We’re living in the age of brevity. We’re communicating more and more, but with less and less.
We’ve traded the blog for the feed. The paragraph for the tweet. And we’ve gone from saying ‘thanks’ to sending along a smiley emoji or a Snapchat photo.
People are even expressing their emotions through memes rather than describing how they truly feel.
It’s difficult to say if the long-term effects of this change will be good or bad, but it has impacted everyone to some degree.
However, the impact goes far beyond how we express ourselves. It changes how we consume. We’re no longer writing less because of a technical requirement, we’re writing less because it’s expected. We’ve come to expect terseness or we move on (thanks if you’re still reading at this point). If you want proof just look at how much more often you see the use of TLDR (Too Long Did Not Read) notes.
Online content creators know this. This brevity is what they’re counting on. The faster you burn through articles, photos, and tweets, the more ads the can sell. It has been a major driver for the publishing phenomenon known as the listicle.
Roughly 40,000 years ago we started using pigments and cave walls to communicate. Nothing complex, just simple outlines and images. This simplicity belied the fact that these symbols communicated ideas far more complex. While what they said is still a matter of debate, the point remains that we’ve been trying to say a lot with a little for a long time.
A ‘like’ or a post to someone’s wall is not all that different. Even when we need to express more we demand a wider set of emojis instead of just using a few more words to get the point across. We’d prefer to paint a bison on the cave wall rather than write out that we saw one.
This desire to express and consume information in a simple way has ignited the need for more lists in the world. Just look at BuzzFeed, a billion dollar media company that owes much of its success to its listicles (for reference a listicle is an article that is formatted like a list).
Lists have been so important for BuzzFeed that a remarkable 76% of their top community posts in 2014 were lists. The vast majority of what brought in the most eyeballs (and the most ad dollars) were lists.
The paring down of communication and the eagerness of new media to serve up information in simple lists has shaped us. This isn’t to say we’re being manipulated, it’s really more about how we manage in a world with more information than we can possibly handle coming at us at once. Coping mechanism or a step in evolution, the world has changed and so have we.
Changing how we navigate this information has also shifted how we leverage it. Lists aren’t just great for consuming, they’re also fantastic for acting. Lists have always had a place. Consumer products have been ranked regularly for a long time. However, the emergence of the internet and e-commerce brought with it countless products and people with information to share about them. Where before you might have had one electronics store in town or a catalogue, you now have an almost incomprehensible pool of options. This overwhelming data problem increased the need for information curation, and lists are the best tool for that job.
But lists are more than just tools to aid in content consumption, they’re perfectly situated to help you remember and take action. To-do lists, notepads, and loose sheets of paper have served us well for ages, and advancements in technology have made them more relevant and powerful than ever. Not only are they formatted in a way that we’re naturally familiar with mentally, they’re perfectly suited for our minimalist communication style.
The piece by piece ordering of ideas and the technological ability to hide excess information till when you need it can’t be matched. In addition, a list can serve as a reliable warehouse of your ideas and reduce the paralyzing cognitive load that comes with living in the information age.
The world will continue to change, and that change (as well as the information it brings) will need to be processed. But whether it be 40,000 years ago or 40,000 years into the future, simplified communication will play a role. And as long as humans want simple and easy to handle, lists will be the best tool for the job.
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