Uncomfortable takes: everything is bitesized and that’s not great.

A while back someone mis-quoted a Microsoft research saying that people’s attention spans were shorter than that of a goldfish. This made its way into mainstream media and a bunch of marketing presentations and we nearly closed down all social media for fear of becoming dumber than fish. Of course, soon enough the statement was debunked and it became a marketing/ social media myth that people now like to quote smugly to show that they were not taken in by the original stat.

I am not sure that we should be comparing ourselves to fish, but what I am sure of is that things are getting shorter and smaller to accommodate our usage of smartphones and the way we understand to fill every second of our lives with some form of content (or other) consumption.

This is something I read about in this month’s LRB and it’s blowing my mind: there is a new generation of TV dramas surfacing in China which is shot exclusively for people to consume in the small moments between tasks. They are called Vertical Dramas because they are almost always shot in Portrait so you don’t have to turn your phone to watch them, and they are between 2–5 minutes long, so technically you can finish one episode while in the loo. There’s something fundamentally pernicious about the concept: they knowingly borrow from the consumption patterns of social media content while serialising the plot. This is long form shot and cut into short form so people can watch it anytime they turn their phone on.

It’s not just content. Everything is getting a “short form” version so you can get more stuff and spend less time committing to anything. Mini cosmetics are everywhere and beauty needs get broken down into smaller and smaller concerns. A 50 ml plastic container for everything that could possibly be wrong with your body.

Food is all “tapas style” and cakes are now multi flavor but single serving with the epitome being a copy-cat cube cake in Korea which serves 27 different cake flavors in a single-bite cube construction (or two-three bites if you’re a dainty eater).

There’s backlash of course. Movies have gotten longer and there’s a growing club of people who read “generational dramas” level books with Hanya Yanaghihara’s A Little Life clocking almost as many words as the Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and about 1/3 of Proust’s A la recherche du Temps Perdu (longest novel ever written). But it seems to me this is a minority.

There’s a Japanese concept I love which appears in Studio Ghibli movies a lot: “ma” is the space between two relevant moment where everything stops and you can just be. I love that idea and it’s mentioned enough online to think that it resonates with a lot of other people. Yet, I cannot help to think that everything is getting bite-sized: careers, houses, movies, food. And it’s doing that so we can constantly fill the spaces in between with stuff, to remove the “ma”.