Is critical thinking at risk in the era of short-form content? Expert’s view
Writing, as a skill, will be as rich as thought. So, the question we should be moving towards is – “Is critical thinking declining?”.
As marketers confront escalating pressures in fishing for eyeballs, compressed information in fifteen-second micro-content is on the rise, and comprehensive reading is becoming an endangered skill.
If there is a limited readership, one may reconsider investing their energy in writing. Beyond grasping what happens when we lose the incentive to read, we need to understand how comprehension gets fractured and manipulated in 280-word tweets and 7-word nonchalant captions.
The advent of Web 2.0 has disturbed the sustenance of long-form content, which has made writing a delegated task.
Even experts’ opinion pieces are triumphed over by short-form copywriting, mainly on the grounds of which is quicker to sell. This shift not only devalues the art of long-form writing but also raises concerns about the erosion of critical thinking skills amongst audiences.
Anubhuti Sharma, the founder of Impresario Global, explores this predicament, shedding light on the obstacles encountered by conventional long-form writing amidst increasing demands for concise expression.
RISE OF BREVITY IN EXPRESSION
The moment communication became audiovisual, content consumption gained speed. Reading is more arduous than listening and watching, simply because of the effort and initiative involved.
The entire process is more hormonal than we would like to admit, and for the media companies, this was a new real estate to exploit. Memes are leading the cultural phenomenon of this culture of instant gratification, risking the prevalence of long-form content.
There are two sides to the proliferation of bite-sized content. We get to explain complex topics in an easy-to-understand manner. On the other side, the absence of context and prevalence of misinformation/disinformation. No amount of emoji-featured internet banter can convince a digital citizen that he or she may or may not be right about their information.
The challenge lies in striking a balance between the demands of short attention spans and the intellectual richness that long-form writing offers, without sacrificing the authenticity of information.
X’s (Formerly Twitter) community notes are a great step in that direction, and such in-built features create safe spaces for necessary discourse.
