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What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

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Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#81

Post by [deleted] »

madeuptempacct wrote: post #26
jasode wrote: post #23

First off, I haven't studied Maryanne Wolf's neuroscientific research on "deep reading" and its claimed benefits. But, as a person who has read most of the major thick books like Moby Dick, War & Peace, Les Miserables, Middlemarch, Proust, and reading cover-to-cover the old computer books like the 3-ring binders of C Language[1], my lifetime reading experience could offer counterpoint to why "deep reading" seems to b…

That was a long paragraph, but I agree with the general premise that a lot of books are tripe worse than TV shows and video games, so we shouldn't put them on a pedestal.

[deleted]

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#82

Post by dpark »

dieterrams wrote: post #66
dpark wrote: post #56

> “My grafted, spasmodic, online style, while appropriate for much of my day’s ordinary reading, had been transferred indiscriminately to all of my reading, rending my former immersion in more difficult texts less and less satisfying,” she writes. Wolf soon tried again, forcing herself to start with 20-minute intervals, and managed to recover her “former reading self.” Translation: I stopped reading novels and then f…

> The problem isn’t the fluff we read online. The problem is that when you go long periods without reading novels, it’s harder to pick up a novel and enjoy it. Reading fluff online doesn’t make you stop reading novels, though, any more than watching TV makes you stop reading novels. It’s entirely possible to do both, with the caveat that everyone’s time is limited. But there’s nothing about browsing online that intri…

> Second, you're completely wrong that the media formats we consume don't affect the other media formats we consume.

Provide some evidence for this claim. People have been decrying the short attention span that “new media” creates for as long as there has been anything that could be described as “new media”.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#83

Post by dpark »

longerthoughts wrote: post #77
dpark wrote: post #56

> “My grafted, spasmodic, online style, while appropriate for much of my day’s ordinary reading, had been transferred indiscriminately to all of my reading, rending my former immersion in more difficult texts less and less satisfying,” she writes. Wolf soon tried again, forcing herself to start with 20-minute intervals, and managed to recover her “former reading self.” Translation: I stopped reading novels and then f…

>The problem isn’t the fluff we read online. The problem is that when you go long periods without reading novels, it’s harder to pick up a novel and enjoy it. Can't it be both? If our brains adapt based on the way we consume information, wouldn't it make sense that both abstinence from reading novels and reading through a drastically different medium would potentially degrade performance in reading novels?

Maybe, but many people read tweets and novels, just as many people watch short clips on YouTube but also watch 3-hour films and binge watch entire drama series on Netflix.

I don’t see much evidence that consuming fluff significantly impacts our ability to consume material with depth. With the exception that they are competing for time.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#84

Post by Panino »

Aeolun wrote: post #48

It sounds a bit silly to assume that reading a hundred reddit posts a day would interfere with my reading of a good novel. I haven’t encountered anuthing even close to it, but I guess it might be different for others?

I think I'm a bit opposite in that I find web / short form reading difficult. Most of it is of low or negative value due either to narcissism (no, your tech howto doesn't need 600 words about your breakfast or social life) or to gaming search engines with various techniques. (Do you know how to do keyword stuffing? Many people are interested in keyword stuffing. They ask themselves, how can I stuff keywords, and you've come to the right place folks because everyone tells me I'm the greatest keyword stuffer of all time, everyone says it, and where should they be stuffed? It's a tremendous thing, believe me folks.) This extends to Youtube videos as well. Want to learn how to do good cuttings of some plant? First 8 minutes of the video are about how they scored free movie tickets and then omg last night the bbq was great and blah blah blah. It is garbage, and I've come to assume that any short-form reading or Youtube video has a 98% chance of being a huge waste of time. So before the 15MB of bloat has finished downloading, and before the multiple screen redraws, my eyes are already darting around the page looking for exits.

Side note: a result is that I tend to stick to no-BS sources and since there aren't that many, I invariably lose some diversity of thought. Sigh.

Books are still great though! All my love to the public library.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#85

Post by jumelles »

ThePadawan wrote: post #12
ebullientocelot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Also, even watching videos for 24 hours it seems unlikely that you'd go through 34GB worth. Maybe the size of video files has gone way up since I was a movie downloader, but 12 2 hour movies is probably < 34GB..

As a point of interest, there are audio- and cinephiles who prefer 10bit color depth, 5.1 FLAC audio. I'm not one of them, but I stumble across their files sometimes, and I have seen stuff like Blade Runner (~2h run time) to the tune of 20-30GB (IIRC).

