The Long Take

It took only took five seconds into this new decade before a new world record was set: On January 1, at 12:00:04 a.m., 6,939 tweets were sent within the space of one second in Japan.

No doubt a huge number of those messages were seasonal greetings to ring in the new year, but I'm old enough to remember a time when at the stroke of midnight on NYE, people would open their front doors and shout their good wishes to their neighbours from their porches. Who knew, in 1980, that in thirty years we would be able to reach people around the world with the same messages without leaving our sofas.

It is this great benefit of accessibility that gets obscured by those who criticize social media tools, like Twitter, for disseminating misinformation and degenerating the level of public discourse. (Of course, these phenomena are not the fault of the technology.)

In a short article published recently in Wired, Clive Thompson proposes that in fact what we're seeing is not a degeneration of discourse, but a new way of organizing it. He argues that tools such as Twitter and Facebook are being used to share headlines, make brief statements of fact or spread short bits of gossip and the like, but that blogs are being used to publish in-depth analyses and reports. He calls this publishing style the long take (a nod to the long tail concept popularized by Chris Anderson.) The long take blog post has several benefits over traditional print media: it can reach a wider audience, its shelf-life is way longer than what magazines and newspapers could ever offer, and you don't have to be employed by a media outlet to make your voice heard. Anyone can publish. Oh, and it's generally free.

I'm not sure I totally agree that the 'middle take' is going the way of the dodo, but my experience of social media is in complete accord with his schema: headlines that are tweeted and texted point me in the direction of where I'd like to pursue further in-depth reading.

The point is that social media technologies are for sharing information. It's unlikely, for example, that a wikipedia entry would ever be used to substantiate a claim in a fact-based argumentative paper, but that's not what wikipedia is for. Its content is user-generated, so it's merely a starting point. It can give you an idea of what's already being talked about on a given topic. Verifying the information is up to the reader. Hasn't that always been the case?