The volume and availability of content we are presented with is larger than ever before and is constantly increasing – 90% of the world's data has been created in the past two years1. For every bit of information we seek we must find it within a sea of similar but irrelevant content, and every piece of information directed towards us must stand out and grab us if it is to be digested by our attention spans, which require instant gratification and assurance of relevance.

We live in an information-rich, time-poor world and the way we are adapting to this reinforces the behaviour; we no longer need to remember facts as they are always stored online, we don't need a concept of geography as directions are available at the touch of a button. This behaviour is leading us to expect answers immediately with the ability to quickly select what to look at – Google receives over three billion searches per day2; content therefore is presented in an engaging and easy to digest way. Many factors contribute to our decision to read or not, one which is becoming more prevalent was recently referenced by Marissa Mayer, President and CEO of Yahoo!. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, Mayer spoke about the spread of the tl;dr (too long;didn't read) scenario, creating an environment which rewards breadth of knowledge rather than depth and leads to a lack of critical, deep thinking.

The way organisations respond to this will be critical in their success, and the media industry will likely set the trend for other sectors. There is a growing belief that even the 140 characters offered in a tweet is seen as excessive, with research showing tweets are getting shorter (the median length has reduced by two words in the last three years)3. Will this trend lead to divergent models of content provision rather than current overcrowding of the middle ground?

There are tools which take a lengthy article and automatically summarise it for you but this is a reaction to a desire, not the root solution. Will content providers change the production at the origin? It is conceivable that one camp will provide truly short content, specialising in condensing briefings to satisfy the need to quickly consume a large breadth of information. Whilst the other provides high quality detailed information, in long form articles accessed when readers are searching for a trusted provider of rich content and expertise on a subject.

The types of content that may be affected by these changes are extremely varied, clearly the most obvious example that this polarisation could apply to is news and journalism, however it is by no means limited there; education sites, academic articles, reviews or instructions to name a few, could all be affected. The true power will lie in the ability to provide the right content at the right time; being able to tie different content forms together to provide briefings or detail as required by the evermore distracted consumer.

Footnotes

1 Dragland, 2013, Big Data – For Better or Worse, SINTEF

2 Meyer, 2013 Microsoft down to fifth place in comScore's global search stats, thanks to Yandex, Gigaom

3 Alis & Lim, 2013, Spatio-temporal variation of conversational utterances on Twitter, PLOS

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