The reality of media content getting shorter is not new to anyone paying attention to today’s entertainment. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are all forms of social media that are dominating the entertainment industry—especially with younger audiences craving short-form rather than long-form content. These forms of social media content are now being labeled “snackable” content.
The term snackable content was coined to aptly describe videos, GIF, memes, or other forms of media that are easily digested, understood, and shared. It is content that can be quickly enjoyed, then swiped past to see more posts in the never-ending pile of content that currently exists today.
People of an older generation might hypothesize that this explosion of snackable content only serves to further deteriorate the already shortening attention spans of younger audiences.
These claims may hold some truth, but the shift to shorter-form content also displays the preferences of a generation that wants answers quickly and dislikes digressions that can possibly lead to misinterpretations. With younger generations being born into a world of misinformation, snackable content serves to provide quick and easy answers.
The pros and cons of snackable content can be argued back and forth, but there is no denying that this is the future of media. Scholarly publishers have also taken note of these changes and have either begun forming new publications to prioritize this content or have been asking authors directly to provide snackable research to support this trend of readership.
It is predicted that many scholarly publications will turn to micropublications to meet snackable demand. Micropublications are publications that can be made into multiple formats such as shorter articles or video summaries. These more snackable options feature more research summaries rather than full-length pieces and would mainly be used to spread their content to a wider audience and to more quickly share information.
The concept and practice of shortening scholarly works is not a radical or new idea though. Traditional news outlets have been doing it for centuries by shortening and summarizing different scholarly articles for a wider audience.
What is different now is that since the demand for shorter-form content has increased, scholarly publications have taken note and have begun to adapt to their new audience. Rather than putting the responsibilities on the public or reporters to decipher the full-length article, they are providing the short-form content themselves.
By scholarly publishers creating shorter and digestible content themselves, this creates more profit and possibly more direct interest in their articles. The more pressing question for authors and publishers is who will be tasked to generage this shorter content? Will it be the publishers themselves, the authors, or will they need to hire new people?
Most likely though, one might assume that AI will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this switch to shorter-form content.
An example of this can be seen with Google AI. Currently, when Googling something, Google summarizes the scholarly content and provides a snackable summary for you. It is not far-fetched to assume that scholarly publications might employ the same methods.
Some caution might be warranted here, however, as AI can confuse information and pull incorrect information into their summaries as well. Therefore, these new forms of micropublications could possibly face heavy levels of scrutiny within academic circles, so growing pains should be expected.
Though snackable research is trending and on the rise with more audiences, it is unlikely that it will replace longer academic pieces, since a snackable creation is dependent on the existence of the longer-form original content to begin with.
Micropublications are not new—just look at this blog post—but the quicker methods of creating this content are what should be considered when considering the future of “snackable” research.
By Eleanor Davis
Eleanor is a Senior Editor at Technica Editorial
