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
.
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.
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.
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.
That's because you're a racist who hates Arabs (or is it the Chinese? -Ed). Anyway, in the spirit of exclusivity you should read equally in all directions.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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.
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.
TL;DR
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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
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.
...is there nothing they can't ruin?
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.
To listen, first of all whoever wants to say something has to do so in a fashion that is not only understandable to that one who is supposed to listen, but it also has to be presented in a way that makes the listener want to listen.
And that piece fails on BOTH ends.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.