Slashdot Mirror
How the Internet Changed the Way We Read (dailydot.com)
An anonymous reader writes: UC Literature Professor Jackson Bliss puts into words something many of you have probably experienced: the evolution of the internet and mobile devices has changed how we read. "The truth is that most of us read continuously in a perpetual stream of incestuous words, but instead of reading novels, book reviews, or newspapers like we used to in the ancien régime, we now read text messages, social media, and bite-sized entries about our protean cultural history on Wikipedia."
Bliss continues, "In the great epistemic galaxy of words, we have become both reading junkies and also professional text skimmers. ... Reading has become a relentless exercise in self-validation, which is why we get impatient when writers don't come out and simply tell us what they're arguing. ... Content—whether thought-provoking, regurgitated, or analytically superficial, impeccably-researched, politically doctrinaire, or grammatically atrocious—now occupies the same cultural space, the same screen space, and the same mental space in the public imagination. After awhile, we just stop keeping track of what's legitimately good because it takes too much energy to separate the crème from the foam."
Bliss continues, "In the great epistemic galaxy of words, we have become both reading junkies and also professional text skimmers. ... Reading has become a relentless exercise in self-validation, which is why we get impatient when writers don't come out and simply tell us what they're arguing. ... Content—whether thought-provoking, regurgitated, or analytically superficial, impeccably-researched, politically doctrinaire, or grammatically atrocious—now occupies the same cultural space, the same screen space, and the same mental space in the public imagination. After awhile, we just stop keeping track of what's legitimately good because it takes too much energy to separate the crème from the foam."
tl;dr
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
With that much excessively verbose pomposity in the summary, the article must be insufferable.
Go fuck yourself
.... people read more now then they ever have in human history, stupid people won't read deeply or thoroughly, those on the higher end of the bell curve will chew through data like its going out of style.
How much you read and whether you read something deeply/thoroughly has everything to do with the traits you've inherited as a biological form of life. The author describes a world that never was, people were always into sound-bytes and gross over simplifications long before the internet. The vast majority of religious people throughout history were barely literate about their own religion. This is nothing new under the sun.
.
Such a large amount of information has to squeeze something out, imo, what has been squeezed out is a lengthy attention span. The media audience just does not have anything approaching a lengthy attention span for reading anymore.
That's why websites are so anxious to sell whatever piece of your attention span they can muster to advertisers. That's why web page advertisements constantly try to hook and reel in your attention.
See? You didn't fucking listen
Apparently I still read the same way I always have.
UC Literature Professor Jackson Bliss puts into words something many of you have probably experienced: the evolution of the internet and mobile devices has changed how we read. "The truth is that most of us read from a never-ending stream of words that have sex with their relatives, but instead of reading novels, book reviews, or newspapers like we used to in the old times, we now read text messages, social media, and bite-sized entries about our ever-changing cultural history on Wikipedia."
Bliss continues, "In the great galaxy of words, we have become both reading junkies and also professional text skimmers. ... Reading has become a way to validate oneself, which is why we get impatient when writers don't come out and simply tell us what they're arguing. ... Content of all kinds -- thought-provoking or not, well-researched or not, politically-charged or not, well-written or not -- now occupies the same cultural space, the same screen space, and the same mental space in the public imagination. After awhile, we just stop keeping track of what's legitimately good because it takes too much energy to separate the wheat from the chaff."
After awhile, we just stop keeping track of what's legitimately good because it takes too much energy to separate the crème from the foam.
I don't know why he thinks this would be that difficult. Low-quality stuff is written in the vernacular, and truly valuable literature and discourse uses assimilated foreign words with accents unnecessarily. I'll bet that checking for the high-order bit would be good enough.
translation: stop liking what I don't like, you provincial rednecks / boors / pagans!
Reading schoolbooks was a waste of time because publishers bribed school authorities to foist incomprehensible texts on students. There are actually books which can clearly explain every subject, but they are not the ones you are mandated. Wikipedia and most content on the net are examples of unreadable text, and so produce nothing of value for searchers of information, so there is no value to reading them in depth, you might as well skim over them.
it takes too much energy to separate the crème from the foam.
"Witty" one-line comments on trivial observations. Slashdot.
This is not a new phenomenon. I remember a lawyer giving me her newspaper at the courthouse when I was 8 or 9. After a few minutes of watching me read it column to column and page to page she said "You're supposed to just skim it."
TL;DR: Kids these days.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
He's speaking for himself. With the way he writes I would expect he'll get minimal readership. Apparently he missed out on the centuries old idea of a good thesis and support structure.
