Reading a full length novel is like going on a long exciting journey. Reading micro fiction is like reading an extremely short statement about a journey but you never actually go on that journey.
It's like seeing one lone photographic snapshot of the journey without getting to experience the journey.
Back in my heavy reading days I always got really excited to see a really, really thick fat book. I loved going on reading adventures. The longest novel I ever read was over 2100 pages long. I was so sad when it ended because I wanted more. I didn't want the journey to end.
But in today's internet world the average attention span has been quickly shriveling down to almost nothing. I call it the 'twitterization' of humanity. Soon an haiku will be considered long-form poetry and any fiction over one paragraph long will never get read.
While you celebrate this, Mark, I find it very, very sad. But I certainly acknowledge this truth about the diminishing of attention spans. And that is why Medium is so popular; because everyone strives for brevity over anything else.
I see the truth of it in my own writings. Of my 4 published novels the one that sold the most was the shortest one. Sales diminished with each subsequent novel according to length. My second shortest novel sold the second most, my third shortest novel sold the third most, and my longest novel (over 400 pages, and what I consider my greatest work) sold the least. 400+ pages is just too much for today's attention span.
The same goes for Medium. When I first started with Medium in August, 2015 there were a lot of pieces over 10 minutes and plenty over 20 minutes. And they got read!
Now, in just 5 years, the average Medium attention span has dramatically reduced. Anything over 5 minutes is avoided by most readers. Anything over 3 minutes is considered long. And the attention span continues to decrease despite payment being decided by length. Why write one really good true short fiction that is a 12 minute read when you can get more reads and make more money by writing 12 one minute micro fictions. On Medium, as with anywhere else on the internet or in real life, everything is about quantity and brevity over quality.
Why go on an exciting journey when instead you can just look at a photographic snapshot of some distant place? That is the mentality the internet is conditioning us with.
Back in 2015 and 2016 so many of my stories were over 10 minutes and I got thousands of views, reads, and claps. Now if I write something that long it will just sit there and never be clicked on.
If I were to check my stats page (which I try not to do more than once or twice a month) I can see that the number of clicks, reads and claps is determined almost entirely by brevity. The shorter a piece is, the more views, reads, and claps I get. It's true almost every single time.
Medium, and the rest of the world, is slowly turning into yet another Facebook or Twitter. At the rate the average attention span is shrinking soon writers will dispense with words entirely and only use photos and emojis.
Personally, I find this to be very, very sad. Everyone else seems to be celebrating this, though.
