werealljustkindawiningit

A commonly accepted truth is that we live in a snack culture: We devour our cultural input the way we eat sweets and tortilla chips. Bite-size content packages that are easy to digest and allow us to move on quickly to the next cultural snack. A world filled with dumb YouTube stunts, short blog posts and lifestreams. And while we’re entertaining ourselves to death, our old culture filled with thick books and deep, philosophic thoughts is being replaced with vapid content.

As it goes with a commonly accepted truths: It’s just a load of b.s.

Sure, the transformation from consumers to producers has led to an advent of bite-sized content: Blog posts, YouTube videos, Twitter expressions. At the same time, we’ve seen the exact opposite in mass media: Shows like Boardwalk Empire or Lost expects viewers to invest a lot of hours to get the full enjoyment out of them. Movies have gotten much longer, during the holidays season the average movie hoping to win an Academy Award is around 3 hours. Music isn’t limited to 3 minutes anymore because it’s not forced to oblige to the rules of Top 40 radio. Some songs are up 10 minutes long. I’ve heard DJ sets that were more than 12 hours long. Video Games changed from “Pong” to sophisticated games, requiring people to spend a lot of time and energy to master them.

Nostalgia doesn’t move us forward

I grew up in a world of 3 TV channels in Germany, 1 newspaper daily available at the newsstand and many, many books at home and in the library. Since I’m pretty curious, I read “War and Peace” and, yes, even “Ulysses”. And thousands of other books. Frankly, I had no other choices. Besides staring at the wall.

The cultural pessimist in me believes that almost nobody will read these books in the future. There’s just so much more interesting content out there. Thank God, the cultural pessimist in me is almost always wrong. The eternal optimist in me believes that our current feeling of being constantly overwhelmed by information will give way to a feeling of being in control. The challenge is that we feel a sense of excess right now: Internet searches turn up too many results, we continue to add people to our Social Graph, making tools like Twitter almost impossible to deal with. This is a temporary issue. We’re starting to devise ways to cope with the information overload. We will find new ways to select, summarize, and sort, and we will use our human judgment and attention to guide the process.

The reliance on the wisdom of crowds and algorithms has brought us to the point where some feel everything will be bite-sized. New ways of curating and introducing human editors to the mix will help us cope with the avalanche of information. And, who knows, one day we all will read Ulyssess in the subway and not stare at our Twitter feed.