The launch of the Apple Watch raises interesting questions about the ‘atomisation’ of content. As Dan Shanoff suggests, Apple Watch is the latest step in the atomisation of content, where thanks to services like Quickish, and then Facebook and Twitter, content has increasingly been squeezed for space. And with Apple Watch’s ‘Glance’ feature, that space is shrinking to the size your wrist.
Apple hasn’t been first to market with a smart watch, but to many its foray is a firm indication they will catch on – and, as with the iPhone and iPad, drive the way media is created and consumed.
Shanoff stands in this camp, and his vision of the (near) future raises some interesting questions, and the prospect of “glance journalism”:
“Atomic unit” was a helpful metaphor, but we’re now talking about the proton/neutron level. Glance journalism makes tweets look like longform, typical news notifications (and even innovative atomised news apps) look like endless scroll
Firstly, how atomised will content have to be to work on the Watch? And if the medium demands too much (or too little) of the content, what will happen? Perhaps the answer lies in the pragmatic use of content, not the semantic value of a word or two.
For example, ‘Referendum: No’ could only be a meaningful headline in the wider context of a lot of coverage of an event such as the Scottish vote for independence – context that is not easily conveyed by a glance. Shanoff hints at the state of journalism with his reference to the Yo app. (To those not in the Yo, the app is a messenger service that lets users send only “Yo” as a message.) A “Yo” can only mean something if there is a context: famously, the app was recently used to warn Israelis of incoming Palestinian missiles. But that could only have been a successful strategy if people knew in advance that ‘Yo’ was shorthand for “incoming missiles”.
Shanoff’s futurism is understandable, and perhaps we will arrive in a tomorrow’s world where a 600-word blog post becomes an “endless scroll”. But that doesn’t mean that the art of long-form has died. I’d suggest that short-form can only be meaningful is there is a longer-form to explain things.
