Fast Food Media

A quote from The Young And The Digital really stood out to me. In chapter seven, author S. Craig Watkins describes his fascinating perspective on how Americans like to consume media. He says, "No matter where we are, fast entertainment is generally just a click away. I liken the efficient delivery of digital media content to another staple in the daily American diet: fast food. Like fast food, fast entertainment is easy to get, all around us, and typically cheap, but not always good for you." His description intrigues me. Americans like their food and their media fast, but I think we are becoming more and more entitled to getting everything quickly. We want our internet connection to be faster, we want people to communicate with us instantly, and we want successful, high-earning careers right after graduating from college.

Is delayed gratification becoming a thing of the past? It seems to be less popular, particularly in media related realms. This reading made me think of an episode of the Colbert Report in which Stephen Colbert discusses how the news website, Slate, is now telling readers how many minutes it will take them to read an article so they can choose whether or not they want to commit that amount of time to reading it. The idea of not wanting to read something because it would take two minutes longer than you were originally planning seems ridiculous, but it is just proof of the fast tracked, impatient culture we live in.

Slate journalist Farhad Manjoo actually posted an interesting article titled "You Won't Finish This Article: Why people online don't read to the end." After doing some research, Manjoo found that 38% percent of readers leave an article after just mere seconds of viewing it. In fact, on average, readers only stay on the page of an article long enough to read 50-60% of it. Manjoo also writes about his concerns that many "readers" will share an article on Twitter or Facebook without reading even half of it. "There’s a very weak relationship between scroll depth and sharing. Both at Slate and across the Web, articles that get a lot of tweets don’t necessarily get read very deeply. Articles that get read deeply aren’t necessarily generating a lot of tweets." (Manjoo) It seems that more and more consumers of media are getting their information through a title they read on their Facebook account; maybe a few sentences of an article here and there. You couldn't even call it skimming though-- we've left the page before we've even scrolled half way down it.

Americans want their media and they want it now. But what happens when we're so impatient to "get to the point" that we don't even stick around to read all of the information the journalist or author intended us to read? We may be missing out on important information, but equally concerning is the fact that our attention spans are becoming so small that we're bored with an article before we've finished reading the first paragraph. If we don't have the discipline to plow through an article online, what else does that say about Americans and our obsession with fast everything?