I would argue that good blog would not, perhaps should not, or even could not well be in “natural” length much more than a single page of paper at 12 font and with single line spacing (or say between 500 and 700 words.) This limitation of length has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the text. Indeed, a better integrated text is always easier to read than an unintegrated piece of writing. Neither does this extrinsic limitation have much of anything to do with the inherent informational capacity of say an average 22 or 32 year old person, versus someone averaging 55 or 65 years of age. Perhaps it should be put like this: “if you can’t deliver 90 percent of the knockout punchline within the first page then there is no knockout likely to be had except instead a never-ending slug fest to the bitter bleeding end.”
The historical facts seem to read more like this: the average age of Internet readership is probably, per hour, younger than older, and the younger age set has probably had a vastly higher proportion of more average computing time during their short lives than those much older who came of age in a time when computing was still a fairly primitive appliance that no one could quite figure out what to do with it. Essentially, the average younger than older reader with more percentage of their lives spent uselessly on-line, will simply not have the patience or self-discipline to read a blog, even if fairly well written, down more than half a page in length, much less anything more than a full page in length. I would expect more than 70 percent bailing out before the end of the first paragraph.
Neither is it because younger people on average are stupider than their parents and uncles and aunts, necessarily. It seems only that they learned to move at an accelerated pace of processing, which if not maintained, quickly turns to boredom and “attention deficit.” Likely, their average parents and grandparents would demonstrate as a function of cognitive discipline a commitment to finish reading to the bottom of the page, even poorly written pieces, but that might not necessarily mean the older adult reader gained any more benefit from attending to the full reading than their younger children who probably moved on to more interesting things by the middle of the page.
It would be our grievous error to mistake a youth’s most apparent lack of interest as symptomatic of weak brain power or lazy attention, thus promulgating a theory of the loss of intelligence and a dumbing down of the younger generation, again, on average, just as it would also be a mistake to believe, much less assert, that older people are on average smarter not only because all the dumb have died off young, but only because they had the discipline to read a document, however poor in taste or lacking of flow, to the final word even if they had next to zero interest in what it was trying to say.
The point of all this being that we perhaps should not take too much for granted that which is almost completely new and historically unprecedented, and that which we little understand in any complete or truly correct sense. What we assume to be a text, and the qualities of a text, its literalness, its literacy and legibility, and its literariness and readability, that we older people assumed to be applicable and true de facto of any and all texts or even of any or all kinds of texts within their own natural, intrinsic limitations, may no longer apply in the technological mapping of a virtual world that is defined by digital text-like “pages” that flow unceasingly like rain through our computer screens as windows upon a virtual world. We move from a textual, traditional information age in which knowledge was always great but bounded, to a new post-textual modern world in which knowledge is unbounded but mostly of equivalent minimal value as anything decontextualized, or as something of real intrinsic worth, literalness, literality, or legibility.
The modern form of knowledge and information production is inherently transient, ephemeral, “virtual,” and only significant to the extent that it makes and leaves some mark upon the mind’s eye-view of the digital consumer, the new modern “every person” of the world. Reading a text ultimately is no longer a mainly passive process of making sense of strange printed letters and words on paper, but it is an active engagement, a participation in the on-going production of a virtual world that barely pretends to mirror and parallel the real world, if in fantasy only.