Terry Jones

There are a few things that bug me on the internet.

One is that people often warn each other that articles are long, or apologize for writing long blog entries. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. When it turns out though that these items are just a couple of screenfuls, you start to wonder what we’re all coming too. And yes, I know, it’s the 21st century, we’re all living at internet speed now, who’s got the time, etc.

OTOH, a word like “long” can be used to convey information. You can look at the word “long” and form some idea of just how long the long thing might be. And these days, it ain’t very long. Maybe we’re in the middle of a transition in which a word comes to mean its opposite.

Marc Andreessen recently began to blog, and the blogosphere is all abuzz. He writes tolerably well, and he’s got interesting comments on many things, but there’s a real down side: his posts are really long. Here’s a random example of someone who agrees.

That’s weird.

From where I sit, if someone writes well and is interesting or otherwise provocative, you wish they’d write more, not less. You want it to be long. Half a dozen web pages is not long. I read In Search of Lost Time last year. It took me 6 months and at 4300 pages or so, I think it qualifies as long. I’m reading Orwell’s letters, essays, and journalism. At 2200 pages, it seems fairly long too. I wished Proust was longer. I’ll probably wish Orwell was longer too. I tried reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (3500 pages), but the 7-volume “leatherette” set I bought stinks of old cigarette smoke and I couldn’t bear it.

How did we get from “long” meaning something like War and Peace (1100 pages) or Anna Karenin (850 pages) all the way to a 6-page (single narrow column) blog posting (with plenty of white space)?

What word should we now use for things that are longer than 6 pages or that require more than 5 minutes to read? Epic?

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