Why can’t we read anymore?

Reading takes all of your attention, all of it. I can't have a conversation while reading a book, I can't watch a movie while reading a book, you have to be ready to give everything to that book for whatever period of time you want to read it for.

I am watching Chopped, skimming articles like this one, I just stepped up mid-typing that last bit to help my wife with something and finally I'm programming. I was interrupted again after finishing that sentence.

Reading is a luxury.

This man should talk for himself.

I am an avid reader. I am part of readers clubs and meetings. I don't see less people today there than 10 years ago, in fact I see way more(probably something to do with the economic crisis).

The world does not end because we can read online and distract ourselves. A person does not need this for distraction, in fact just a fly making noises around you or thinking on your partner-son-mother while looking at the wall is enough.

The same was said about TV decades ago, and radio before it, even about books when it became cheap centuries ago. The Quijote is a book about someone that reads instead of living and wants to live at the end of his life. At the time cheap books were a novelty because of the printing press, remember that before it it took a year to copy a single book.

I'm honestly a little surprised at some of the comments here. I thought most people on here would agree that many of us do suffer from this. I mean, how many of you actually read through the entire article, WITHOUT checking your email, or flipping to twitter/fb to tell the world about this good article you just found? I had to really force myself to read the entire article first, and not give in to that urge to get a hit of dopamine. But of course, YMMV.

I think the ability to concentrate and focus on a single task is going to become more and more useful, because it is so easy to give in to that temptation to flip away, just for a quick moment. I've been working on practicing mindfulness through meditation, and have thought of reading a book as a form of meditation (nice to see the author allude to that a little).

So your TL;DR: good article, read more books, re-learn how to focus on single tasking.

> 15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos?

Not saying it's better or worse, but I'm willing to say that the understanding you'll get from blogs is going to be be different than from a long-form book.

Books get the benefit of knowing where they left off one chapter, and picking it up on the next. Unless you're reading a long series of posts on the same blog (which, in the limit, approaches reading a book), reading blog posts will lack that continuity, and I find them inferior for building up a basic understanding of a topic. What blogs do really well, IMO, is for teaching you well-isolated techniques, or other such limited-scope ideas.

Your experience with C++ And Golang are in no way, shape or form comparable. If you've been doing C++ for 15 years, Golang is a comparatively small learning curve. You just need to pick up on a few syntactic differences and you'll be at that basic level of competence that books will give you, and you're ready for the single-topic, specialized learning that you'll get from blogs.

Because the layout on medium.com, which purports to be a "long form" site for people who read, is for short-attention-span people. Scroll through the article linked. It's painful.