Our concept of time can be adjusted. In a study on the perception of time participants were exposed to flashes of light at set intervals. After being exposed to 100 flashes that lasted 150 milliseconds participants felt that flashes of 300 milliseconds were closer to 400.
I’ve read about the “optimum length” for online articles and always felt there was something wrong with the idea that the web only likes short work. If our sense of time can be influenced by 100 flashes of light, then it seems that the “appropriate” length of an article is also more affected by the other short articles a person reads. Or perhaps there is something about the flickering the of the screen itself that makes an article feel long.
It would seem that an easy countermeasure to the cultural preference of short articles is simply to make a habit of reading longer material.
