Present Tense:There was a time, not long ago, when the 24-hour news cycle was hailed as the clearest manifestation of a world rendered dizzy with information overload: round-the-clock coverage demanded round-the-clock activity.
Bill Clinton, we were told, was the first politician to fully exploit this (forget Kosovo and Northern Ireland, his great legacies will be dawn-to-dawn media mastery, his variety of handshakes and a creative way with cigars - a true titan of modern politics).
A new reality is emerging, however: the 24-second news cycle, where headline, content and recap are squeezed into just three words. "Bertie negotiates longtime", "Iraq still dangerous", "Popemobile hijack proof", that sort of thing. What we lose in nuance, we more than make up for in concision.
Ignore the fact that the 24-second news cycle so far exists only on the satirical website The Onion ("America's finest news source", and don't doubt it). As Homer Simpson once said, "It's funny 'cos it's true." The notion of a 24-second news cycle works because we live, in the words of British comic-book writer Warren Ellis, in the age of a "burst culture".
Ellis recently wrote a blog post in which he discussed the impact of consuming our culture in short bursts, rather than longer, more considered units.
The web and mobile communications are, of course, permanently changing the way we receive and create information - surfing instead of reading, texting instead of talking, instant-messaging instead of e-mailing (yep, even e-mail is old skool).
But burst culture isn't restricted to the net - as we have become more accustomed to processing lots of small units of information online, other culture creators have had to become equally snappy to keep up. Soupy Norman is probably the funniest thing on RTÉ since Pat Kenny got attacked on The Late Late Show, but how much of its success is down to its 10-minute, YouTube-esque running time?
The TV advert, for instance, is a perfect burst culture artefact - for years, we've been hearing how the ads are more entertaining than the TV programmes. In a burst culture world, the Guinness ads are our longest-running avant-garde TV series, consistently subverting the conventional narrative form epitomised by Glenroe, say, or The Clinic.
The venerable album, too, is taking on a more dodo-like demeanour with every downloaded MP3 file. In this climate, Timothy Leary's "Turn on, tune in, drop out" begins to sound like a long-term commitment.
What does burst culture mean for our poor, put-upon attention spans? How are we supposed to cope with this cognitive overload? One phrase used to describe the way in which we absorb burst culture is "continuous partial attention", which sounds unfortunately like a condition invented by a big pharmaceutical company to sell a new drug. CPA, as it will inevitably be known, describes the way in which we really, really want to keep up with as much stuff as possible, and skim over lots of information in an effort to do so. Not surprisingly, the chief effect of CPA appears to be anxiety. Cultural multitasking is asking a lot of our brains, just as office-based multitasking does.
We should remember, however, that culture has always been shaped by the modes of communication available. Stories were originally passed on orally, back in the days before Bic pens and Cara copybooks.
There was a reason why the novels of Henry Fielding or Samuel Richardson, for example, were so big they could double as building blocks - they were catering for readers who wished to spend as much time absorbed in the author's world as possible, because they didn't have many other distractions vying for their attention. If 18th-century readers had as much information being thrown at them as we do, they'd probably be demanding Richardson get a good editor, or at least write Clarissa in comic-strip form.
Likewise, in the good old days of cinema, movies were often shown in double bills because people didn't have TVs to rush home to (if you watch two movies in a row now, you're some sort of degenerate, or Quentin Tarantino). Books were big and films were double-billed, not because our predecessors were possessed of bigger minds, but because it was what technology and prevailing social conditions conspired to produce.
To that end, we need to take into account the fact that the two most successful movies of the year so far, Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean 3, are both butt-numbingly long, and that the best-selling book of the year will undoubtedly be the construction material-sized final Harry Potter novel. All of those products are squarely aimed at the ADD generation, which gives credence to Ellis's prophecy that burst culture isn't a "replacement medium", it's a new medium.
With training, we'll probably increase our CPA abilities, so there might come a point when the 24-second news cycle seems a little long-winded. If some day I can't get a news digest in a single syllable, I'm definitely tuning out for good.