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."

Comments

Re:Not gonna read this

[rudy_wayne]

I literally did not understand what he was saying (the the quoted summary). I don't have the patience to decode what he's trying to say in this convoluted mess of word salad. Why doesn't he just come out and state his thesis? Maybe I'll just look him up on wikipedia.

I like his unintentional humour: "which is why we get impatient when writers don't come out and simply tell us what they're arguing."

Long-winded prose, which uses 1000 words when only 10 are needed, used to be confined to academia. But now, thanks to the interwebs, it's everywhere.

Why your article won't be read

[Cowclops]

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.

Re:Why your article won't be read

[DNS-and-BIND]

No, it means YOU are the philistine and cannot understand the things the adults are saying.

You don't even know what philistine means, do you? It is the attitude of anti-intellectualism that undervalues and despises art, beauty, spirituality, and intellect. A philistine person is an individual who is smugly narrow of mind and of conventional morality whose materialistic views and tastes indicate a lack of and indifference to cultural and aesthetic values.

How can you say he is "an asshole without much to say"? Not only does he have far more than you to say, but he is a Professor of Literature AND he can get what he writes heard on The Daily Dot as well as Slashdot. Vladimir Nabokov had a lot to say about you people, and if you think Nabokov is a pervert just because he wrote a famous novel about a man who becomes sexually involved with a 12-year-old girl, you're a philistine too. Your prudish attitudes are the result of being contaminated with bourgeois values.

Now please note that I do not for a minute agree with any of this - but a rather large portion of the world's decision makers think this way. They have nothing but contempt for you and your kind, and your philistine attitude is their justification. If you find Nabokov, Woody Allen, or what Roman Polanski did despicable, you're one of them and your views are not worth listening to. They have simply decided that their own views are correct, and yours are wrong. That argument about your Mom being an English teacher? You'd be laughed out of any independent theater in the world.

Re:Why your article won't be read

[chihowa]

His use of "contrast" instead of "context" might not have been an accident, which highlights one of the reasons that I have a hard time reading much of what is written today. You get a huge serving of it here on Slashdot, but even people who are paid to write in English often regularly try to use words that they don't actually know: from the famous "intensive purposes" to the use of "idealistic" instead of "idyllic" (which made me cringe while reading an article this morning).

Re:Not gonna read this

[93 Escort Wagon]

Give him a break, he's a Literary professor. Words are his life...

Even allowing for that - when someone uses a phrase as ridiculous as "incestuous words", it serves as a warning flag telling me they almost certainly don't have anything to offer beyond pomposity.

Legitimately good?

[Tony Isaac]

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.

Re:Not gonna read this

[Applehu Akbar]

UCI - My school!

Okay, Dr. Bliss needs to have a thesaurus removed from his colon, wherein it was undoubtedly placed by some angry freshman, but the point is an interesting one. Back in the nineteen hundreds, when to access information we needed to leave home and drive to a public building called a "library" and carefully select printed works of interest, we absorbed information only when we specifically intended to. The mechanics of this process forced us to remember specific authors and publications as being our sources. And the distribution paradigm was always one-to-many, information flowing from authors through their august gatekeeping Publishers to the plebeian eye.

Today, it's raining 'content'. The lordly Publisher, and his retinue of pimply-faced grad students who made sure that only approved Major Authors made it past the slush pile, is all but gone. Because we can search effortlessly in a world of diverse data, we no longer have to depend on a few authors we trust to define the culture we live in. And furthermore, we can now talk back. One-to-many distribution has become the shrieking of many-to-many. This confuses quite a few of us.