real world columns: length

Morgan’s bedtime stories are about Snow White at the moment. It must always be ‘Snow White and the seven somethings’: seven kings, seven volcanoes, seven hippos. We have even had some strange, self-referential versions: ‘Snow White and the seven Snow Whites’ was interesting, and ‘Snow White and the seven nothings’ was excruciatingly difficult to improvise.

However, one thing that remains fairly constant is the length. If ever I try to pull a fast one and trot out an abridged version, Morgan will be aware of it and complain: ‘That wasn’t much at all!’ Even if I make the story short and incredibly interesting she is still aware that it should be longer. In fact we both have the same idea of the right length, I know this because when I come to ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ to complete a decent length story she will peacefully go to sleep with no complaints.

This idea of a standard acceptable length or scope holds true for a variety of media: movies, plays, news, music; they all have a typical length.

A single in the charts needs to be five minutes at the most, make it twelve and it gets tedious. I’m always suspicious of thin novels, even if they have won the Booker prize. And consider movies at the cinema. If the movie is a blockbuster spanning seventeen generations of the same wealthy family and it manages to cram hundreds of years into two hours then we can cope with it, more to the point we can live those hundreds of years with the characters. Try and cram it into five hours though and it becomes unacceptable. Despite my suspicion of thin books they are interesting. They are something of a special case as they are not ‘consumed’ at one sitting so they are not limited by the time a person can sit quietly in one place, because of this there is a wide range of lengths for books. I wonder why the advent of the video recorder and the ability to watch a movie in several sittings didn’t have any effect on the length of movies.

It’s the same with real life interactions. Each has a fairly standard scope. Someone comes round for dinner; about five hours. Someone pops in for a coffee; about one hour. Game of cards; fifteen minutes. Job interview; 45 minutes. Large variations have a tendency to sound surreal; imagine if someone came round for dinner and had to leave within twenty minutes, or someone ‘just popped in’ and stayed three days.

Some aspects of the scope of a medium are dictated by the function of the medium. For example there is no recognized size for a telephone book, basically it is as big as is necessary to get all the names and telephone numbers in. Although they do sometimes split phone books up to make them more manageable.

The scope is governed by our limitations, both physical and mental. On the physical side books cannot weigh more than a few pounds (although some of the medieval tomes were massive). On the more important mental side there are limitations governing how quickly we can take information in and process it, and our concentration span. Longer media ‘binges’ tend to come back to the physical again with the question of how long we can sit still and ‘consume’ the medium. Although it should be stressed that this is always a balancing act between the discomfort and the interest in the movie. With some movies I have been fidgety and uncomfortable after just ten minutes.

Well, it makes you think doesn’t it; just how big should a multimedia CD-Rom be? 650 megabytes you might say – that is certainly the maximum that can be carried – but is that a good guide for the content? It would probably be possible to bind a book with five thousand pages in it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good size for books. And the number of kilobytes doesn’t really say much about scope and length in time, the 650M could be taken up with one huge TIFF image. And what about a website? How big should one of those be? Functional issues play a part again and maybe it is heavily related to the purpose of the site. The web is a broad medium indeed, so it is akin to asking ‘how long should a piece of text be?’

Well as far as the SIGCHI Real World is concerned a piece of text should be 800 words and so that’s it for now, and no angry emails saying ‘That wasn’t much at all!’