Pay attention: it’s time to celebrate the age of the short

We are, it is said, swimming in The Shallows . The title of Nicholas Carr's 2011 book became a shorthand for the current angst about attention span and the corrosion of concentration. It feeds into the oft-repeated mourning for the supposed demise of the long read, the novel, the album, and the development of a snack culture in which we graze, our attention span shortened as if it were a muscle that could be measured, trained, stretched and snapped.

There has been an obvious swing towards brevity in the internet age, with a supposed impact even on the popularity of forms such as the short story that long predate digital. Generally, the trend is treated as a negative and decried as (I'm embarrassed to even use the phrase) dumbing down.

Short and sweet
Surely it's time to flip that view, to revel in how the internet so often allows us to escape the verbose, the bloated; how it has encouraged a culture in which the long form is still available, to a wider audience, but which has little patience for fat.

It is time to celebrate the triumph of the short.

There has always been too much padding in culture: the three-hour plays (with interval thrown in); the doorstop books that could have done the same job in half the words; the overwritten newspaper articles; the films that won't get off the screen. (Most people who saw Lincoln , with Daniel Day-Lewis (right) as the president, didn't talk about awards; they talked about how long it was and how much longer it felt.)

Even The Shallows was more satisfying in its original incarnation as an Atlantic article. Much of the book was written because a book needed to be filled. The internet was not to blame for any wavering of its readers' concentration.

Much of modern culture is created to fulfil templates and criteria that aren’t just superfluous to creativity but ultimately damaging to it. I’m walking myself into this, but this column is a good example. It is expected to serve two primary functions: to be interesting and readable (insert snark here); and to fill a hole on a newspaper page.

Too much culture has been created to fill a hole.

Democratic creativity
The malleability of the internet has been matched by the democratisation of creativity and the greater availability of the tools needed to make it. The results are an endless stream of tiny treats. Sketches, documentaries, animations, short films, flash fictions, virals. Yes, much of it is terrible, and even the great stuff can be disposable, but the demands of the web have focused human imagination in gloriously satisfying ways.

Have a look at shortoftheweek.com for a repository of quite wonderful live action and animation, each of which can be watched over a lunch break or between train stops, and most of which are more satisfying than the majority of film releases that squat, heavy, on a cinema screen near you.

The brevity fostered by the internet age has crept into traditional areas – and shown how it can improve them. Among the 25 Tiny Plays for Ireland 2 at the Project, Richie O'Sullivan's diminutive Ode to Life features a man playing an upbeat piano tune to an appreciative audience.

After a while the music stops and a nurse wraps a blanket around his shoulders, so we become aware that this is all just a tragic hallucination in a damaged brain. The piece has a set-up, a twist, takes the audience on a journey, and is all over in three minutes.

At Galway Arts Festival last year, Bruce Graham's The Outgoing Tide had an opening sequence that used several pages of dialogue to get to pretty much the same place – and then kept going.

It's a little unfair to compare one with the other, as each emerged from entirely different needs. Ode to Life was an answer to The Irish Times and Fishamble Theatre Company's call for plays of 600 words or less. (As this newspaper's Arts Editor I have an involvement in it.) But if the Tiny Plays productions were a response to snack culture, they illustrated how two dozen short plays – some successful, some not – could be brought together with a coherence that trumped that of many of the full-length plays you will see.

Even as the works came and went, one after another, the stronger plays lingered beyond their mayfly lives, entering an afterlife in the mind of an audience that has long forgotten longer, supposedly weightier productions. Proof that just because you have the words, it doesn’t mean you need to use them.

shegarty@irishtimes.com
@shanehegarty