It only launched on January 24, but you've probably already heard of a smartphone app called Vine. It's basically the Instagram of video, allowing you to shoot six-second films on your phone and share them with friends. Much like Twitter - which owns Vine - it encourages you to tell a story or generate an emotion in an ultra-short format. So instead of taking pictures of your dinner, you can film the chef cooking it.
As a journalist I've been trained to admire concision. Articles, sentences, words - the shorter the better, as far as we're concerned. Which is just as well, because today shortness is everywhere. Status updates, tweets, YouTube clips and now six second snatches of reality. All this has led to claims by scientists that our attention spans are shrinking. But I'm not so sure. Yes, we feel obliged to cram more information into our day. But not all of it is so short: when was the last time you downloaded an episode of your favourite TV series and then ended up watching two or three more? The new Tarantino movie, Django Unchained, is nearly three hours long. On the métro the other day, I saw someone reading Anna Karenina, a hefty novel, on her Kindle. Our attention spans are not shrinking, but our patience is. In a world of infinite choices, we have grown more demanding. All you have to do is deliver great content and we'll stay as long as you want.
