The Internet killed publishing. The Internet destroyed our attention spans. The Internet turned us all into a bunch of lazy, shit-eating philistines. Then the Internet punched a cripple and stole his bagged lunch. And, according to Prince, the Internet is “completely over.”
Do any of these complaints hold water? Well, we’ll concede the point to Prince (Prince: if you’re reading this, we would die 4 u). And, really, all of the claims carry a certain degree of validity. But we’d like to call into question the idea that people refuse to read longer pieces online—that the medium itself resists in-depth writing.
To quote David Sleight from Stuntbox: “It’s a bald fallacy of presumption to hold that presenting text on a webpage ipso facto induces peripatetic behavior in your audience. The content itself, and the design used to present it, are the leading factors in shaping success. Not pixels or points.”
So yes, if a webpage is littered with advertisements and in-text link-outs, and the writing is total pablum, one should expect a high degree of attrition. After all, this is what cash-cow sites with garbage content are built to do: induce frenetic browsing to maximize page views, ad clicks, and impressions. But a handsome and uncluttered webpage with quality content (Triple Canopy, for example, or n+1’s revamped online presence) should induce quite the opposite.
