Joel Achenbach has a good piece in the Washington Post that tackles the question of text in a modern age head on: Is there less time today for the finely crafted narrative? The Web offers no way to read a narrative, argues Achebach. But does that mean that long-form journalism or fiction is dead? No.
“There’s endless talk in the news media about the next killer app. Maybe Twitter really will change the world. Maybe the next big thing will be just an algorithm, like Google’s citation-ranking equation. But Smith is betting that there will still be a market, somehow, for what he does. Narrative isn’t merely a technique for communicating; it’s how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this,” writes Achenbach.
“They know that the story is the original killer app.”
