Once upon a time an economist and a journalist got together and wrote a book, Freakonomics. A lot of people read and liked their book because it was very good, so they set up a blog (also Freaknomics) which ultimately ended up being rolled into the New York Times website. The blog was also very good, and a lot of people read and liked it too. Four years later they published another book - Superfreakonomics - and it turned out that after four years of blogging they had, collectively, forgotten how to write anything long-form at all because the whole damned thing reads like a series of blog posts. Sure, every now and again there's a nod to bringing the snippets and anecdotes in a chapter together as part of a wider theme but almost no single tale in there spans more than a couple of pages.
We read a lot about the web shortening the attention spans of readers (indeed I was discussing this with a magazine editor at the weekend and he simply said they didn't publish anything longer than a thousand words online because no-one would read it) but the shortening attention spans of authors is a new one for me. Does the discipline of blogging habituate its practitioners to thoughts and expressions only a few hundred words long? Probably. And while this makes - in this one instance at least - for an extremely disjointed book, is such brevity really such a bad thing?
Comments