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What's happening to reading?

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Re: What's happening to reading?

#141

Post by colinwilyb »

jasonthorsness wrote: post #26
anzumitsu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the preface, the study in question dealt with the opening of Chapter 1

I like it “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizz…

When I write, it comes out like this. Pulling your attention to and fro across a scene to construct "brain pictures", letting your imagination fill in the gaps as the fragments become a whole.

The mention of Megalosaurus was jarring. My imagination placed this within a gloomy late-Victorian period and the mention of giant lizard caused mental association to very unrelated content for the rest of paragraph. I think a Wooly Mammoth waddling up the hill would make for a better picture.

On another note: What are horse blinkers?

Re: What's happening to reading?

#142

Post by tines »

YinglingHeavy wrote: post #124
asimpletune wrote: post #95

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril. On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting su…

Reddit is trivia porn

I had this exact thought the other day. Social media is information porn. Endless amounts of empty information that gives you the feeling of acquiring knowledge, with none of the substance.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#144

Post by SamBam »

jcranmer wrote: post #42
datadrivenangel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority of people to be able to read this?

I suspect a majority of the population has no idea what "Michaelmas term" is. And there's some other phrases in there that require some familiarity with things commonplace in the 19th century that aren't so in the 21st century.

They were given a dictionary, and also told they were allowed to look things up on their phone.

I suspect that the unfamiliarity with words like Michaelmas was part of the point.

I.e. What do the students do when reading a book and they come across a word they don't know? Look it up? Deduce it's rough meaning from context? Live with the uncertainty? Get mad and not finish the text?

Re: What's happening to reading?

#145

Post by smeej »

I'm not sure what's happening, but I am sure it isn't new.

I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all.

I don't expect you to believe me. It's a weird claim. But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words. If you give them time to prepare, they'll probably be able to get through it in a few minutes, but nobody's putting that kind of effort into a text-only email, even if it's important for work.

Reading is so difficult as to be a chore for the average person. They don't just see written words and know what they say. They really have to work to get meaning out of written text.

With the proliferation of other means of taking in information, many of which require no effort of any kind beyond hitting play and staying within earshot, why would people choose to read? They didn't want to do it before. And now they don't need to do it either.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#146

Post by xphilter »

nottorp wrote: post #6
xphilter wrote: post #4

I can’t read it (lol) due to paywall, but 100% it’s because we stopped teaching kids how to read. But good luck trying to hold public schools accountable! https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/podcasts/the-daily/readin...

The article is about "AI" not people stopping reading even before "AI". Someone trying to jump on the bandwagon...

Right. But you don’t think the giant education gap right before AI isn’t the primary reason?

Re: What's happening to reading?

#148

Post by lelandfe »

andoando wrote: post #128
jerf wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The study itself [1] contains transcript fragments of students talking through what they think the passage means. In fact I feel I should remind you before you start reading it, even though the study also starts with this, that the subject of this study is not the population at large but specifically English majors in college . Not the most elite colleges, but still, I expect better. In the normative sense of "expect…

I guess I would not have done much better. >Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. >Facilitator: >O.K. >Subject: >There’s just fog everywhere. What deep insight is there to say about this sentence and this sentence alone? Reading the paper it seems li…

Without reading the paper… There seems to be fog everywhere - but it’s the beautiful and natural fog of London intermingling with the stinking haze of pollution. The use of “great” is interesting because it seems like the city was about to be presented as “bad.” But there’s more to it.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#149

Post by everybodyknows »

hluska wrote: post #78
0xffff2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count me among those who have no idea when Michaelmas is, but does it really matter? The next sentence tells you it is sometime around November. The whole passage is laden with overlapping context clues.

It’s a helpful detail that Dickens wrote for his Victorian readers. Michaelmas term refers to both the first academic term of the school year and the start of the legal year in the English courts system. Bleak House is about a court case that has gone on so long that nobody knows what it’s about. The case is about an inheritance and has dragged on for so long that the estate itself has been totally wiped out by legal…

> nothing left but fighting to fight over

Toward the end of the story the fighting does stop when lawyer's fees, which they had been charging to the estate, at last empty it. This is announced publicly in court, and the attorneys respond by flinging their piles of paper into the air, one of a few comic scenes in the novel.

FYA, this modus vivendi is still being practiced -- see the litigation around the estate of O.J. Simpson.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#150

Post by Tronno »

libraryatnight wrote: post #102
KPGv2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. I think a flaw in your argument here is that you're dismissing the possibility that specific expression of an idea is the modality. Consider, for example, summarizing a poem. You aren't just losing some magic. You're losing the entire point .

Most people aren't getting the point anyway. The surface idea was always enough for them. It's a hard-knock life when you realize you're staring into the blank face of a man for whom science fiction is just war in space with cooler guns and aliens. In the US, it's a culture of point missing. From Punisher Skull tattoos on our police to racist Star Trek fans, missing the point is mostly what the people around you are…

Not everyone "misses" the point. People can take what they want and choose to discard the rest. Consider, for example, watching beach volleyball not for the thrill of the sport but to ogle the players. That they're also engaged in serious competition is not lost on anyone - the audience just doesn't care.

Some authoritarians also like vigilante violence and find it in The Punisher. Some racists also like futuristic fiction and find it in Star Trek. The rest of the work don't fly over their heads - it is willfully ignored because it doesn't match their worldview.

Many people are perfectly capable of getting e.g. the moods, visuals, themes, ideas conveyed by poetry, and it simply doesn't match their taste. That doesn't make them morons, and to imply otherwise is snobbery.

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