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In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

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Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#191

Post by asdff »

bostonwalker wrote: post #96

Just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death on the recommendation of some commenters here. Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of ent…

I think there is an assumption being made of the pre tv “informed person” that either never really existed as such, or merely modernized into someone who might consume their internet content in the form of Atlantic articles over tick toks and pod casts. Most people have always been poorly informed and driven to emotional content over the plain facts. A tale as old as the first chieftain we chose to emotionally believe as sacred and elevate above fact and ourselves in the premodern times.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#192

Post by nataliste »

vacuity wrote: post #152
Yawrehto wrote: post #143

I recently read Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf, which makes many similar arguments, and found myself agreeing with this. I've been finding it harder and harder to lose myself in a book, to finish books, to read as I used to read. It's as if the lens through which I view reading and books has shifted - from a way to be thrust into another world, to something to be browsed in short, easy-to-read snippets, like soci…

I envision that meme of having large bookshelves filled with books, something I could show off to friends as a proof that there is still plenty to be found in books, that I've found valuable in books. That on some days I might take the time to sit down, brew some tea or something, and read a book.

>The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#193

Post by RiverCrochet »

exceptione wrote: post #136
bostonwalker wrote: post #96

Just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death on the recommendation of some commenters here. Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of ent…

The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it? Simple but effective solution: 1. You bring news or debate? You will have to comply with a journalistic code. 2. You want to optimize revenue? You think about infotainment, click bait etc? You better not, because you will have to comply with the journalistic cod…

The following item counters and possibly invalidates the above assertion "simple":

- News reporting is straightforward insofar as requiring a code. Opinion about news is where it gets messy - if someone has a TV or radio show where they render their opinions or thoughts about news events, that's first amendment territory.

The following item counters and possibly invalidates the above assertion "effective":

- Journalism probably must be scalably funded to scalably exist. We see currently that people are not willing to do that and that opinion heads pervade the "news and information" space. So requiring compliance to a code in order to profit off of journalism doesn't work for the same reason minimum wage doesn't really work - people can just choose not to interact with code-compliant journalism much like companies can just not hire people.

The following item counters and possibly invalidates both the above assertions "simple" and "effective" at once.

- You cannot separate any board of X from political interests, which are much more important if commercial interests are explicilty separated from X.

> Or democracy will perish eventually.

None of the above counters or invalidates this statement.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#194

Post by asdff »

wholinator2 wrote: post #150
MichaelZuo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any other viable method for organizing TV? I doubt even the median HN reader can hold a dozen complex ideas in their head at the same time, certainly not for longer than 45 seconds without starting to confuse them. Let alone the median general public.

Probably not, as long as we continue the requirement that all information conveyed to the public must be done in a way that is maximally profitable to the producer. As long as information must be profitable, it will inevitably cease to be information and turn into entertainment soon enough. When was the last time you saw a TV Station that wasn't majority ads?

At the same time its not like the harder information isn’t available. One can find factual news and pieces of information. This is what the policy wonks who craft policy that the pr wonks spin into soundbites have to be able to find and read to understand the world after all.

Its simply not fun nor satisfying for most people. News isn’t to be informed for most people. It is for entertainment like any other fodder content shoehorned into some free minutes of your day. And that’s ok because as long as some technical people need to actually get things done, there is good information and data out there for you to actually learn about the world. It just will be in some dry .gov website or some other source perhaps instead of distilled down to a 2 min article written to a 6th grade reading level with a catchy headline on cnn.com, but thats OK. You will learn to appreciate the dryness and technical language.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#195

Post by mlsu »

The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration.

When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.

But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.

By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#196

Post by alexashka »

mandmandam wrote: post #188
alexashka wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe what's most important to them isn't what's most important to you. Have you contemplated such possibility?

Yes, the ultra wealthy have different priorities to what I would call important. The yachts, deregulation, tacit (or not) support for torture, illegal wars, pollution, private jets, ostentatious displays of conspicuous and pointless wealth, etc, leave that in no doubt. Were you trying to say that maybe all that destruction in the pursuit of insatiable greed could be 'good' somehow? Like Zorg's little speech [0] about…

> It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.

You said they are dodging 'genuine understanding'.

I am saying you aren't the final word on what 'genuine understanding of everything most important' is.

In other words - you are using lots of words to say 'I want others to do more of the stuff I want them to do and less of the stuff they are doing because the stuff I want them to do is obviously good and the stuff they are doing is obviously less good'.

Thing is, almost everyone thinks this. Given that almost everyone already thinks this way and the world isn't what you want it to be, maybe something about such a worldview is off. Or maybe we just need more of people like you in positions of power and you'll fix it :) Where have I heard that one before?

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#197

Post by asdff »

hmmm-i-wonder wrote: post #174

This seems to conflate short-form media as "digital" and long-form media (books) as paper. This is patently untrue. I can experience the disconnection same while 'digital' reading on my e-reader in a cozy chair in the middle of nowhere, with much less RSI and eye strain. Magazines, newspapers, short stories and other short-form written paper works pre-digital age are as guilty (or not guilty) of changing the consumpt…

The biggest eye roll for me is the underlying assumption that these behaviors are new with the internet, new with even ticktock. We have a blindness towards how we used to receive our propaganda. No one probably noticed it was the prince paying off the town cryer to speak their praise. Or that it was the chief telling the shaman what to utter in prophecy to control their position. It has always been useful to control the mindshare of a people and emotional half or less than truths can always be dressed up in ways that innately satisfy us like music notes completing a chord progression. Rationality, fact, and logic often has no such advocate crafting the message towards maximal monkey brain compatibility. It just exists.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#198

Post by paulyy_y »

mlsu wrote: post #195

The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration. When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiologi…

[flagged]

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#199

Post by asdff »

mandmandam wrote: post #12
bux93 wrote: post #4

It's not what you know, but who you know. Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots, while the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group. The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group. Whether the memes you consume are in print is entirely incidental.

> the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them: * Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons. * Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures. * Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy…

Part of it is a sort of pascals wager being done, where it becomes rational and logical to play this game as it is for yourself however unsavory, because the incentives for playing it as such are high enough where people will always do it. Altruism towards the collective species fundamentally takes a backseat for individual and kin survival. There are plenty of species where the mother will even eat any offspring who don’t flee them after birth soon enough because the incentives for the mother even out way that small affordance of altruism to kin. Biology is about entropy not emotions at the end of the day.

Re: In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

#200

Post by mlsu »

paulyy_y wrote: post #198
mlsu wrote: post #195

The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration. When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiologi…

[flagged]

I'm interested in what people think about this. Maybe offer some constructive criticism instead of restating what I said and adding lol at the end?
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