How the Internet Changed the Way We Read (dailydot.com) 148
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."
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
tl;dr
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/. did not disappoint, thank you kind Sir (or Madam if the SJWs are circling).
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Oh no, you won't escape the indignation. Just like you tried with "Happy Holidays" to dodge the religion bullet, all you got was overzealous Christians going ballistic on you for not wishing them a "Merry Christmas".
Give it a while and people will be all over you for thinking that they're a "Madam". For I want to be a victim of your prosecution and I won't let you dictate whether you prosecute me or not!
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every one of its articles now bleeds with its comment section, much of it written by posters who haven't even read the article in question--essentially erasing the dividing lines between expert, echo chamber, and dilettante, journalist, hack, and self-promoter, reportage, character assassination, and mob frenzy.
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You remind me of a friend whose attention span is 1/2 a tweet
The twat. The audacity.
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2 twats = 1 tweet?
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Not gonna read this (Score:5, Informative)
With that much excessively verbose pomposity in the summary, the article must be insufferable.
Re:Not gonna read this (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, just checkout this introductory paragraph:
Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me,
As plurdled gabbleblotchits,
On a lurgid bee,
That mordiously hath blurted out,
Its earted jurtles,
Into a rancid festering confectious organ squealer.
Re:Not gonna read this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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One-to-many distribution has become the shrieking of many-to-many.
When you say it like that, it sounds like an improvement.
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And there's a great deal of garbage that's not readily distinguishable from the real thing. Witness:
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ [elsewhere.org]
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Whatever this was, it no longer comes up. Just a blank page.
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Huh. Dunno why. Works for me, even without javascript. Just curious, what browser? SeaMonkey 2.39 here.
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Safari 9.0.2
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Huh. I'd understood it's usually less sensitive to website oddity. Well, not this time!
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Guess what: Just tried the site again and, this time, it comes up.
Yes, the postmodernist movement was an academic high-water mark in the development of abstruse language. The Pomos became so difficult to communicate with that they eventually lost the ability to mate with humans and died out. According to legend, the grave of the last Pomo is unmarked because academics could not agree on what discourse to put on her tombstone.
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Perhaps it just needed to know you were sincere!
I believe your understanding has reached maximum velocity. :)
Re: Not gonna read this (Score:2)
Im pretty sure back in the 1800s and early 1900s, before TV and decent radio, the masses were fairly ignorant of current events outside the town fair. Knowledge of anything besides the absolutely practical for surviving the month was hard won and often the privilege of the wealthy or well-reputed.
I'll trade that for having to shove aside Kanye West infotainment to gain easy access to pretty much anything I want to know about without moving my thumb more than 4 inches at a time.
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.
I don't care how much a man talks, if he only says it in a few words. - - - Henry Wheeler Shaw
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With a hobby of pointing out which novels are literature and which ones are trashy pulp for the masses?
Re:Not gonna read this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Even allowing for that - when someone uses a phrase as ridiculous as "incestuous words", it serves as a warning flag .
I saw a porn named that once.
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Even allowing for that - when someone uses a phrase as ridiculous as "incestuous words", it serves as a warning flag .
I saw a porn named that once.
"Warning Flag"? Heh, yeah, I saw that one too. I watched it twice, actually. 8 out o10 on the "Stroker" scale.
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Here seems to be the crux of his complaint:
We now skim everything it seems to find evidence for our own belief system. We read to comment on reality (Read: to prove our own belief system). 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.
Of course, the notion that this is somehow new and different is utter tripe. Does anyone think that some magical, golden age existed in which wordsmiths could sway the hearts and minds of the masses? My goodness, how *dare* we have our own opinions, rather than relying on the words of others to shape our thoughts.
Typical ivory-tower nonsense. You're missing nothing by skipping this article.
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Agreed. "Incestuous words" puts a whole new spin on oral sex and only proves the adage, that if it can be put on the Internet, there will be porn of it.
This librarian has found a way to create thesaurus porn, but thesaurus porn does not satisfy any of my particular perversions. So I have not read his article.
besides, tl;dr.
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I don't know if it's just kids but it seems that everyone's reading "Twitter: The Condensed Version" these days. Anything that can't be expressed in 140 characters or on a bumper sticker is too complicated. Anything that requires an attention span greater than that of a newt is more work than many are willing to invest.
This isn't limited to "kids." It's multi-generational and seems to span cultures. I can speculate as to why but, frankly, I'd be wasting the effort as nobody would bother to read it.
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Sorry, didn't have time to read your post, but I did want to say "nice sig".
Re:Not gonna read this (Score:5, Funny)
I skimmed it and you're right. Sweeping generalizations tossed in a word salad.
I just spent 6 hours reading Heinlein on e ink, so I humored him. Meanwhile, the same has been said in fewer, clearer words for at least 5 years now, with predictions of same around the time facebook, texting, and news aggregators went mainstream. Each time, that is.
Take old news and wrap it in New paper.
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Yeah, they guy is obviously ignorant of the world around him. Before the internet, the twitterverse was sated by trash print like The Inquirer.
And before that, writers were paid pennies for crap short stories to fill the pages of industry rags. There was trash out there for any level of intelligence. For every Heinlein contributing to these rags, you had a hundred thousand worthless "writers" filing copy for pay.
Nothing has changed in the CONTENT or PRESENTATION, it's just easier now than it ever was for
Re:Not gonna read this (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not gonna read this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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well played
1 no sentence caps
2 use 3 dots instead of any other punctuation
3 drop your pronouns
and 4 spelling of coarse
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u win teh inet 2day.
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With that much excessively verbose pomposity in the summary, the article must be insufferable.
