Instant NOW

Essay - T. Pitre

Starbucks is coming out with instant coffee. It's called Ready Brew. Kevin Spacey is promoting five minute videos for mobile phone distribution. Twitter.com lets you type in 140 characters so you can tell the world what you're doing right now and my writing coach thought that my poetry might fit into the flash fiction or postcard fiction genre.

What does all this instant involvement and art imply, and what influence or consequences will it have for us in a few years? As it is, our news is fed to us in bites. Sound bites now, visual bites, tomorrow. What is the limit to the minimum size of a piece of electronic media that can still deliver meaningful and comprehensible information?

Writer's enter on-line contests to write a short story in under five hundred words. Folks upload twelve-second videos for the web. The site's motto at 12seconds.tv is “Keeping it pithy since 2008.” Pithy, indeed. There is no story in many of the videos I viewed. They are visual scribbles, usually depicting a baby and a dog, or some woman on vacation blowing a kiss to her sweetheart.

Let's look ahead a few years. Let's look past instant texting on the cell phone, smaller and smaller postings on twitter-like sites, and shorter and shorter videos. Most of this kind of stuff will find its way onto cell phones, and eventually might creep into our television programming. A five minute situation comedy might emerge, along with five minute reality shows and short, educational shows. We will pack twelve times as much programming into each hour of television viewing. This will require more writers, producers, directors and advertisers. Quality be damned. It's quantity and brevity they're after.