Why Long-Form Media Matters

People often divide books into two categories: entertainment or academic mumbo jumbo. But this misses what books were originally built to do. Before widespread literacy, knowledge and information traveled through stories. Myths, fables, and folktales weren’t separate from learning. Narrative gave people a way to encounter complex questions about morality, power, community, and safety in a form they could understand and apply to their lives, regardless of how similar the story was to their day-to-day.

What made stories effective was the experience of spending time inside them. To be able to recite these stories, you would lock them into memory. Listeners could revisit situations, imagine alternatives, and apply lessons to their own lives. Fiction created enough distance from reality to make reflection possible, but enough familiarity to keep it relevant.

Books inherited this function. They slow the reader down. They ask for attention, patience, and the willingness to follow an idea past the point of immediate clarity. In doing so, they create conditions where thinking can deepen. Rather than delivering instant conclusions, long-form writing allows meaning to build gradually.

Today, many forms of media still tell stories, but they operate under different pressures, primarily algorithmic pressures. People are forced to create content that the algorithm supports, and part of that is getting content out fast and making content that is intentionally half-baked so that people can argue in the comments for engagement. Speed, volume, and constant updates make it difficult to stay focused on any single issue for very long. Just as someone begins to grasp a topic, another takes its place. When duration disappears, so does depth. Information may circulate widely, but it doesn’t really say anything to the reader/consumer. Without the time required to think and really ponder ideas, engagement looses it true value.

This is why long-form media continues to matter. Books preserve a structure where complexity can unfold rather than compete. They give arguments room to develop, contradictions space to exist, and readers the opportunity to change their minds. The value of the form lies not only in what it says, but in the sustained encounter it forces.

The purpose of books is not simply to entertain or to archive expertise. It is to create the space necessary for understanding. In a culture organized around acceleration, that may be their most important role. After writing something like this, I try to think about the “so what?” What are the actual takeaways from even having this thought? The biggest one that comes to mind is imagining what a critical-thinking-focused algorithm would look like. What behavior would it promote, and what would it look like to implement these things? I think it would be a great idea for social media platforms to offer a toggle switch that lets people choose which algorithm they want to use to consume and produce content.