From 24-hour cable news to constantly-updated online news sources to social networks like Twitter and Facebook, it seems like our information comes at us in streams. (And come to think of it, a fire hose may be a more appropriate metaphor than a stream.) Conceptual artist Jonathan Keats is slowing the information cycle down on the cover of the most recent issue of Opium Magazine, where he has printed “the longest story ever told.”
Though the actual story is only nine words long, the printing process was done in such a way that each word will be revealed only as the ink fades – which, if their calculations are correct, will expose just one word every hundred years.
As if underscoring Keats’s point, my first reaction was to wonder if I could find a spoiler online.
Jim Eltringham 