Sunday, March 20, 2005
(11:59 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Long Posts
I have a theory. I might be wrong, but it seems like the optimal length for a blog post is something that's going to be one screenful on a 1024x768 monitor (that's the standard size for laptops and most non-stupidly-huge desktop monitors). For every paragraph you go over that length, your risk of going unread grows exponentially. If you go over two screenfuls, you virtually guarantee that people will scroll down, see that it's over two screenfuls, and either just say, "Screw it," or else put you on their "read later" list (i.e., forget to come back and read your post).The genre of "blog post" is of course an evolving genre, but ultimately I think it's going to turn out to be a short genre -- which doesn't have to mean a thoughtless genre. I think it is especially difficult for theory-oriented folks to conform to the blog genre, since the general "theory style" depends so heavily on citation and lengthy exposition -- but I think it's doable. Zizek's approach to his more journalistic and popular writings is problematic in many ways, but he definitely has the right idea in terms of length. The problem comes when he just cuts and pastes; I think that arguments unfolded in a short form can have their own kind of rigor that will not necessarily require someone to go off and read a million things in order to engage with the argument in some kind of intelligent way.
I'm thinking that blogging can be a kind of discipline, rather than a kind of sinkhole -- admittedly, it's easier for it to become and remain the latter.
UPDATE: I didn't intend this post to be normative. I am not proposing a "two screenful limit." All co-bloggers still have the freedom of speech to which they are accustomed, and if they want to write long posts, that's great. In fact, I bet that within the next couple days, I will have written a longer post. Everyone's right that audience expectations, etc., make a big difference and that we have an audience here that is prepared for long posts (though probably not for nothing but long posts, not that we're in any danger of having that).
