1 - starexplorer
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Has your reading changed in the age of reading online?
This may be of interest to pose to a group that loves reading. I listened to a podcast that extended something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. The issue doesn’t require listening, but the speaker does crystallize many things. It’s the most recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast titled “This Conversation About the ‘Reading Mind’ Is a Gift”, November 22, featuring Maryanne Wolf who is at U.C.L.A.’s School of Education and Information Studies.
I wonder if others have experienced what has been troubling me for some time? She argues that the quantity of information we absorb, and in particular the means by which we read, has changed many things about the experience of reading. We tend to have so much coming at us, and it is so designed to cause us to skim, to read superficially, to get the gist, that we are losing something fundamental in the reading experience. We read far less deeply, far less for sheer beauty, for language, for immersion in the reading world and in the state of reading. She makes a good case that we are losing something vital about a process that at one time used to incorporate so much more of our previous experience, of our own contribution to what we read in the form of the ideas and history we bring to the books we read.
There is much more, but I have noticed that i absorb so much information on a daily basis that information skimming has crowded out a lot of what reading used to be for me. I have given up without intention a portion of one of the things I love the most in the world. I have only to look at my reading records to see that the sheer number of books I read annually has gone down. But more importantly is the way I read. I believe I read faster and with less depth and immersion that’s I used to. I have noticed this with alarm, and the podcast put it into stark relief.
I am currently reading a wonderful book - nonfiction - The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by Graeber and Wengrow. It’s a long challenging book, and a waste of time to read quickly. It’s a complex assembly of argumentation, anthropological findings, and reflection. I find I have to make an uncharacteristic effort to get through it, and not because the authors make it difficult. It’s more my own tendency to read differently.
To editorialize, I believe part of this is the effect of reading differently itself. But another related part is the way software engineers, acting for the benefit of corporate profit, have successfully hijacked the human neurological incentive system to get people to do what is in the interests of the company. They want our attention, and we are sitting ducks for the stimulation and reinforcement on offer.
I am interested in what your experiences are. For myself, I recognize the need to examine the places where, in effect, I have become addicted to online stimulation and incentives. I need to read less on devices. I need to read more slowly. I need to absorb less information. I need to read in the immersive way I have loved my whole life. I am concerned that we may be the last generation that is in a position to even evaluate this fairly, as no one again will have the early experiences we did where we read and there was no internet to alter the experience.
I am retiring in six months, one of my plans for the coming years is to read the best work, and to read it slowly, savoring its ideas and language, to try to free myself of addiction, and to return to something I have loved the most in my life. We are so malleable, and feel the need to fight against it.
Last edited by starexplorer (11/23/2022 12:49 pm)
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- Pence
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Re: Has your reading changed in the age of reading online?
Reading physical books is definitely a different experience than reading on a kindle. That said I've always been a fast reader and have to make myself slow down when the words are appropriate for savoring. ...which is a bit easier to make myself do when I'm reading a physical book. It is also much more difficult -and annoying- to flip back and forth when I want to back reference on ebooks.
Audio books are slower so provide a different experience. Providing that the reader is good. A poor reader ruins the book and requires a bit of a break so that I don't 'hear' that reader's voice in my head when I am reading the physical book.
The kindle does make it seductively easier to just skim.
- Pence
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Re: Has your reading changed in the age of reading online?
I suspect it is like the difference technology makes in physically writing something. Many years ago I read an essay in the Sunday New York Times (back when it took all of Sunday to read it) in which the writer described how what kind of writing determined the tool he used to write -fountain pen for short essays, typewriter for somewhat longer articles, and a word processor for book length work.
- starexplorer
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Re: Has your reading changed in the age of reading online?
Pence wrote:
I suspect it is like the difference technology makes in physically writing something. Many years ago I read an essay in the Sunday New York Times (back when it took all of Sunday to read it) in which the writer described how what kind of writing determined the tool he used to write -fountain pen for short essays, typewriter for somewhat longer articles, and a word processor for book length work.
I agree, part of this is a contemporary version of the medium is the message. We read differently depending on not just what we are reading but how we are reading….
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Thread Starter- starexplorer
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Re: Has your reading changed in the age of reading online?
Reading physical books is definitely a different experience than reading on a kindle. That said I've always been a fast reader and have to make myself slow down when the words are appropriate for savoring. ...which is a bit easier to make myself do when I'm reading a physical book. It is also much more difficult -and annoying- to flip back and forth when I want to back reference on ebooks.
Audio books are slower so provide a different experience. Providing that the reader is good. A poor reader ruins the book and requires a bit of a break so that I don't 'hear' that reader's voice in my head when I am reading the physical book.
The kindle does make it seductively easier to just skim.
