Cynics Unlimited

With the financial woes of The Independent, News International’s bizarre plan to charge for their hitherto underwhelming websites and rumours flying that the Guardian Media Group is plotting to slam the doors on The Observer, it would appear that the corn-dappled log of broadsheet journalism is sliding ever faster down the cracked porcelain toilet of history, leaving just a hardened smear of unemployed op-ed hacks for future generations to furtively scrape at with a borrowed breadknife. I’m going to hold my hands up here: whilst I’m well aware that the Obs is the world’s oldest-surviving quality paper and love it like an ill-tempered grandfather, I haven’t gone as far as actually purchasing a copy in months. No, I’ve joined the legions of educated traitors who do most of their weekend reading either on websites or via the Saturday Guardian, and it’s not like I can even excuse myself by claiming to read the Review or News sections first. Instead, I pamper my reptilian Saturday brain by overbrewing a cup of sugary tea and reaching for either the Weekend or, more often, the Guide: a newspaper section that gradually reads more like an especially comprehensive blog than an actual newspaper.

Judging by an utterly unscientific straw-poll of friends and family, many people do the same. This probably bears at least some relation to a trend that shows the ongoing reduction in the average size of news items from across the media spectrum.

Neither of these men had a beard when they started reading

Editorials have diminished to mere 800 word pamphlets when compared to the Tolstoyan epics of the Victorian era; major news feature wordcounts loll flaccidly in the low thousands and only glorious throwbacks like the London Review Of Books seem content to regularly publish anything long enough to justify forking out for a decent sub-editor. On telly, even science documentaries are frequently guilty of cramming decades of theory into pre-packaged pub anecdotes, and may often shit the bed completely by employing a bad comedian or one of the presenters from Top Gear to fling spurious factoids at the audience like an angry zoo gorilla with a fistful of dried shit.

Die.

Some erudite and learned commentators might wag a finger at the Ritalinian attention spans of the Twitter generation, nod towards a woeful decline in adult literacy, or stare witheringly at the multi-channel offal spewed forth from the flatscreen idiot lantern that does most of the educating in modern Britain.

I, on the other hand, can’t be bothered with all that because I have an easier target: the lazy desire of the modern audience to consume everything in a bloody list-format.

Behold: A Brief History of the Top Ten

The stealthy domination of human culture by the list-format has been a slow and subtle process that has been with us ever since Moses thrilled the Semitic blogosphere with his stone-based rundown of guaranteed Jehovah-irritators. Its most current form has evolved through unit-shifting successes in serious music magazines like Q and Mojo (‘Top One Hundred Albums That You’ll Buy From This List And Never Play’), vapid gender-specific glossies (“Ninety Nine Ways To Make Him/Her Come Loud Enough To Wake The Neighbours”) and bafflingly daft supermarket lady tabloids (‘Seven Most Harrowing Soap Opera Rape Scenes!”). Outside print, there seemed to be a long period when no Saturday night was complete without a seven hour televisual marathon contractually obliged to feature dull northern mannequin Vernon Kaye reminiscing stupidly about a film/snack food/invasive surgical procedure, his cheery mug superimposed atop a low-budget graphical countdown and the type of overplayed clips that would go on to clog up Youtube like matted fur in a cat’s stomach.

Shamon.

Whilst each of these formats can still be relied on as a cheap failsafe to boost circulation/viewing figures to appease the advertisers, the concept of the list-format has exploded like a devastating informational daisy cutter over the woody landscape of online media, mowing down ancient groves of lengthier articles (themselves often artefacts of print media) in favour of the fast-growing verbal shrubbery that suits the habits of the average web grazer. The unfortunate truth for the lumbering sauropods of print media is that most people find it simpler and more pleasurable to consume information

Heee-heee

in tiny bite-sized morsels. It’s just easier to skim a chain email touting ‘Fifteen Potential Sperm Donors For Dead MJ’ at work than it is to unfold Saturday’s paper and struggle through Germaine Greer’s mind-numbingly pretentious obit piece about the number-one-in-a-list-of-one awesome, chimp-owning kiddy fiddler. The list is short, sweet and handily signposts any boring bits that you might like to skip; it renders well in pretty much any browser and can be safely consumed in-between other tasks. It’s the Milky Way of media, and hopefully you don’t need four minutes of simian mugging from Justin Lee Collins to work out that I’m referring to a chocolate bar rather than an astral formation there.

Seven reasons why even writers prefer to make lists

The other catalyst for the ubiquity of this fizzing beaker of quasi-random fact elements is that lists aren’t just easier to read, they’re also staggeringly quick and simple for people to write. Like most creative procrastinators, I’ve been churning out lists ever since I could type, for the simple reason that they often constitute the bare bones of an idea that could later be refined, edited and structured into some kind of plausibly coherent argument.

“Yes. Tom Baker is indisputably the best Dr Who. I will email Pravda directly.”

Pools of examples might be drawn, shuffled around and reformulated to buttress a logical flow of ideas, and may pupate from the caterpillar of idle speculation into the elegant butterfly of convincing argument. Back in the real world, I habitually squander hours doodling stupid lists of ideas that never get out of my notebook because I lack the organisation for the time-intensive editing phase that would create anything I’d consider submitting to a magazine, newspaper or academic journal. Moreso, I ditch most of them because it’s obvious that they won’t really progress beyond the intellectual equivalent of unanswered letters to my creative Santa. Until recently, I never dreamed there would be any reason to lavish much concentration on my abandoned draft of “Nine Least Convincing Kung Fu Beards” or ‘Twelve Closeted Villains of Eighties Kids Shows”, but now I’ve got even less free time and a blog to work on, I totally plan to milk my shallow attention span and piles of old notebooks for all they’re worth. Any editor who thinks their readers wants to know which ten murderous dictators wore the sharpest suits can shoot me an email; my rates are very reasonable.

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