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I'm actually a little worried about this trend to make things shorter and more dense. When does it stop? Twitter's character limit was ludicrous at first, but now people applaud its length. I even notice in myself how short of an attention span I have nowadays. If a comment is too long, I'll read half of it and skip the rest. I don't delve anymore, I just skim. I'm wondering how this is affecting us on a larger, longer scale.

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I think (or hope) we're learning to compartmentalize our information consumption. As someone who's been involved in "user generated digital content" since before the web, I've had a front row seat for the evolutionary process that, to me, is logical but to others feels accelerated if not sudden.

I see it as our brains adapting to the information overburden that we feel is being imposed on us. As a result, those learning to adapt are creating four categories of information: (1) Stuff I need to know (2) Stuff I should know (3) Stuff I'd like to know (4) Stuff I don't care about

Content shortening/summarization helps augment our ability to quantify what fits into 2, 3, and 4. If I read the first paragraph of a traditionally written journalistic piece, I know where it fits before the second paragraph. But a precious small percentage of online content is written in that manner -- first paragraph giving the reader enough information to know what to do next. (There's a whole rant on our lost ability to write, but that's for later.) So since a smaller and smaller percentage of potentially viable information is written traditionally, automated summaries (should) help us decide sooner where something fits.

Does that make sense or am I just spewing madness?

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