"Reading and the making of time"

I recently took a MOOC from Northwestern University about Content Strategy.

The big idea was that people don't have time to read and digest an ever increasing tide of information in the same seven days a week and 16 waking hours they always had. Professor John Lavine says:

“It is vital that you recognise the ferocious competition [for your audiences’ attention]. It is helpful to picture the person or people you hope will pay attention to your content and recognise that their first priority is something that matters to them; it is not your message . Even if the information you are sending their way is valuable to them, the pressure on their lives to do other essential things nearly always outweighs what you want them to know.”

Interesting, then, to read this review in the TLS of Christina Lupton's 'Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century', which observes:

[Lupton's book] looks back to the late eighteenth century, the period that produced the modern novel as we know it. But it is not about lost time — not about some bygone golden age of leisured deep reading. After all, the rise of the novel occurred alongside both an increase in working hours and a proliferation of competing media — much like today, that is. Eighteenth-century readers, Lupton points out, were "people like us," who "struggled to make room for reading of books" in lives they too experienced as "crowded" .

Plus ça change.

The really interesting part of the review is the final paragraph and the understanding of reading and communication that comes out of Lupton's study, which I think is relevant to how we design content.

Books are temporally complex objects and the time we spend reading them is never quite the same as 'real' time. For Lupton, reading's irregularity — its uneven mixture of tenses and tempos — might even subvert modern regimes of efficient time-management. Her book goes beyond the perennial problem of how, amid life's many distractions, we might carve out time to read. Reading itself, she argues, 'makes' time: books allow us to apprehend time as something elusive and elastic, less a resource to be exploited than an experience to be explored .

I think this applies beyond books. Creative content makers are not merely in the business of snatching time from niggardly and resentful audiences, though that is obviously a crucial part of the job. People don't always just count out their attention with coffee spoons. Funny, interesting, intriguing, striking writing (images, film) can help people to stretch their time and bust out of their schedules and routine.