Meta-Medium
On Medium as a medium of writing
What did it take for you to click on this post?
What will it take for you to read it all the way through?
And what will make you hit “Recommend”?
I write about technology and I teach writing. So when I try out a new writing platform like Medium, these are some of the questions that eventually come to mind.
Megan Garber recently posted a brief dispatch from the Aspen Ideas Festival. She covered a talk by industrial designer Murray Moss about the wine glass. Wine glasses, particularly the finer ones, are hard to hold and easy to break. But, Moss argued, the fragility of the wine glass is its greatest asset. It’s delicacy encourages you to handle it more gracefully and to experience its content more deliberately. Or, as Moss put it, “The glass allows you to cherish something.”
Pour wine into a paper cup and the whole experience changes. The medium matters. It can either enhance the experience or detract from it. And so it is with a writing medium; it’s never neutral. Pen and paper, carved stone, wax tablets, word processors, blogs, etc. — they all tweak the experience of writing.
In the case of Medium, the characteristic that gets a lot of attention is the clean, inviting graphic interface. As I type this, I see words on white space and almost nothing else. A small grey box with a plus sign appears just to the right of the paragraph I’m currently typing in case I want to add a note, and the Medium logo remains at the top left of the screen with the words Saved and Saving alternating next to it as I type, which is a little annoying. Happily, there is very little to visually distract me from the process of writing once I get to it. This is commendable.
As a writer, though, I also think about Medium from the reader’s perspective. More to the point, I think about how readers will encounter my writing. Medium is, of course, a platform for public writing. In fact, I suspect part of its appeal is the potential for a quite sizable audience. Let’s face it, any platform with a stats page will prompt (or tempt) writers to think about reaching a larger audience. That’s part of the package. Public writing necessarily concerns itself with its audience, and metrics to measure that audience lead writers to think of their writing in light of those metrics. Of course, how a writer handles all of this can vary.
And so we’re back to the questions with which we began. Given Medium’s interface, what’s a writer to do to reach their audience?
One of the first features I noticed when I scrolled through Medium’s homepage for the first time was the approximate reading time for each piece. It’s easy to see why this is an attractive feature. Occasionally, we have time to sit down and read without interruption for a long stretch; usually we have less time to invest. Always, we are having to decide what’s worth our time online given all the material that calls for our attention.
So as I write, I’m thinking about the time that will show when readers first see my piece. At worst, this may encourage me to keep my posts artificially short thinking that readers will only read what is marked two, three, or four minutes. But this isn’t necessarily so. I’m heartened by the longer pieces that frequently appear among the most recommended. I’m not sure, though, that the time marker is altogether irrelevant to the initial decision to read or not, particularly when the piece isn’t already highlighted as an editor’s pick or a most recommended.
There’s a mental calculus that plays out, often so quickly that it borders on intuition. If the decision to click on a story happens after some sort of motivation threshold has been crossed, it’s probably safe to assume that the threshold is lower when the piece is one or two minutes long than when it is 10 or 12 minutes.
Consequently, I’m thinking about the length of my piece when I’m drafting on Medium; certainly more so than when I write on my blog. And when I’m revising, I’m thinking about how I can tighten the piece and where I can cut. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’ve always thought George Orwell was more right than wrong when he advised, “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” I don’t always follow through on that counsel, but I’m even more mindful of it on Medium.
The mental calculus also takes other factors into account. The title for instance. I hate writing titles. Rarely do feel as if I’ve written a “good” title: the kind that catches your attention and draws you in, more or less honestly. My titles range from the bland to the unimaginative with occasional detours into the hoaky. But titles matter some. Crappy title, brief piece may still yield a low threshold, but, all else being equal, a longer piece may need a more engaging title.
Now, once that threshold has been crossed and someone has decided to click through to something I’ve written, Medium invites me to think about how I can get them to read all the way through. This is something that hardly ever crosses my mind when I write on other platforms. Medium brings it to mind by letting me know not only how many people have viewed my post, but also how many people have actually read it.
I’m not entirely certain how Medium determines this. I imagine it’s some combination of how long a reader stays on a page and whether or not they scroll to the end. I can’t imagine the metric is entirely accurate, though. There’s probably no way to guarantee that someone has actually read a post. On the other hand, there are some pretty clear indicators to tell who hasn’t.
