We need to do better. I need to do better. There is too much content and not enough art. Almost every tweet, every Instagram story, and every YouTube video is low-quality, easily digestible content made for the masses to consume in the 24-hour trickle of so-called ‘news feeds.’ And the more we scroll, the more we find to consume on the reg and it all gets added to the pile of digital waste we must check in on whenever we are bored or distracted.
And we wonder why we feel lost, jaded, anxious, and jealous. We feel like we are missing out on something but we don’t know what that something is. Our default response to this feeling of FOMO is to grab our phone and scroll just once more. Perhaps we think there will be something there this time but we don’t even know what it is we are looking for.
There’s a similar problem with online articles. Pieces written for easy consumption in an attempt to sell a product or service. Articles with clickbait headlines published for no other reason than to gain internet traffic in the hopes you get distracted and click on an ad. I know this because when I first started writing, I was told this is how to make a living as an online writer. And admittedly, there was a time when I produced work that arguably polluted the internet more than enhance it.
The problem is twofold in my opinion so bear with me as I attempt to examine each issue individually in an attempt to improve my skills as a writer and your experience as a reader.
Fast Food
Content as they call it has become a race to the bottom. I say this because the average content creator has made his or her ‘art’ cheap, easy to consume, and low quality. Much of the writing on the internet isn’t trying to teach you, or show you a world outside of your own. It’s simply a ploy to get you to click on the piece, skim through it, and be funneled into the action they want you to take — like clicking on ads and so forth.
Beyond that, most writing advice to newbie writers is to keep your words simple. At or below an eighth-grade level they say, with neat bullet points and what they call, skimmability. Most new writers fall for this — myself included. While this is okay, there’s no need to sound like a pretentious ass, the problem lies in the fact that after getting to a baseline level of competence, many online writers don’t try to become progressively better. And why should they? If most readers want snackable content, why not give it to them? Writers need readers and the internet has caused them to serve the lowest common denominator. This train of thinking doesn’t do the reader any service and it definitely doesn’t serve the writer but that’s what the ‘gurus’ are teaching.
So what we have is a bunch of writers writing low-grade content to feed the masses who aren’t picky about what they’re consuming because they haven’t been exposed to actual art — all in the hopes you take a completely different action. And when you can skim through a piece without actually reading the words, you the reader have gained nothing. You likely haven’t learned anything and if you have, you will probably forget what you’ve learned within twenty minutes — if not sooner. However, the content creator has completed his mission of adding one more site visitor and one more ad view to his analytics. And that’s all he or she cares about because that’s how creators make money. They need traffic and the cost is your attention span and your mental bandwidth.
I liken it to fast food. Fast food is cheap and easy and satisfying to the palette when you are hungry for something quick. And if you eat fast food all of the time you’ll never know what it is like to enjoy meals that are considered culinary excellence. Meals with ingredients that required extensive time to grow. Ingredients that were carefully chosen, and cautiously used. Meals that were prepared by a highly trained chef out of love for seeing others enjoy his creations. Like reading a long in-depth article, these types of meals seem laborsome and costly because our attention spans have become insolvent.
It’s much easier to grab fast food and move on to the next thing. McNuggets are quick, cheap, easy, and what you have come to expect.
That’s what ‘content’ does which leads me to my next point.
A Scarcity of Patience and an Abundance of Laziness
Quick and easy content leads to a lack of patience and worse, laziness. Our focus is shot and we’ve lost the ability to remain patient. It has disappeared because we have trained our minds to give as little attention as possible to in-depth quality writing. We’ve all clicked on the article that was a wall of text that seemed too long for us to finish. We have lost the ability to learn from some of history’s greatest works because it is easier to get life advice from a 20-year-old ‘life coach’ with a blog.
If it’s not in the form of a bulleted list we won’t read it. If the title of the article doesn’t have a number in it we won’t click on it. Again we are looking for low-hanging fruit because we’ve lost patience. On top of that, most modern content consumption is laziness. It is easier to open an app than it is to walk to the library. We’re too lazy to get a ladder to climb the tree to get to the good fruit. So, back to McDonald’s we go, circling the drive-through again and again rotting our minds as a result of the garbage we consume.
Because of this cycle, we don’t know what good art actually consists of, we don’t have the patience to discern the good from the bad, and we don’t care to put in the effort to learn either. More importantly, we don’t have the focus to correct any of this much in the same way that, if all we consumed was fast food, we wouldn’t have the health or energy to exercise, eat a better diet, or find a better restaurant. Consume enough fast food and we lose the will and ability to find anything remotely better.
Final Thoughts
If you are still with me, congrats and thank you as I am rambling a bit. I’ll finish with these thoughts.
Consumers and creators control the market and each has a responsibility to shape the market in a manner that benefits both parties. As a writer, it is my duty to make things for people to consume at the highest level of my ability while continuing to improve my skills. Pandering to the bottom is sleazy, arguably unethical, and neither serves you nor I.
As a consumer, it is important that we regain our focus and choose things to consume that will benefit us in the long term. We are best served to seek in-depth essays, poignant reflections, informative teachings, and or high-quality art produced by creators who put time and love into their craft, rather than consuming cheap, disgusting, digital McNuggets.
As a reader, it is your job to like, share, retweet, comment, and otherwise engage with worthy creations as it is my job to produce creations worthy of praise. Both methods work for the greater good of humanity which is what the internet is all about.
In short, skip the fast food and find a great local restaurant. Take the time to make a reservation, and wait for your table, and wait at your table, and slowly savor the meal that someone has worked hard to carefully prepare for you, and when you are done tell your peers about the excellent experience you had while dining, and for god’s sake, don’t scroll through your phone in the middle of dinner.
For thoughts and comments @ me on Twitter.