The problem with media

 I read an article that claimed that myths have sustained the American republic and that the collapse of those myths wouldn’t have been possible without social media.

I was interested but skeptical. Most of what’s said about new media doesn’t age well — the phrase “old as yesterday’s news” comes to mind. But I love this line about the constraints of media by the novelist George Gissing:

 

Everything must be very short … their attention can’t sustain itself … Even chat is too solid for them; they want chit-chat.

 

Gissing was complaining about the mass-circulation newspapers of the 1800s. I don’t think he’d have been astonished by Twitter, now known as X, but I don’t think he’d have liked it either.

• Source: The line is from Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, published in 1891, but I found it in Frank Muir’s An Irreverent and Thoroughly Incomplete History of Almost Everything; New York: Stein and Day, 1976, p. 168.