“But there’s another reason that these new media tell stories in different ways from their old media predecessors: They’re telling different stories. TV sitcoms, novels, feature films, and other traditional forms are cages as well as frames. The reason that every sitcom lasts 22 minutes is that no one tries to make sitcoms about stories that take five minutes to tell. The reason movies last 90 minutes is that no one tries to make feature films about subjects that take 30 seconds to elucidate — or 30 days.
“The critics of new media often point to its failure to live up to the standards of old media. Some scientists and science journalists wring their hands at the idea that the Mars landers and the Large Hadron Collider emanate information in the form of anthropomorphized Twitter messages, arguing that these messages lack the formal virtues of science reporting and papers.
“It’s true. They do. They don’t succeed at being better in-depth science articles than the science articles. They succeed at being better Twitter messages than science articles; they succeed at producing and sustaining a different kind of interest and understanding than a long article in the weekend paper.
“The low cost of deploying new media online is revealing a heretofore unsuspected appetite for stories in different boxes than we’ve heretofore used — and a universe of stories waiting to be told.” -Cory Doctorow, “Don’t Judge New Media by Old Rules“
