The Paradox of Pacing and Density in the 21st Century

Two postings ago, I lambasted my own recent posting, "Why New Year's Resolutions Don't Stick Part 2 ":

My signature shtick - explaining complicated, counterintuitive, esoteric stuff with the easy informality I apply to chocolate pudding - didn't work. The posting, to my shame, is nearly unreadable. Too much to swallow, force-fed with eerily relentless casualness. Yeesh.

And...by coincidence...

A quick digression about coincidence! When you're mentally working on something, you become far more sensitive and receptive to random elements which shed light on the problem. This is a major component of the inescapable impression that Everything That Happens Teaches You Precisely What You Need to Learn in This Moment.

The more you lock on to a problem, the more disparate bits get noticed and correlated, dislodging previous framings and offering fresh ones - aka insight/epiphany/eureka. The less distracted you are with gratuitous drama, ego salve, and fluffy bullshit, the more cognitive headroom you have for noticing and processing these bits. This explains how reflective, curious people become insightful.

Coincidence doesn't happen to you; you make it happen by choosing to pay attention to choicer, riper strands amid the noisy Piano Smash of it all (rather than, for example, freaking out about the problem or cursing the gods for not dropping easy solutions in your lap).

By coincidence I just noticed this video effort by Randall Munroe, the cartoonist behind nerd comic XKCD, testing out a new medium:



It has the exact same flaw (at least for my second-rate intellect): lots of stuff you might need to chew on for a moment gets shoved in your face at breakneck speed with an irritatingly blasé attitude of "relax, you've got this!"

Munroe figures if he just explains clearly, and sprinkles clever visual doodads, he can get away with unspooling as much material as he likes at fast conversational tempo. Easy peasy. You've got this!

He and I both have pacing problems. And understandably so! 21st century viewers will blow you off in a heartbeat if you're not endlessly stimulating. You must tap-dance as furiously as a varmint can dance for any chance of retaining their rare and skittish attention (I once likened modern writers to childrens' party clowns). So, from sheer flop sweat, Munroe and I both rush through things. We’re terrified to seem the least bit draggy, lest viewers flip over to cat videos and chat boxes.

His material is technical. He could slow it down by 50% and the problem would be solved. Brains are made to process that sort of information - just not as kinetically as Munroe spoons it out. My material, by contrast, is more singular. There's no engrained mental function for absorbing the thoughts in my earlier posting, even at 10% speed. Not that they're so profound. Just unfamiliar!

Furthermore, Munroe is one of millions of people with solid understanding of tech stuff, while I'm the only guy offering these singular thoughts. This makes my stuff orders of magnitude more opaque, so I ought to proceed at something more like 1% speed. And translating "speed" into writing means my 2100 word essay needed to be 210,000 words long. And I can't ask 21st century people to read 210,000 words of painstaking explanation. At least not written by some food zealot/trombonist. Maybe if Seth Godin wrote it! :)

I once described this Slog as an offering of cognitive lozenges:

Slog postings are intentionally designed to reward - and even require - multiple re-readings. See those "Popular Entries" listed on the extreme left side of the page? I've read each of them a dozen or more times, myself. And I wrote them!

These postings are cognitive lozenges which, by design, impede speedy absorption (by, for example, forcing you to unpack phrases like "cognitive lozenges"). The ideas that absorb me are counterintuitive and nuanced, and while I always leave a breadcrumb trail, I choose not to spoon-feed (having worked as a professional spoon-feeder for years). I want you to work it all through, as I have, and maybe go further than I could.

We are accustomed to writers pre-masticating their stuff into a slurpy paste for instant digestion. That treatment works for conventional notions, but, again: Surprising observations can't be hastily gulped.

I am confessedly not up to the task of determining the optimal density of lozenge - for an "average" reader among an invisible crowd - and then writing faithfully to that formula. Nor have I dreamed up a way to persuade people to read 20,000 or 200,000 word blog posts from a food zealot trombonist.

Worst of all, these issues are moving targets! Every decade, readers have significantly less patience for length and density. We are increasingly conditioned for meme-y tweets, utterances, and smileys, not for chewing on the meaning of it all (the sub-rosa is no longer even a thing!). If future people stumble upon the Slog, it will seem as daunting and impenetrable as dusty tomes of 19th-century German philosophy seem today. Even though I work overtime to be witty and infectious (Kant and Hegel did no such thing!).

I may be spinning wheels. It might be that thers is no place for any of this sort of thing in the Wall-E future.