"...stories on Reddit or your friends' pointless twits about their life. Looking at photos of sunsets or reading one-liners takes no cognitive effort. It's the mental equivalent of snack food. You start eating one and before you know it you've gone through two cans of Pringles and become a world expert on Evan Williams' travel habits.
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As David Foster Wallace noted about television, "people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." Similarly, no one (Doctorow included, I suspect), actually prefers blog posts to novels, it's just that people tend to have more short chunks of time to read blog posts than they do long chunks of time to read novels."
The first lesson from this is that the popularization of products that are not vulgar will require personalization. Luckily, that is not far away.
The second lesson from the post is that people prefer things in bite sized chunks. This will not change --biological organisms evolved to survive today before they worry about tomorrow. Attention spans will only get shorter with increasing availability of distractions. Besides, breaking things into small chunks make it easier for people to make their own decisions as to whether to continue with something or not, which parts to read, etc. Products will be consumed more if broken up in small digestible chunks.
Why is David Foster Wallace's observation true? Because vulgar interests are primitive, original, something we all come endowed with from the factory, while refined interests are just that: they evolved from a process of refinement (like sugar from a refinery), a process which is different for each individual, consequently ending up with different results in each case.
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