As ubiquitous as social media and blogs have become, people are still reading long form journalism! Grant shares some great ways Twitter has enabled the spread of long essays from sources like The Atlantic and Wired. In addition, services like Readability, Instapaper and Longreads have streamlined the distribution of articles to our myriad devices. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Reading Long Material Online”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
There is something incredibly appealing about finding out that something that you thought was lost or was disappearing actually is still with us.
My car keys. I was looking for them all morning.
I have something more interesting, and I know that you’re excited about this too.
It’s people who like to read long articles in magazines and newspapers.
And the reason this is kind of a surprise is because what we hear from media commentaries and what we hear from supposed experts is that social media and the Internet are making us have short attention spans.
And they keep telling us that we can’t concentrate beyond 140 characters.
Wait, why did you say I was checking my email?
It turns out that one of the advantages to all this technology is to actually make it easier to consume these 10,000-word biographies that might appear in The Atlantic or these stories in Wired magazine about the oncoming technology wave that’s going to hit us, whatever it might be next year.
Or these interesting stories about the rise and fall of a great personality or the inside business of some industry that you didn’t know existed.
I call all these services long reads.
And the reason I call them that, there was a hashtag on Twitter.
This is just a little identifying word that you put in a tweet.
And people got in the habit a few years ago of when they were linking to one of these great long magazine pieces of just including that little hashtag.
Long reads is one word.
And then you could search for long reads.
And when you wanted something that could consume your brain, something that would involve you thinking, and not these quick passing hits or the little fripperies or lolcats or anything like that, right?
That you could find some and add them to your reading list.
Something to curl up with.
Yeah.
And then on top of that, there are now all these services that will take all these stories that you save.
They’re called Readability or Instapaper.
Even the Safari web browser has one built in.
They’ll take all these long reads that you’ve saved and they’ll pipe them to all your devices.
They’ll strip out the ads, take out all the navigation, just leave the content, the article itself,
And put them on your Kindle or your iPad, your laptop or your cell phone.
That’s how I read most of the stuff that I read these days.
And you find yourself sitting, say, in a cafe or waiting in line at the bank reading about a firefight in Fallujah.
Or you find yourself reading about the recovery in New Orleans.
And it’s not 100 words or 400 words.
It’s 4,000 or even 14,000.
And it’s on your phone.
And it’s on your phone.
And you find yourself moved in public places.
You didn’t have to bring the New Yorker with you.
You know that stack that you have on the back of the toilet?
Yeah.
You didn’t have to bring all of your copies of Harper’s or make sure that you fished the New York Times magazine out of the recycling pile.
It’s on your phone. You’ve saved it. There it is.
And I think that it deserves to be said that along with perhaps some of us having a shorter attention span,
Those of us who are inclined to read a lot anyway are finding that technology does a great service to our desire for more information from thinking people who are writing from a position of authority.
And that’s what these do.
So these programs like Instapaper, it’s a website, right?
Yeah.
You go to the Instapaper website.
That’s right.
They’re the electronic version of My Aunt Margaret.
My Aunt Margaret was a librarian, and she was forever clipping all these long articles.
And we would get these manila envelopes in the mail that were an inch thick because she would see an article and say, oh, I know Martha would be interested in this.
And we would get these huge envelopes full of long reads.
I love it.
Yes.
It’s something like that.
It’s a little bit of a clipping service.
We hope that you’ll join us in sharing with our community of listeners, our community of readers, the articles that you think deserve to be read.
You can send them to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call 877-929-9673.
And you can find all that great stuff on our website, waywordradio.org.