The bottom line is that a new consideration now makes its presence felt while I write. But what’s there to do with it other than write in a clear, engaging manner and not waste your readers’ time. And so it is with that last question: what makes someone hit “Recommend.” Readers will recommend what they value.
I rather like “Recommend” as opposed to “Like,” “+1" or “Favorite,” etc. There’s something a little more, I don’t know … professional or serious about it. The other thing about Recommending that’s worth mentioning is that you do so annonymously, at least so far as readers of the post are concerned. Someone who happens on your author page can see the posts you’ve recommended, but no one on the posts themselves can see who’s recommended them or even how many people have done so. It seems to me that this downplays that annoying performative dimension of reading on social media. When you know that others will see that you’ve “Liked,” “Favorited,” or re-blogged something, a subtle pressure arises to do so as a way of saying something about yourself or the fear that someone will interpret the gesture in a way that you did not intend. The most obvious reason to recommend on Medium is simply to promote what you think is worth promoting because of the content or quality of the writing.[Update: This aspect of Medium has been evolving since this piece was published.]
One final thought about “Recommend.” I have a slight proclivity for linguistic snobbery, so I rather appreciate how the word doesn’t require one to mangle the language in order to use it in its various declensions. I can say that I’ve “recommended” a post on Medium or that I will be “recommending” a post without using the word abnormally or inventing some barbaric neologism.
Barbaric commenting seems to be another characteristic of web writing that is felicitously absent from Medium — as far as I can tell anyway, and, admittedly, I’ve not made a rigorous study of the matter. This in turn is because “comments,” as we traditionally think of them, are absent from the page as I read. In their place, Medium offers Notes that are neatly tucked away out of sight until you reveal them by clicking on the Note icon by a paragraph of text. These notes can also alternate between public and private modes, which is inspired tweak on the traditional comment. It allows readers to interact with writers while giving writers the freedom to feature only those notes that would enhance the text without resorting to deletion.
The clean interface, the polished ethos, the decorous notes: all of this is conducive to good writing, even if it does not quite guarantee it. Medium differs from more conventional online writing platforms in one other way that may also contribute to the overall quality of the writing. There’s no built-in way to follow a particular writer. The effect, as I read it, is a certain distance between the author and the piece so that each piece stands or falls on its own merits.
Blogs, the more conventional alternative, allow audiences to coalesce around personalities. A popular blogger will have a steady audience that will read most of what they post. Because of this, bloggers are able to cultivate the informality that comes from casual familiarity. That sort of informality feels personal, even intimate. But it’s that sort of informality that is unavailable on Medium. On Medium, I can’t count on readers having read what I wrote before and or reading what I write after a given post, and I can’t form an audience that “follows” me (at least not with any ease). I have to win an audience with every post. This, combined with the features discussed above, cultivates the ideal of writing as craft.
Crafted: I think that may best define the feel of writing on Medium, at least the writing that gets featured by the editors or is highly recommended. These posts exhibit a certain quality, but it’s not immediately obvious what this quality is. The content of the posts is certainly diverse and so too is the style of writing. But what these posts share is a well-crafted voice that has left behind the informality of casual familiarity. Yet, they are not impersonal because of this. In fact, the best of them may be even more personal for not relying on informality as a mode of intimacy. Instead, they give off the intimacy that arises from a craft approach to writing. They offer a voice that’s been cultivated and honed, consequently offering the intimacy of care and depth. In the world of online writing, this is no small thing.
Looked at from a slightly more critical perspective, there is one other quality to the collective Medium voice as I hear it. It’s the tone of self-helpy, Oprah-ish, motivational guru uplift. It’s really earnest, not that there’s anything wrong with that. The world-weary, knowing, faux-ironic, snarky pose gets tiring and boring after awhile. But there may be a thin line between writing as craft and writing as slick, canned performance. Both initially give off that polished feel, but well-crafted writing ultimately discloses depth of character and perspective while canned writing reveals nothing beyond the glimmer of its surface. This is all to say that maybe Medium posts risk becoming the written equivalent of TED Talks at their parody-inviting worst.
More can be said about Medium, and more will need to be said. There are a number of other critical approaches to be taken. But as a medium for writing, Medium works unusually well and I need to wrap this up to stay at eight minutes.