+5
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With that much excessively verbose pomposity in the summary, the article must be insufferable.
Methings the learned scholar is taking great umbrage at this perfidy, and possibly needs gruntled.
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Needs gruntled? Is that correct english?
Anyway , if the article is using difficult words that does not mean the author is overstretching himself in order to appear smart. When people use jargon, they may be using the most specific word possible even if simpler words would also do the job. They may want to be accurate as well as eager to show that they know the subject well.
It does not follow the author doesn't make sense. I know some extreme examples personally. Outrageously complicated words but somehow al
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Needs gruntled? Is that correct english?
I don't think so. A woman who worked with me used to say that all the time when we were talking about someone being disgruntled. Anyhow, I always though it was a cute saying - although she said gruntle much better than I.
Anyway , if the article is using difficult words that does not mean the author is overstretching himself in order to appear smart.
No, but his choice of words, at least to me, tends to lead me away form what he is trying to accomplish. "Incestuous" for example. Yes, he uses it correctly, if in a fairly obscure manner. But the visions of incestuous relationships between family members comes up, then I have to play catc
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right :) And I had exactly the same reaction to the use of 'incestuous'. But the issue he raises is worthwhile and instead everyone focuses on his insecurity.
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It's like I tell my friends and co-workers, "I don't talk like everyone else. I speak in a manner similar to others."
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Incestuous words have sex with synonyms and (sometimes) homonyms. They give birth to horribly deformed words that are abominations before the Creator.
Example: horrible + bad TEHSEXMAKES horribad
horribad! Nnnngh I have webbed toes
Ancien régime? (Score:1)
Go fuck yourself
A glut of information, a lack of attention span (Score:2)
.
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
Re:A glut of information, a lack of attention span (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 lan
Re:A glut of information, a lack of attention span (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re: A glut of information, a lack of attention spa (Score:1)
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.
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NoW had you made a real edit, say to fix a spelling error, it would have been instantaneously reverted.
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He's using "Protean" (which should be capitalized) to mean "changing."
This 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 agree that the author's prose is unnecessarily wordy and trying to be too " clever."
But you missed the point here -- history shouldn't change (well, at least not in the common imagination; historiography shows us otherwise), but it DOES change on Wikipedia. Not only is Wikipedia continuously being edited and updated, but people here are always talking about the excessive coverage of random pop culture topics... and that of course is continuously evolving. You can actually see it happen as a pop cultu
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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.
Protip: Don't bother with Tolstoy - it can take him 100 pages to make his point clear.
On the other hand, you'll miss out on some amazing literature.
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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 tea
Nothing has changed (Score:2)
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/atten [time.com]
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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.
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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.
It's actually pretty easy (Score:2)
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.
Not new (Score:1)
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."
Re:Not new (Score:4, Funny)
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?
TL;DR (Score:5, Funny)
TL;DR: Kids these days.
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TL;DR: Kids these days.
'Nuff said.
Speaking but not listening (Score:2)
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.
False assumption (Score:3)
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I picked up a book once. It was heavy and looked like effort. So I jumped on wikipedia and read the "plot" section and left satisfied.
Note to the humourless: I was kidding.
Incestuous Words (Score:5, Funny)
most of us read continuously in a perpetual stream of incestuous words
Remember kids, that's where portmanteau words come from.
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Ah, that must explain why they tend to be so weird and misshapen.
Why your article won't be read (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I actually recognize most of these words or could figure it out from contrast
I figured out what you meant there from context. And, I agree completely with your point.
Re:Why your article won't be read (Score:4, Insightful)
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: Why your article won't be read (Score:3)
Illiteracy - it has electrolytes.
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Things would go so much better if people would quit whining and tow the line. Else we all loose.
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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
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While I agree with most of that, what do you have against the use of the word regime in that context? I certainly find it a lot more commonly used than referring to leadership.
The rest of examples I agree are verbal self gratification, but regime in common use when I hear it is a way of doing something, like a workout regime or a daily regime.
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Totally agree.
The article didn't embiggen my vocabulary, and it was annoying to read. Plus, I would not have used "epistemic" like that.
Also, give me your lunch cookie. If you don't, I'm going to tell you mom you left out the comma after "I think its good to have as big of a vocabulary as possible".
There's more, but I'm saving those for later
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Its not that big a deal, it's meaning is still clear.
Legitimately good? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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A minor correction: A piece of writing might be:
- funny
- insightful
- informative
- offtopic
- flamebait
- normal
- troll
- redundant
- interesting
- overrated
- underrated
Internet is changing the way we read (Score:1)
"We"?? (Score:2)
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.
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I, for one, still prefer hardbound dead tree versions.
I'm with you, my dead-tree appreciating brother.
A Kindle or a real book? I'll take the real book any day.
Ha ha (Score:2)
TL;DR
TF;GO (Score:3)
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.
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I read a lot on the Internet and off, mostly technical stuff. I find much is poorly written, in the end only conveying a confusing or pointless message. Somehow, though, I've noticed that often I am skipping over entire paragraphs that my eyes "don't want to read". I assumed it was some sort of temporary mental laziness, so I would force myself to go back and painstakingly read the text, sentence-by-sentence, only to find again and again that my eyes we
And you know it's authentic (Score:2)
....because real Literature professors use words like 'epistemic'.
I've authors to say what they were saying (Score:2)
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 cla
Trolling? (Score:2)
... which is why we get impatient when writers don't come out and simply tell us what they're arguing...
How ironic.
slashdot (Score:2)
We just read click-baits now (Score:1)
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.
Millennials... (Score:1)
or alternatively... (Score:1)