The Long and Short of it

I don't know what it is about the web, but it appears to discourage the reading of long articles. I make no claim to originality here (I think it was Michael Kingsley, then editor of Slate, who first brought this phenomenon to my attention - I don't mean "me" personally).  As I remember, he said that there was little point in journalists writing long articles as nobody would read them through to the end.* Is this because we know we should be doing something else? Because there are so many other things waiting to be read? Because we are saturated and sated?

Whatever the reason, I find myself "speeding up" as I read through an article, skipping first sentences and then paragraphs, and finally giving up altogether.

This partly explains why my blog posts are so short. There is another reason, of course...

* However, if you do like long articles, you may be interested in this site:

http://longform.org/