Square Peg, Meet Round Hole.

Science fiction author, internet activist and uber-blogger, Cory Doctorow, has a piece at internetevolution.com about how we should stop judging new media from an old media framework.  Sitcoms seem like they work best in 22-minute (plus commercials) segments because that's the box that sitcoms fit in, but we shouldn't infer that all comedies in the video medium must therefore conform to that standard...

Twenty-two-minute sitcoms are highly evolved creatures, as formally bounded as a sonnet. Their highly paid practitioners have an arcane vocabulary and procedure to describe the system by which they are assembled to achieve maximal effect; we, the audience for these shows, have imbibed so many of them that we unconsciously expect the twists and turns the storytellers are delivering, even if we lack a conscious understanding of the formal structure and the specialist jargon needed to describe it.

By contrast, the short Internet video isn't a single genre -- it's more like cosmic narrative dust hurtling through space, clumping together here and there into larger conglomerates, then splitting apart before stabilizing. There's no formal structure to the eight-minute teenage-ramble-from-the-bedroom -- both the creator and the audience are winging it.   

...

The critics of new media often point to its failure to live up to the standards of old media. Some scientists and science journalists wring their hands at the idea that the Mars landers and the Large Hadron Collider emanate information in the form of anthropomorphized Twitter messages, arguing that these messages lack the formal virtues of science reporting and papers.   

It's true. They do. They don't succeed at being better in-depth science articles than the science articles. They succeed at being better Twitter messages than science articles; they succeed at producing and sustaining a different kind of interest and understanding than a long article in the weekend paper.

The low cost of deploying new media online is revealing a heretofore unsuspected appetite for stories in different boxes than we've heretofore used -- and a universe of stories waiting to be told.

Read the whole piece here.