While Jeremiah Owyang may not have tagged me in his post this morning the idea of mediasnackers caught my sleep deprived attention as I tried to prop my eyelids open with a fresh input of coffee.

The idea is that mediasnackers are those folks out there on the internet who devour information; regardless of format, in small bite size chunks rather than delve into anything with any substance. This will sound some what familiar to those that experienced the growth of the term MTV Generation which was used to describe how society was getting its information in smaller and smaller bites.

Increasingly we see terms like filters and aggregators being used in reference to our busy lives and how we need to quickly and succinctly be fed our information. It seems that life is going by so fast that we can no longer take the time to be truly informed beyond cursory glances at headlines and a paragraph.

To a certain point I can see this as a good thing it but what worries me is that the only thing we are concerned with is what can be fit in a 140 characters. While I do not agree with Robert Scoble who said via Twitter “… Long videos aren’t for everyone but if you CARE about LEARNING something and not just being superficial there’s no alternative … “ I don’t think that pandering to the shortest attention span is right either.

I might care about learning something but an hour long video isn’t going to hold my attention either. This doesn’t mean that Twitter type of information sharing is the ideal way either. The increasing move to even smaller sound bites than what was born by MTV style journalism bothers me and tagging it with a cool sounding name doesn’t make it any better - especially if you’re a longwinded old fart like me.

Listening to: Gregorian - Masters Of Chant1 - Brothers In Arms

Conversation Tags: mediasnackers, Jeremiah Owyang, Robert Scoble, MTV Generation