Social media has a distinct prejudice toward short attention spans that demand snappy images and snippets of text. It’s hard to tell what came first: did our short attention spans demand that social media apps only produce snippets of information – bite-sized pics, quick videos, text – or did all of these social media apps that revolve around data snippets create our short attention spans?
Which came first: the short attention span or the social media app?
These are the kind of deep “philosophical” questions we ask in the 21st century.
IS THERE MORE TO LIFE THAN MEMES AND TWEETS?
Frankly, for people who are fighting desperately to retain their brain’s ability to concentrate for longer than five seconds – people who love reading books, for example – the social media world is an annoying necessity. Very annoying. Or if not very annoying, it’s at least exhausting and demoralizing. It makes you feel as if the tech world is reconfiguring your brain into a factory that runs solely on thousands of little loops of pop culture – like assembly lines churning out rows of Campbell’s soup cans from a Warhol painting.
But then, in walks Quotle.
The new social media app Quotle is a breath of fresh air in an Internet environment that is prejudiced toward the Snippet Club of instant images, videos, and thinking compressed into Tweets.
HOW QUOTLE WORKS
TechCrunch described it as a cross between OneShot and Instagram, but for book quotes. Let’s examine this analogy for a moment:
Instagram: Just in case you’ve been a cast-away on an island since 2010, Instagram is essentially social media built solely around pictures. You take a picture, share it with your followers, they comment on it.
OneShot: This is a lesser known app, and deserves a little more explanation. Launched in March 2015, OneShot allows you to take screenshots of text on iOS devices and share them with others on Twitter. It allows you to crop the screenshot, highlight relevant text in custom colors, and then it magically figures out the URL for it for you; and then you share it on Twitter, and it’s all there: the image, highlighted text, and URL.
