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.
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
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.
I disagree. I don't think it is the attention span. I skip reading things if the author has not clearly stated his/her point within the first 3 paragraphs.
From the summary:
What does the phrase "incestuous words" mean?
Why is "continuously" used in the same sentence with "perpetual"?
How is "cultural history" associated with "protean"?
The problem isn't the attention span. The problem is trying to figure out what someone is really saying. Electrons are cheaper than ink. That does not mean it is acceptable to pack in the adjectives and adverbs just because you don't have to pay a printer.
This is not a new phenomenon. I remember a lawyer giving me her newspaper at the courthouse when I was 8 or 9. "
Wait . . . . what?
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.
That is what I suspected. The problem is that "history" should not be "Protean".
Instead of
I would suggest "our Protean culture". Or even "... our changing culture".
I am reminded of The Eye or Argon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eye_of_Argon
My experience is that I skim a lot more noise than I used to, but when I do find something worthy paying attention to I will happily slow down and read it properly. And because of the increased volume of available material I read a lot less crap than I used to because there is too much good stuff to waste time on the rubbish. After all, why would I waste time reading some poorly written, sensationalist "now feel scared" newspaper article when there is content just a few clicks away that might actually teach me something worth learning?
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.
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.