What about the longform?

There has definitely been a TikTokification of the world where only the short, silly and ridiculous seem to go viral. 
But for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. A counter to the short is the emergence of the longform, a lesser talked about phenomenon. Newspapers and magazines were limited in their content, bound by their physical number of pages. But no such restrictions are there on the Internet. People started writing articles of thousands of words and even tens of thousands. There’s a good readership for that.
In the past if you watched television for hours on end, now with Netflix and other streaming services you can binge watch a single series for days on end. Liked a 15-season series which took 20 years to make? Well now you can polish that off in a matter of weeks. There are dozens of streaming networks with an unseeming endless supply of TV serials, web series, films and documentaries. If you note, then even Hollywood films seem to be getting longer and some breach the 3-hour mark.
Then there’s the podcast. Listen to two people talking for hours on end without an ad break. Joe Rogan has mastered this. Most of his talks go on for 2.5-3 hours, some even cross 4.5. Apart from fun times with friends, we have subject matter experts from every corner of the knowledge pool cramming in 3 hours an entire academic semester’s worth of concepts. The viewers love it and want more. While such shows flourish in America, even in India we are now regularly getting podcasts in the 1-2-hour region.
Another great innovation is the audiobook. 10/20/30 hours… it doesn’t matter. If you like the book, you’ll listen to it all day. Many professors have put up all their lectures in the audio format. With all this you can truly multi-task. If you read a physical book, you have to sit in one place and can do little else. That’s not the case with a podcast or audiobook. You may listen to them all day while getting ready in the morning, jogging, cooking, driving to work or any other activity. No time is wasted. You would have gone about your routine day and consumed books-podcasts without devoting any extra time on them.
That the brain is changing with the advent of the Internet age is known by everyone. But not everyone is getting shorter attention spans. Some are digging deep. Are their brains heading off in a different direction? Where will this dichotomy take us? That’s some food for thought!