Reading Ourselves to Death
thenewatlantis.com
Reading Ourselves to Death
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Re: Reading Ourselves to Death
#2"If there is no Torah study, there is no worldly involvement; if there is no worldly involvement, there is no Torah study. ... If there is no flour, there is no Torah; if there is no Torah, there is no flour."
It’s good to walk in the world.
Re: Reading Ourselves to Death
#3I think what you read is the key here. Mindless reading of text messages, news headlines and social media posts is very different cognitively than reading actual literature, something like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
Re: Reading Ourselves to Death
#4I feel like the shift in social media from Facebook to instagram and TikTok actually makes us less surrounded by text than we were last decade.
Re: Reading Ourselves to Death
#5I think what you read is the key here. Mindless reading of text messages, news headlines and social media posts is very different cognitively than reading actual literature, something like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
Interested in sharing what makes this particular work valuable, in your eyes? I‘m assuming that you‘ve read many books. So if you single out this one as an example for a particularly good read, I‘m curious to hear why. Thanks!
Re: Reading Ourselves to Death
#6> What would your grasp of the outside world feel like? ... increasingly ... simplified, abstracted, flattened ...
More to the contrary. The more you see selected still images and video clips, the more your perception of the world through this becomes shallow, simplistic, garish. It is the written text which delves into complexity, the multitude of facets and nuances, depth.
Re: Reading Ourselves to Death
#7I think what you read is the key here. Mindless reading of text messages, news headlines and social media posts is very different cognitively than reading actual literature, something like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
I think the author tries to capture the counterpoint: that much of the effect is due to the sheer volume of text. From the article:
"...we would have to account for the quality of reading too, as much of it involves skimming and darting around the page. But the sheer quantity matters...We are so used to our screens bombarding us with text — news, tweets, emails — that we are almost surprised to discover that the walls around us have nothing to say. The sudden absence of words — the evaporation of the sense of control they give us — feels disorienting. "
Re: Reading Ourselves to Death
#8> What would your grasp of the outside world feel like? ... increasingly ... simplified, abstracted, flattened ... More to the contrary. The more you see selected still images and video clips, the more your perception of the world through this becomes shallow, simplistic, garish. It is the written text which delves into complexity, the multitude of facets and nuances, depth.
This is a take on the allegory of the cave[0]:
> In the allegory "The Cave," Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world.
So, basically, the point is that if you only ever see the abstraction, it becomes your reality.
Re: Reading Ourselves to Death
#9I think what you read is the key here. Mindless reading of text messages, news headlines and social media posts is very different cognitively than reading actual literature, something like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
People spend too much time in their heads and not enough in the real world. We used to say people need to stop reading books and start talking to people.
Re: Reading Ourselves to Death
#10I think what you read is the key here. Mindless reading of text messages, news headlines and social media posts is very different cognitively than reading actual literature, something like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
Interested in sharing what makes this particular work valuable, in your eyes? I‘m assuming that you‘ve read many books. So if you single out this one as an example for a particularly good read, I‘m curious to hear why. Thanks!
There's an element of irony here I suspect. Gravity's Rainbow is (IMHO) a _good_ book but it's a pain in the neck to read as a lot of the writing is... complex.
There's a true point being made that a lot of social media content is incredibly badly written and the brain 'teaches itself' to fill in blanks that you don't have to fill in when reading literature, though.
If you go from reading books (any books, really, anything that's been published) to reading reddit you have to go through an adjustment period as so much of what's on the screen looks like gibberish as it's so un-edited.