This was featured in #Long Reads
ShortFormBlog is the product of Ernie Smith, Seth Millstein, Chris Tognotti, Sami Main, Scott Craft, Matthew Keys, Julius the laid-off RSS robot, awesome links from awesome sources, a hacked version of Wordpress, Tumblr's Tumblarity, the letter Q, the number 13 and a series of tubes.
Copyright 2009-2013 Ernie Smith • Ask us stuff! • E-mail us • Follow us on Twitter • Follow us on Facebook
This may be the longest comment in Internet history. In this Google Docs-produced reply, Jeff Jarvis tears apart, piece-by-piece, a lengthy review Evgeny Morozov wrote of his latest book, “Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live,” a buzz-building article in which Morozov pretty much tears Jarvis apart. “Had Jarvis Written his book as self-parody — as a cunning attack on the narrow-mindedness of new media academics who trade in pronouncements so pompous, ahistorical, and vacuous that even the nastiest of post-modernists appear lucid and sensible in comparison — it would have been a remarkable accomplishment,” Morozov writes. “But alas, he is serious. This is a book that should have stayed a tweet.” Total word count of Morozov’s review? 6,389 words. Total word count of Jarvis’ lengthy rebuttal (which includes Morozov’s article, by the way)? 11,605 words. As a service to our short-form readers, we’d like to cut this down to three sentences: “Guy writes book on sharing stuff. Other guy shares his opinion of the book, at length. Original guy gets in huff, responds at length.”