"Take a look at your browser tabs if you're reading this on a computer. Inevitably, you have at least a few that are weeks, if not months, old, things you've always intended to get to but just never have. Odds are these are so-called "longform" articles that will take a while to read. (Here's one of mine, which I've had open since October: a GQ feature about "the last true hermit.") A fair number of you are going to open this piece in a tab and just never get back to it.
These longform pieces are the pinnacle to which lots and lots of us writers and the websites we work for aspire. They win awards. They garner attention from other journalists. They're often why we got into this business to begin with. Even BuzzFeed turned out to be using all those cat GIFs as a Trojan horse for a lot of great investigative journalism.
And I don't want to suggest, even inadvertently, that nobody reads these longer pieces...
The internet has made it clear that the kinds of things that people want to read are sort of an endless collection of what's cool. And that might be a longform story, or it might be the quick, clicky little things that repackage the best flotsam and jetsam out there in a more presentable fashion. And if longform takes time, then aggregation is its opposite, easier to throw together in a few minutes with huge potential upside...
On social media, you share an article because you agree with the take, sure, but also because it says something about you, whether that fact is that you're angry about a political issue, or that you like cute bunnies, or that you love Back to the Future. Your social media feed is a curation of things you want people to know about you. Inconvenient truths, negative views, or anything too dark will be pushed aside...
articles increasingly seem to be individual insects trapped in someone else's web "
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/6/9099357/internet-dead-end
That's such an interesting point, that we share information because it says something about us.
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