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."
With that much excessively verbose pomposity in the summary, the article must be insufferable.
He's using "Protean" (which should be capitalized) to mean "changing." It comes from the Greek myth of Proteus, but the professor (who is clearly an idiot) does not know that, which is why he does not capitalize the adjective derived of a proper noun.
He simply uses "incestuous" incorrectly. Likely, he is used to dropping "provocative" adjectives into his academic writing as if that made him somehow less boring or more meaningful. Instead, he simply comes across as shallow and stupid, like most modern language professors.
Disclosure: I'm a classics professor, and I hate with a passion the English professors around me and their utter failure to use correctly the language that they teach.