Plenty of us still read books, too. Note the market for regular paper books is not dead, and e-readers are quite common. There is "internet reading" and real reading. Like there is fast food and good food.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
most of us read continuously in a perpetual stream of incestuous words
Remember kids, that's where portmanteau words come from.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I'm not even making a slashdot-type "nobody reads the article" joke here - literally no one anywhere is going to read the article when you use high-level SAT words and phrases like:
incestuous words
regime (not referring to a country's leadership)
protean
epistemic
doctrinaire
If its supposed to be ironic, I get it, but if its not then you failed miserably and don't even understand your own ideas.
I think its good to have as big of a vocabulary as possible and I actually recognize most of these words or could figure it out from contrast, and I consider myself to have a fairly above-average vocab due to having an English teacher for a Mom, but repeatedly using "big" words like those is just a shortcut to letting us know you're an asshole without much to say.
tldr version:
tldr.
...because we skim. We skim because we're confronted with an ungodly amount of junk to read, of which the article posted is an excellent specimen. Obviously I've skimmed through it.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, strawberry liquorice heart fills YOU!
What a country! ah ah ah!
I agree with the hypothesis. I find that I can not read and concentrate like I used to be able to do. It might be age, it might be the Internet 'fast read & skim'.
Who's to say what is "legitimately" good?
There are several points of view that all encompass "good." A piece of writing might be
- funny
- insightful
- artistic
- emotional
- provocative
- motivational
- well-crafted
Each of these (and other characteristics) might characterize writing as "good" even if it doesn't possess all of them.
In other words, beauty (or goodness) is in the eye of the beholder.
If it is changing the way we read it's making people forget how to spell,punctuate, use proper grammar and think before they hit enter.
Wikipedia is a great place for historical revisionism. I just edited an article about France to make history realize that the French lost all their wars because they were too busy having sex with cheese to fight off the dirty huns. Now this fact will appear in countless undergrad term papers. Eat your heart out, Proteus.
Wow, what a windbag. Here is a hint fuckface, one can read both novels and drivel on the intergrated face system too. They are not mutually exclusive. If anything though, people are reading more in general. I'm sure there are a lot of people who only read anything because of the internet, in past times a lot of these people wouldn't ever read anything.
I, for one, still prefer hardbound dead tree versions.
So you can join the rest of the oh-honey-look-it's-the-new-shiny-shiny-64G-Orgasmatron-from-Cupertino-that-I-traded-for-Princess-Leia-in-a-slave-girl-outfit-worshipping crowd.
In other words, the rest of your attention deficit is stuck back there with your gadget.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
That's why websites are so anxious to sell whatever piece of your attention span they can muster to advertisers. That's why web page advertisements constantly try to hook and reel in your attention.
And that's how we get Honey Boo, Little people who own pawnshops and cut logs in swamps, and in their spare time hunt alligators.
Because as time has moved on, the stupid people have gained access to technology that only smart people once used, and lo and behold.....Twitter!
People such as myself still have the attention span we used to, and the interent becomes a treasure trove for our personal research
The stupid, or those who have a shorter attention span than a goldfish http://time.com/3858309/attent... are there to consume facebook and twitter, and all the other internet venues that cater to this sort.
The pity is that the pruveyors of this utter shit seem to think that the condition is universal, hence the death of intelligent entertainment.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
In the context of Slashdot, I ignore any (me-too) post begining with "This." .
Reason? Unoriginal thinking.
TL;DR
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Helps explains why young people are growing up ignorant. Often you find what the author wants you to think right away, and hides how the facts show that he is wrong at the end of an article. This is how "climate change" got a big following, people don't read enough of the article to see that every prediction is wrong, and only computer models are used to predict the future, which have yet to have any to be correct.
Then we have tweets/text, don't know about everyone else, but i NEVER trust a tweet till I verify it, you are a fool if you do. Talking about news type tweets, not from people you know.
It's ironic. For generations, professors dreamed of day when voracious readers were the norm. Growing up, the message to read -- to read anything -- to read pretty please was everywhere.
Now we are voracious readers. We read. We read novels worth of information. We read about what happened to our friends, neighbors, and family. We read about current events. We read about history. We read about fiction. We read about all kinds of science. We read how to do all sorts of amazing projects. We read about new skills we can learn and places we can go and the result? These gilded idiots complain about it.
Some of the criticisms are incredibly myopic. One argument I've been hearing more and more is that the human brain is made less because people use reference materials more today. This argument acts as if this is some brand new concept! Some of the reference texts I personally use are 90 years old. The one I use more than any other was written in 1969. The Internet didn't just magically make reference materials come into existence for the first time.
Others, like this criticism, are beyond myopic. "People read differently now!" -- Actually, the people who are going to read through War & Peace for fun probably haven't gone anywhere, and they're probably still reading it. The difference is that now people who wouldn't have read at all in the past are now also voracious readers.
