11–20 of 47 posts
I started reading again when it became a lot more convenient, thanks to the kindle.
I think I finished reading all the Wheel of Time books because of the convenience of the kindle (it gets boring around book eight, before a well deserved end).
Paper books are heavy and expensive.
It doesn't work for all books, as it is not a good PDF reader, but for anything that's more text than graphics or layout, it's a huge improvement.
Get a Kindle. I started reading again when it became a lot more convenient, thanks to the kindle. I think I finished reading all the Wheel of Time books because of the convenience of the kindle (it gets boring around book eight, before a well deserved end). Paper books are heavy and expensive. It doesn't work for all books, as it is not a good PDF reader, but for anything that's more text than graphics or layout, it'…
If you get the font size right, it's not bad. The advantage of the phone is that it's always in my pocket, so if I've got a couple of minutes of waiting time, I can just pull out my phone from my pocket.
That nonsense aside, I was doing what you're doing until I learned an important lesson. I found that I will not gain anything of value by reading quickly and inattentively. If I am spending my time skimming articles, forum posts, stack overflow, without doing something like taking notes, I'm just teaching my brain that most information is useless to me. The sooner I learned that lesson, the sooner I was back to reading books.
I'm worried about our attention spans as humans. Mine has certainly gone down. When I was a kid and the internet was less popular and showy, I used to read long-form articles and message boards and do actual reading . Now there's so much content out there it seems to be genuinely hard to not just look for the next "quick fix" in the form of a funny or insightful comment. Reading even a 20 minute article doesn't seem…
I don't see what's wrong with the trend of encouraging people not to use 5000 words when 50 would do. Not that these kinds of forums correct it: people will still link long arguments that they are unable or unwilling to summarize in their own words.
I made a conscious decision a few months ago to decrease the number of online articles I read. I realized that I wasn't finishing most of them (and most people don't) and if I wasn't learning any relevant to me then they were basically trivia. I've concentrated more on slimming down my book shelves by getting to all of those books that I always wanted to. I'm finding them more illuminating and enjoyable than any shor…
For finding time to read, I go through lulls when I try to read before I go to bed since I almost never can finish a chapter before falling asleep. Instead, I started carving out time in the afternoons on weekends when I often have a couple open hours.
I find that the kind of people who are "squeezed for time" are always "squeezed for time". You make time for the things you need to make time for, just like everyone else. That nonsense aside, I was doing what you're doing until I learned an important lesson. I found that I will not gain anything of value by reading quickly and inattentively. If I am spending my time skimming articles, forum posts, stack overflow, wi…
Like OP, I was an avid reader during my school years and noticed that I wasn't doing it as much the past couple of years. I realized most of the time that I could spend reading books I was spending reading articles from my RSS feeds, but many times just to get a sense of completion (like an Inbox Zero for my RSS feeds), which meant I didn't really let them sink in or wasn't doing any thinking of my own about them.
Realizing that it provided very little value, if any, I decided that I had to stop that and go back to reading only when I have the time to do so at my own pace, and only things that I really wanted to read, not that I felt I had to read for bogus reasons.
Going back to OP's question, I do think that information overload is partly to blame here. At least for me, it's taking a conscious effort to put this in practice and ignore a lot of the information that comes my way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see what's wrong with the trend of encouraging people not to use 5000 words when 50 would do. Not that these kinds of forums correct it: people will still link long arguments that they are unable or unwilling to summarize in their own words.
The problem is that it takes a lot less time to come up with 50 words. 50 words don't require the kind of organization that 5,000 words require in order to stay coherent. It takes an afternoon to write an article. It can take years to write a book. Through bare necessity, longer spans of text require more attention and quality.
Writing a shorter post, especially one that summarizes what you'll get out of an article, typically takes more mental work since you have to pack more insight into fewer words.
Writing an investigative article, of course, takes more time and thought but it's not because you're putting more words out; if anything, padding it with flowery novel-style antidotes (that took little research) is how they make them artificially long, and it annoys me greatly.
If what you have to say legitimately requires 5000 words, go for it! Otherwise, your long post is not improving the exchange of ideas.