Published 6 May 2010 · Main Posts Meanland extract – An argument for long form Jacinda Woodhead Long form: long-form journalism, long form online; you may have heard the term bandied about but a definition will prove elusive. ‘Long form’ makes me think of p-books1. In the same way we have e-books and p-books, we now have the short essay, the blog post and lately, the long-form essay. The fact that we can’t reach a consensus on the territory the long-form essay claims suggests that is it not an established term, and scrutiny may result in fraying around the edges. When researching reading online, one is bound to come across the following ideas: long form onscreen is hard on the mind and the eye; it’s taxing and the reader is easily distracted; it is not suited to the digital medium. It is hard to say what will become of the long form, it is implied, when we cross the great divide into the wholly digital textual world. Long form, I propose, means ‘essay’. It can include but is not limited to technology essays, academic essays, New Yorker essays. It is a term created to describe a form established and practiced pre-Internet. Many internet audiences have come to accept that blog posts are short. Which is true, up until a point – but it depends what you’re selling and who your audience is. And audience is pivotal to this argument. (Again.) Long form, suggests the New Yorker, ‘is something you want to sit with and not be distracted by. I don’t mean this in a spiritual way, but it’s a meditative experience. The Web is fundamentally a distracted experience’. Read the rest of the post over at Meanland. Jacinda Woodhead Jacinda Woodhead is a former editor of Overland and current law student. More by Jacinda Woodhead › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 16 August 202416 August 2024 · Poetry pork lullaby Panda Wong but an alive pig / roots in the soil /turning it over / with its snout / softening the ground / is this a hymn 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body.