In both cases, the arguments feel like the complaining of an ideologue that their monkey's paw wish didn't look like what they expected to. It feels like these folks thought we'd all become erudite professors of literature like they did, but it turns out the great unwashed masses who read more than ever in the history of mankind still read about things that interest them.
NoW had you made a real edit, say to fix a spelling error, it would have been instantaneously reverted.
Wow. I had no idea literate people found this level of prose the least bit difficult. The ornate lexicon in the summary text dented my customary reading speed hardly a yod.
But then, when I clicked through to the full article, my eyes refused to focus anywhere in his text. Apparently my Joo Janta 300 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Neural Implants went into filter mode, removing the black letterforms while leaving behind only the whitespace between and around the words and letters. (Obviously, this is not an optical process, but hooks somewhere deeper into the visual–cognitive semantic stack.)
I've never even remotely figured out how this works. I take a brief glance at a wall of text, and even before I've consciously read more than a phrase or two, some subliminal thesis detector goes "nope, no cigar" and then my eyes defocus into paragraph at a time mode and pretty soon I've assessed an entire piece from end to end without having read a full sentence anywhere.
So I figure, "there's no farting way my brain could be passing judgment on a complex text while skimming at this speed" so I randomly force myself to read a sentence or two ... word ... by ... painful ... word and just about every time, same end result: no thesis detected.
Maybe this is why I've never really understood the whole TL;DR meme. Closest I ever come is TF;GO (too fuzzy, glassed over).
Length, as such, has nothing to do with it.
....because real Literature professors use words like 'epistemic'.
-Styopa
I have family members who constantly forward me pseudo-scientific garbage. Usually it is about politics or health. I am constantly amazed that they cannot seem to differentiate a research article from a random diatribe of unrelated statements. Prior to the internet, those crazy diatribes were hard to find. They came in door-to-door letters, or self-published books that bookstores rarely carried. Even when they were on the newsstand, everyone knew that "The Enquirer" wasn't reputable like "Time Magazine." But now people can't tell greennewsletter.com versus nature.com. I find spending a lot of time debunking insane raves rather than having intelligent debate.
Reading has become a relentless exercise in self-validation, which is why we get impatient when writers don't come out and simply tell us what they're arguing.
Well before I started using the internet I've always been impatient with writers who don't say what they're trying to say. The internet didn't change that. I'm sorry, but I've never liked fluff; and honestly never got the whole obsession with reading between the lines and interpreting other meanings from something that 'should' be implied by what the author was writing. It's probably why I would get frustrated with how I loved to read, would read more than most of my peers, but would struggle in English class, or on reading tests.
... which is why we get impatient when writers don't come out and simply tell us what they're arguing...
How ironic.
Interesting article to read on a site that made it's name shortening full news stories to a paragraph; on which still only around 20% read the full article.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
There used to be a time when the writing on the internet was for reading.
Now, it's just to generate clicks.
The only metric that anyone uses of the quality of the writing is the clicks and so the only thing that shows up everywhere is click-baits.
...is there nothing they can't ruin?
[Flame On] [Pompous Idiot Mode Engaged] The summary of this article is a perfect example of why most people ignore and/or annoy literature "professors" - as most individuals of that ilk have nothing better to do other than produce a constant effluvium of pedantic and verbose clap-trap to disguise the fact that their "education" was limited to constantly critiquing The Scarlet Letter. I would rather be a stamp collector (oblig. XKCD reference. Look it up, you've got Google) than to waste, nay, sully... such a entertaining word that is... my life with such a noble pursuit. [Normality restored][Flame Off]
For goodness sakes. A literature professor trying to make a point about communication when using a lexicon that only those mentally perverted by exposure to other literature professors? What were they thinking???
Another way of looking at it is that text used to be scarce due to the cost of publishing and distributing it, so people read a lot of crap, like the musings of impoverished Frenchmen or the escapist poetry of disenfranchised Germans. These days, people actually read stuff that matters to them: writings by people they care about, dating profiles of people they can actually meet, stories about places they can actually visit.
WTF is this guy saying? great epistemic galaxy of words ???
Calvin and Hobbes said eventually language will become a barrier to understanding.
That day is now.
Perhaps if 'no one is going to read' works like this literally, they can attempt to do so figuratively...
BTW, gratz on your newly found clairvoyance!
Who apparently doesn't know what the word "incestuous" means?
TL;DR
Blown out from the hermetic chasm of the literary stratum -- one full of ideas, albeit often tortuous -- a most thought-provoking (if ever so slightly unoriginal) introspection on the habit-forming ways in which we peruse of our societies's contemporary collective oeuvre.
To me, the question that remains is the following: Notwithstanding its fickler, unsure and often ephemeral versimilitude, shall we concern ourselves with the unintentionally purported crassitude of said oeuvre? To which I am, if ever so slightly, inclined to answer: Mayhaps we must, peradventure we might.