friend here) an e-mail to see how he's doing, because I know how he's doing, because on Facebook it says that he just went to the bathroom and there's even a picture.  So I don't send Joe an e-mail quite so often.  And so Joe doesn't really send me an e-mail quite so often.  Maybe a link to an article.  Or a text message (good grief, I hate text messaging almost as much as I hate Twitter).  And even though the number of points of contact are probably the same, the contact is so much more superficial and so much less real.  I have no idea what Joe is really thinking about, and he has no idea what I'm thinking about, and we're sort of barely friends anymore, and there's no space for anything more than surface level small talk if we ever see each other in person.  And so I miss Joe.  But would feel really silly sending him a super-long e-mail like maybe I would have in 2002, when there was no Facebook and there was no gChat, and that was the only way I could find out what Joe was up to.

Before I go further with my theory, I want to pause to consider alternative explanations.  The further out of college one gets, perhaps it's just inevitable that friendships become more superficial except with that core group of people you see regularly and are genuinely close to.  Also, people start to get married and have kids and have real jobs that take up real time and that's what people's lives start to focus on and there isn't the time or inclination to be exchanging long e-mails and sharing real feelings with so many people, because you've got a spouse taking that role, and friendships will inevitably fade.  Also, as we get older, maybe we have less to say.  Jobs give people less to think about than school might have, and a lot of people start to settle into routines and the practical concerns of life replace anything real they might have going in their heads that they want to share.  I mean, I blog a lot less than I used to.  I have less going on in my head, maybe.  Or maybe it's just gotten harder to feel compelled to share because it's harder to feel like anyone cares.

So there are all sorts of reasons why blaming the loss of real and genuine e-mail back-and-forths on technology is a mistake and that it's more about me and the life cycle than about the rise of Facebook.  But I'm not convinced by the alternative explanations.  Because I still do end up in real e-mail exchanges, and when they happen, I have just as much to say as I did before, and just as much urge to communicate.  

No, I think that what happened was a transitional phase in communication that just so happened to be to my liking -- we had e-mail, but we didn't have more than that, and before we were quite as wired as we are today, e-mail lent itself to these long back and forths, but it was only a transitional phase... and then Blackberries and iPhones and Facebook and Twitter all popped up, and we've left that phase and moved into some new phase, which may or may not be transitional, depending on whether there's a next thing--

And I want to call this current transition the Shortification of Content.  And I want to declare that I hate it.  Further supporting theory: I think it's getting harder and harder to find real writing on the Internet.  When blogs started to get popular, back in 2002, 2003, 2004, so much of what I read were people's honest thoughts about things, stuff going on in their heads, compelling personal content.  There's very little in my Google Reader that's anything like that anymore -- the blogs I used to read regularly don't exist anymore, and I haven't seemed to be able to find replacements.  Instead, it's about news and information and functional rather than personal content.  Blogs with big readerships are blogs that break stories or link to stories or aggregate stories instead of tell stories.  

Unless, again, it's just me, and I either haven't found or haven't been drawn to the kinds of stuff I used to be.  But I don't think it's about me, and I don't think what compels me has changed.  I think what's out there has changed.  I think it went from impossible for people to put their thoughts out into the world (pre-Internet) to a very nice balance where people put real thoughts out there (my 2000-2006 space, roughly), to a point where it's much, much, much too easy to put thoughts out there, and so the thoughts out there are almost universally the low-hanging fruit of "I'm going to bed!" and "I'm waking up!"

The internet was neat because it enabled connection.  I e-mailed long e-mails to friends, and started blogging back when I did, in large part to find and maintain rewarding connection.  It's nice to feel connected.  Beyond just the surface level.  And lately I feel less and less connected, to most of the people in my life (not all, but most).  People are less and less good about real communication, and there's less and less urgency about things like e-mail, because if you really need someone to answer something, there's nineteen other ways to find them, and everyone gets so many e-mails that it's easy for things to get lost in the shuffle.  At the same time, again, maybe I'm wrong, and maybe it's just that I have less to say, and also less urgency to say it, because I'm getting married and have that real connection with my fiancee, so maybe I don't need it as much elsewhere and don't pursue it quite so hard.  But that can't be true, because I'm writing this post -- I miss feeling closer to a bunch of people I used to feel closer to, genuinely.  And I guess I want to blame technology instead of the unfortunate reality that I guess people get busy and inevitably drift apart.