You can even find 4K remuxes weighing in at over 50 GB.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#86

Post by Johnny555 »

majos wrote: post #8
hyko wrote: post #4

the average person “consumes about 34 gigabytes across varied devices each day” — some 100,000 words’ worth of information - seems like an odd and misleading statistic.

Yeah, that's silly. 34 gb is 34 billion bytes, so if each byte is a character and the average word about 5 characters, 34 gb should be more like 6.8 billion words. Also, most of that 34 gb is probably video anyway, in which case we may as well say the ancients consumed many gb of information per day in the form of looking at the world around them.

That number could be made arbitrarily high... an hour of 720p TV is 1280 * 720 * 3 * 60 * 3600 is 238GB

Granted my eye averages/summarized the pixels and my brain ignored a lot of the content (i.e. I don't notice the clock ticking in the corner while the hero is fighting the bad guy), yet still an argument could be made that that's the amount of data I'm exposed to while watching an hour HD movie through my HD display.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#87

Post by longerthoughts »

dpark wrote: post #83
longerthoughts wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem isn’t the fluff we read online. The problem is that when you go long periods without reading novels, it’s harder to pick up a novel and enjoy it. Can't it be both? If our brains adapt based on the way we consume information, wouldn't it make sense that both abstinence from reading novels and reading through a drastically different medium would potentially degrade performance in reading novels?

Maybe, but many people read tweets and novels, just as many people watch short clips on YouTube but also watch 3-hour films and binge watch entire drama series on Netflix. I don’t see much evidence that consuming fluff significantly impacts our ability to consume material with depth. With the exception that they are competing for time.

It's less about depth vs fluff than sustained focus and engagement vs scattered, rapid micro-doses of information. Yes, many people read both tweets and novels, but they have different demands and the brain adapts. Somebody who exclusively reads tweets could be less adapted to effectively engaging with a novel than somebody who reads both novels and tweets, and both people would be less effective than somebody who exclusively reads novels. That hierarchy would in turn be inverted with respect to effectiveness at consuming rapid, scattered chunks of information.

I'm not a neuroscientist, I just don't think it makes sense to say "well that can't be true because not reading novels for a while also makes you worse at reading novels". Identifying an additional cause for a given symptom doesn't disprove the validity of all other causes.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#88

Post by tinalumfoil »

daveslash wrote: post #73

This reminds me of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 . Many people believe the story to be about censorship, but Bradbury himself (in his later years) publicly claimed it was about peoples' increasingly short attention spans. In Fahrenheit 451 , people were afraid of books because the stories, thoughts, and concepts were more than mere sound-bytes and were thus unintelligible to the masses with shortened attention spans.…

I tried reading 451 once, since it seemed up my alley. I got about a chapter in, put it down and never picked it up again. It wasn't that I didn't like the book (I don't remember if I did), but I just happened to get really busy right after that and just forgot that I ever started reading.

Maybe if I had read it I would understand the importance of having an attention long enough to finish the book. Thing is if I had that attention span the lesson would be lost on me since I'm already reading the book.

In other words, a book teaching the importance of reading books is teaching a pointless lesson.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#89

Post by walshemj »

WalterSear wrote: post #78
kbenson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually limit my exposure to novels because I find it extremely hard to stop reading once I start. I'll stay up way too late, and sneak reading in throughout the day, basically doing whatever I have to to continue and finish the story. I enjoy this process, as it keeps me immersed, but it's not healthy.

Someone should create a book that helps us manage this harmful technology! We should, at least, keep novels out of the reach of children.

Indeed "Is It a Book That You Would Even Wish Your Wife or Your Servants to Read?"

This is a Quote from the LadyChatterley’sLover Trial in the 60's

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#90

Post by prostoalex »

dpark wrote: post #56

> “My grafted, spasmodic, online style, while appropriate for much of my day’s ordinary reading, had been transferred indiscriminately to all of my reading, rending my former immersion in more difficult texts less and less satisfying,” she writes. Wolf soon tried again, forcing herself to start with 20-minute intervals, and managed to recover her “former reading self.” Translation: I stopped reading novels and then f…

> The problem isn’t the fluff we read online.

There are some alternative theories linking deep immersive reading and short sporadic reading to different parts of the brain. Spending significant time online does seem to lead to shorter attention spans.

https://www.wired.com/2010/05/ff-nicholas-carr/

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