Just got this from a friend... Yes, it's meant to be funny, but this is so incredibly true. We are becoming a picture-book society, and that should impact every piece of communication you send out to prospects and residents.
I just had a second to check out your funny article from The Onion. So true!
I have childhood friend in my Facebook account and her status updates are generally 6-9 sentences long. They normally contain a few unrelated topics and for some reason, she likes to group them together in one post. I've gotten to the point where I never read her status updates anymore because they are too long. And I notice she rarely gets comments so I would bet others feel the same way. We have taken fast food mentality to a new level! Geez!
This data might already exist, but I think it would be interesting to look at a population of posts and see the length of the post versus how many comments. But I also think it matters depending on the medium. For example, if someone tried to write a post in the discussion forum here the same length as a normal blog post, it would probably just get ignored whereas it would get read if it were in the blogs section.