The internet has lengthened our attention span 29 Jan 2007

The bloody interweb! It's given us all ADD and now we can't read books, watch films or consume media longer than five minutes any more. Everything has to be short and snappy these days or it's a non-starter.

...at least that's the commonly-held belief. But is this really the case? Seamus McCauley isn't so sure:

"As little as five years ago, everything (I saw) on TV was based around the formula that you could dip in and out from one episode to the next without the need to follow an overall story arc. From Friends to the Simpsons to even serious stuff like the West Wing, programme makers understood that we needed to be able to drop in and out of the show, missing week after week, because no-one is consistently in their house at the same time every week just to watch a TV show - or at least no-one advertisers want to talk to...Broadband, and broadband's killer ap BitTorrent, has changed all that. TiVo, Teleport TV and Sky+ have changed all that. Hell, DVDs changed it a bit. Look at Lost - all arc. Look at The Wire which to all intents and purposes is four 13-hour-long films. Shows that would make no sense dipped in and out of are suddenly possible because the delivery mechanism is there to ensure people can watch a whole season in order. BitTorrent has done for epic television what Dances with Wolves did for epic films - in this instance a tech-driven, rather than culture-driven, return to a richer, longer form."