In 1440, Gutenberg invented the printing press. The average length of a printed book is half a million characters, and the book with more prints is the King James Bible, with a staggering amount of 3,116,480 characters.
Things didn’t change for many years. When the 20th century was ending, a new way of distributing information was invented: the blogosphere. And its king was called Google.
The average number of characters in a blog post is 5,710. This allowed the grownups to look down on the kids and say: “These kids nowadays, they can’t read for more than a few minutes.”
In 2004 came Facebook, the first hugely popular social network, and it changed the way people communicate forever. In those days Facebook established a limit of 477 characters per post before truncating them. If your post had more than 477 characters, an ellipsis and the words ‘Read More’ successfully made you stop reading altogether.
This allowed the second wave of grownups to look down on the people who spent their time on Facebook and say derisively: “These kids nowadays can’t read more than 100 words.”
A couple years later, in 2006, Twitter was born. It was famous because their maximum post length was 140 characters, like an SMS (does anybody remembers SMS’s?). Later it was expanded to 280 characters, but no one seemed to care. This way, the Facebook generation looked down on the Twitter generation and called them The Text Generation. “These kids nowadays,” they said, “they can’t read messages with more than 140 characters.”
In 2010 Instagram was born. It was intended at first as a photo sharing network and, thus, the ideal number of characters accompanying each post was 0. They allowed up to 125 characters that are used mainly to accumulate hashtags.
The Twitter generation looked down on the Instagram people and said derisively: “These kids nowadays, they can’t read: they just watch pictures.”
Is this a trend? The great innovation in communication is just to make things shorter?
Wait, there’s more: in 1895 the Lumière brothers invented cinema. Since then, the average length of a movie has been 90 minutes.
In 1927 Philo Taylor Farsnworth invented television. Since then, the average length of a TV show is around 30 minutes, with one-hour episodes (which really last 42 minutes) and half-hour episodes (22 minutes).
In 2005 YouTube was born. The average length of a video here is 4 minutes and 20 seconds.
In 2016 Tik Tok was born. Although there are tricks to make videos last up to one full minute, the suggested duration is 15 seconds.
Do you want to innovate? Make things shorter!