So that is my theory.  Does any of this resonate with anyone or make any sense at all?

*and will someone please tell me what they get out of Twitter, what makes them at all interested in writing or reading any of it, and what the point is, because I absolutely cannot figure out why anyone cares about what anyone is posting and why anyone thinks that anyone should care.

Comments

[Cindy]

Very interesting theory. I certainly went through the same process. When I started using the internet in 1999 or so, my emails were just like the physical letters I used to write to people, only a lot easier to send. So, they all started "Dear So-and-so" and ended "Love, Cindy," and had multiple paragraphs. But then more and more people started making comments about how long my emails were, and I gradually started making them shorter and more informal. I didn't get onto facebook until this year, but that has decreased the quantity and content of my emails even more.

[Ben]

Great entry, Jeremy. I miss those long emails, too. I think back in those days, our concept of emails was more similar to our concept of hand-written letters, which were also longish (to justify the postage and bother of snail mail). In general, I do miss the ability to sit still (mine and everybody else's).

[Sean S.]

Overall this was a really great post, but for the moment I just want to focus on the last sentence regarding Twitter/Facebook. I think that people believe that others care about what they are posting, simply because others do care.

On Facebook, for example, a person will post a status update, and others will leave comments concerning the update. Certainly, those comments reinforce within the poster that people are not only reading what he/she is writing, but taking the time to respond in some way. So, if the motivation to post on twitter/facebook can be driven simply by the knowledge that others care about what one is writing, then I can see easily why one might continue to post.

A second question is why do people care about the often trivial things written on the status updates. Not quite sure, but it may tie into your theory about people drifting apart over time. Although the drifting is real, by constantly letting people know what you are up to, and by commenting to those people posting who you've formed a relationship with over time, you might convince yourself that you are in some way staying in touch with certain friends, and not in fact drifting apart. Have you ever felt guilty after not speaking to someone in a while? This kind of communication might alleviate some of that guilt, and might lead one to believe that they've remained in touch with all of their friends from the past. Whether they have is open to interpretation.

Sadly, people might be less likely to reach out and communicate with people, because they won't feel guilty about drifting apart, due to the constant stream of easy communication on facebook/twitter.(And I believe this was a point you were making.) But these kinds of websites do serve a purpose in providing a sense of well-being to those who want to think they are well-connected to former friends.

[Emily]

You're right about this.

It's all kind of too bad, really. I miss feeling connected with people, and I don't really like having tons of shallow relationships. (Just because we had a class together five years ago doesn't mean I care what you're eating.)

I just can't get excited about Facebook status updates. And twitter is okay, but it's something that I check every week or two and that's about it.

The only thing I really do like about twitter is that I've found a few people that are funny to read, and I enjoy their witty remarks. (Surprisingly, none of them are people that I actually know. People that I do know seem to post stuff that I don't care about, and I feel a twinge of irritation towards them for wasting my time with stupid updates. In contrast though, their blogs are usually better crafted.)

[Scheherazade]

You might like this article, and the links within it, about friendship patterns across different technologies. Or you might not, but I think it's connected to what you're talking about: http://bit.ly/b7eWR

[Jessica R.]

Great post. So true.

[Hamilton]

Shaq might give you something free if you follow him on twitter...

[Jessica]

Hi. I just tuned back in. I used to read your AL blog several years ago and I remember how fun it was and how smug and mean he was. Then, I realized he was fiction and I was like, no way! So, tonight I just surfed your blog and found you aren't doing that right now and I get to read you as you... that is great.