Couple of weeks ago I had dinner with my friend Duncan, and the photo above is the result of our conversation while we were waiting to get our credit cards back. (I most certainly did not draw this). X axis is "Difficulty" and Y axis is "Appreciation". And the lines are how those two things intersect.
It all started quite simply, with my observation what kind of stuff people like to read, and that they prefer something that's easy to understand. This comment was related to my thinking about my preferred audience for my dissertation: academic or professional. My complaining went like this: if I go professional, my advisers will never let me graduate. If I go too academic, then I can kiss goodbye anyone else. This is also precisely why academic papers fare so poorly in the real world, and at the same time, why Malcom Gladwell is the best-selling author. While it is always a great read to have something complex explained simply, the problem arises when something simple (and often terribly un-insightful and yes, dumb) is um, written simply (but mostly because there is no other way).
Duncan, always a smart ass, then drew the three graphs above on our dinner receipt. Then he discredited the first one as impossible, and the third one as the most likely. As you can see, the intersection of these two lines is a winner: something that is insightful enough but also easy to read by the greatest number of people. But the operative part of the sentence here is "the greatest number of people", and mostly because it sounds too much like the lowest common denominator thing that lowered our film and television industries output to an impressive amount of plain dumb content. Is something like this happening in the sphere of digital marketing blogs? Or, better yet, conference presentations? Do we write stuff in a way that the greatest number of people are going to be able to understand, and consequently, be interested in?
As the top point on the right shows, the most difficult content is appreciated by the very small number of people. I was asked if I would rather be Chuck Tilly, a recently deceased Columbia professor who published one book a year for 50 years = 50 books (and whom obviously no one else but his loyal academic readers ever heard of) or Malcom Gladwell, who is not even allowed to be cited in academia as a relevant source of information, but who published his 3 books in millions copies and who is known by almost everyone? (I was not quite able to respond that I aspire to be like Chuck Tilly without lying.) At the same time, appreciation is at its highest when difficulty is minimal, and in this case, too many examples to list come to my mind.
While I would certainly prefer to be at the intersection of the lines, I could not help but noticing that this point is still pretty low on the Y axis. If I move it further up, I will lose a lot of readers. But anyway, the thing that really escapes me is that people - especially online - seem not to want to put a lot of effort in things that can't be grasped in 30 seconds or less. That sounds like if someone taking a college course said, you know, this material requires too much work to understand, I don't like it. Not good.
