Nope; I'm not the grammar police. And I got interested in publishing because, though the desire was there, I couldn't write. Kinda like the lifetime sportscaster who makes a living calling the game, but never had the talent to play it himself.Jusme wrote:Great post and thanks for sharing your background in the publishing business. (I'll have to be more careful with my grammar and syntax now)
Yep. It began over three decades ago shortly after MTV launched and the realization hit that attention spans were being shrunken to nothing over the length of a music video. And seemingly with each improvement in technology, that attention span has continued to shrink while the proclivity to multitask increased.Jusme wrote:I think writing, like most art forms, has faced tremendous changes in just our lifetimes. With the advent of computer aided sounds, and graphics, the consumer driven, instantaneous result oriented, public, sees time consuming prose, composition, and sound, much as we viewed horse drawn transportation. It is quaint, and good for an afternoon distraction, but not worthwhile to really consider it as viable anymore. I still don't own a Kindle or any other dedicated electronic reading device. I do download electronic books to my laptop, but I still prefer being able to turn pages.
In spring of 2015, with the publication of a study by Microsoft, we learned that humans now had an average attention span shorter than that piscine mental giant, the goldfish. The study surveyed 2,000 participants and studied the brain activity using EEGs of 112 others. What they found was that, over the space of 15 years, the average attention span dropped 33% down to eight seconds. The lowly goldfish logs in at nine seconds.
One tidbit from the report: "Heavy multi-screeners find it difficult to filter out irrelevant stimuli--they’re more easily distracted by multiple streams of media."
"Look! A squirrel!"
I grew up a reader. My mother had that passion and passed it on, and my parents didn't restrict my reading material (well, within reason; meaning that they didn't try to filter out material based on reading level or seriousness of topic; back then, overtly sexual subjects and profane language were much less common, so it didn't take as much work on their part as it would today). I was reading at a fairly mature level by the time I went into elementary school. The books we read there drove me nuts. I took vocal exception to the "See Jane run" curriculum, which in turn drove my teachers nuts. I'd wake in the middle of the night in second and third grade, sit up with the sheet draped over me, and by flashlight read Ian Fleming, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Johnston McCulley, and Dashiell Hammett, or pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, or Weird Tales. No wonder I ended up wearing glasses when I was young.
But if you had a young, imaginative mind in the era of console televisions the size of a deep freeze that housed a rounded, 12-inch black-and-white screen, you read. Now a kid lives in a home with, typically, more than one flat-screen TV, probably with local and internet streaming capabilities plus several hundred cable channels and a gazillion YouTube videos available, one or more desktop or laptop computers and tablets, and seemingly everybody over the age of 10 has a personal smartphone.
"Okay, Google. What is the average person's attention span?"
I don't think the novel, as art form, will disappear anytime soon. But as the Baby Boomer generation dies off, the demand for novels will, I expect, markedly decrease. Add to that the shear volume of terribly written stuff now available in digital form--and able to masquerade as if it were legitimately edited and published--and today's high schoolers or college students who might decide to dabble in reading for entertainment are likely to find all the chaff too hard to sift through and permanently off-putting.
There will always be those in every generation who love the written language, its infinite flexibility, and the nuance it can convey that multimedia immersion simply cannot. But those will be few, and I wouldn't be surprised if hardcopy novel publication doesn't drop below a tenth its current volume by 2040. Hardcopy book publishing in general may face the same decline, but I think textbook sales will provide a longer lifeline before the printing presses go dark.
Of course, there are almost no printing presses left in large book publishing. The printing is electronic now, done by a Ricoh or a Xerox. But the quieting of clacking offset presses is a more tangible metaphor. I don't know if we will ever again see a work challenge for the title of, "The Great American Novel."