So the difference in reading a fiction paper book vs kindle is an important issue. But the other part I was getting at is the sheer absorption of information, and by that I don’t mean fiction. I mean the rapid perusal of emails, articles, internet pieces of interest, etc. So many, often tempting. I need to be more discriminating
Last edited by starexplorer (11/23/2022 2:21 pm)
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Thread Starter- Surtac
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Re: Has your reading changed in the age of reading online?
Reading physical books is definitely a different experience than reading on a kindle. That said I've always been a fast reader and have to make myself slow down when the words are appropriate for savoring. ...which is a bit easier to make myself do when I'm reading a physical book. It is also much more difficult -and annoying- to flip back and forth when I want to back reference on ebooks.
Audio books are slower so provide a different experience. Providing that the reader is good. A poor reader ruins the book and requires a bit of a break so that I don't 'hear' that reader's voice in my head when I am reading the physical book.
The kindle does make it seductively easier to just skim.
So the difference in reading a fiction paper book vs kindle is an important issue. But the other part I was getting at is the sheer absorption of information, and by that I don’t mean fiction. I mean the rapid perusal of emails, articles, internet pieces of interest, etc. So many, often tempting. I need to be more discriminating
Yes. There is so, so much to respond to on this topic and in consideration of Star's specific questions that I suspect I'll be spending most of the day thinking about this. It's 8:30am here right now, and I'm off to open a scratchpad doc to start capturing thoughts. I'll be back.
It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.
- starexplorer
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Re: Has your reading changed in the age of reading online?
Reading physical books is definitely a different experience than reading on a kindle. That said I've always been a fast reader and have to make myself slow down when the words are appropriate for savoring. ...which is a bit easier to make myself do when I'm reading a physical book. It is also much more difficult -and annoying- to flip back and forth when I want to back reference on ebooks.
Audio books are slower so provide a different experience. Providing that the reader is good. A poor reader ruins the book and requires a bit of a break so that I don't 'hear' that reader's voice in my head when I am reading the physical book.
The kindle does make it seductively easier to just skim.
So the difference in reading a fiction paper book vs kindle is an important issue. But the other part I was getting at is the sheer absorption of information, and by that I don’t mean fiction. I mean the rapid perusal of emails, articles, internet pieces of interest, etc. So many, often tempting. I need to be more discriminating
Yes. There is so, so much to respond to on this topic and in consideration of Star's specific questions that I suspect I'll be spending most of the day thinking about this. It's 8:30am here right now, and I'm off to open a scratchpad doc to start capturing thoughts. I'll be back.
looking forward to your comments, and to what everyone has to say on this topic that I suspect affects us all
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Thread Starter- starexplorer
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Re: Has your reading changed in the age of reading online?
FYI, a related but not identical set of perspectives might be found in the documentary “The Social Dilemma” available on Netflix. It addresses the intentional and insidious hijacking of attention by Big Tech, interviewing many of the software developers who created the platforms. I believe the documentary was actually made by former developers for Facebook and other companies.
Many of these developers do not allow their own children to use those platforms, as they regard them as harmful and as attempting to manipulate our attention. The devices employed in the documentary are in places oversimplified and metaphorical, but it’s another side to this whole topic. I intended my comments to be about reading, but it’s also true that this can’t fully be separated from the larger issues of what’s happening to humanity in it’s sudden shift to using platforms that are designed to get us to click to promote the goals of those platforms/companies.
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Thread Starter- Griffinmoon
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Re: Has your reading changed in the age of reading online?
My short-circuited brain can skip words en masse with a paper book, no telling what it'd do with an e-book. I prefer the engrossed imagination of a paper book but I suppose a sufficiently vivid imagination would work just as well with an e-reader. As far as podcasts go, people did really well in the old days of radio, so I don't see anything really different for a podcast. I used to listen to rebroadcasts of the antique radio programs of the 30s and 40s. I find I've taken to listening to horror stories read online while my hands are occupied with some craftwork. I will probably continue to prefer a paper book to anything else simply because it doesn't depend on batteries or corporate manipulations (beyond buying the thing).
- Surtac
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Re: Has your reading changed in the age of reading online?
FYI, a related but not identical set of perspectives might be found in the documentary “The Social Dilemma” available on Netflix. It addresses the intentional and insidious hijacking of attention by Big Tech, interviewing many of the software developers who created the platforms. I believe the documentary was actually made by former developers for Facebook and other companies.
Many of these developers do not allow their own children to use those platforms, as they regard them as harmful and as attempting to manipulate our attention. The devices employed in the documentary are in places oversimplified and metaphorical, but it’s another side to this whole topic. I intended my comments to be about reading, but it’s also true that this can’t fully be separated from the larger issues of what’s happening to humanity in it’s sudden shift to using platforms that are designed to get us to click to promote the goals of those platforms/companies.
Yeah. By coincidence, I watched a doco last night on SBS TV here in a similar vein, In a series called Land of the Giants: Titans of Tech it was a history of Google from its inception right up to today, warts and all. Next weeks ep is about Amazon supposedly, so that should be fun.
It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.
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