Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

Okay I do like HN—I'm here for a reason after all—but it is flawed like any other curation. For one, I find that it veers extremely literal and nerdy. For some topics such as programming and math, this is wonderful, as programming and math are both topics where literalism and nerdiness are required.

But in some cases this blend is not great. I wouldn't put HN as a great place to get your knowledge of more social, cultural content. There are good articles on occasion and of course great users/comments, but there are times when I am confronted with the fact that there is a remarkable homogeneity which is reflected in the discourse on race, gender, politics, etc. This is a site populated by primarily tech workers and we have to face facts that tech workers are predominantly white and Asian and male, indeed predominantly cis-hetereosexual male. I don't mean any of this in an accusatory fashion; this is simply the reality of tech. But it does mean that the discourse is not capturing the entire spectrum of experiences and the few voices who do not fit these paradigms can, on occasion, be overwhelmed by the majority.

Not to mention, as a tech worker forum, I'd hazard that the average commenter is far more well versed in tech than in say, US politics or third wave feminism. Much as we'd find the discourse on technology in a politics forum rather naive and uninformed, I'd have to imagine that a politics expert would find the political discussions on HN similarly so.

TL;DR: Use HN as part of a balanced information diet. Read books and try to get out of the tech worker bubble.

> tech workers and we have to face facts that tech workers are predominantly white and Asian and male

In the US at least many tech companies have way more Indians that white. It's funny to me how Indians in the US are usually not in the white/asian conversation, and even often put in the "people of color" group. Just shows most people think race is about skin color.

The present state of reading and the internet is another example of the familiar tension that a healthy diet and processed foods demonstrate. Those that still read and write are like those that jogged, abstained from smoking, and ate balanced meals in the seventies. There is an intrinsic good to reading, one that readers have an intuition for, and that good merely needs to be discovered again by the culture and made explicit. No few of us are lost to the negative effects of internet, just like no few people simply will not overcome their reliance on sweets. We do go on, but leave the kind of material in our wake that the likes of the Johns Stewart and Oliver can use to make their living.

I'm not in the whole anti-Internet camp, indeed my viewpoint is far closer to Randall Munroe's[1]. But it is a little sad how few of my peers read books. I just finished three volumes of the Robert Caro series on Lyndon Johnson along with The Power Broker. Now, granted, these are big tomes. They also cover a topic that most people would not find interesting. Yet I still find it very depressing how almost all of my peers balk at the idea of reading them. Part of the reason they balk is, yes, the length and topic, but also because reading has become such a chore, such an unusual event, that the idea of reading a 800 page book is akin to running a marathon. If you struggle to read a 200 page book, an 800 page book appears impossible.

And yet, inside these books, there is absolutely multitudes. There's more insight and political knowledge and facts than thousands of blog posts and news articles, aided by thorough, comprehensive decades-long research. There's also pure pleasure. The writing quality is so far and above the pedestrian prose that you see on the internet. It's like eating your first bite of top notch sushi after years of cold supermarket stuff. I can't tell you how emotional I got reading about the Civil Rights movement, about the trial of Emmett Till, about Coke Stevenson[2], about the Rural Electrification movement. There's no blog or article that compares.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1414/

[2]: Even if that portrayal is considered to be suspect. Although if you ask me, I think the rebuttal of "but Stevenson was a virulent racist" ignores the fact that everybody, LBJ included, was a virulent racist at the time and to tar Stevenson with that brush is to apply modern sensibilities to a different era.

I view it as Indian ⊆ Asian ⊆ people of color. I agree that Indians are often neglected in the Asian discourse, although I think there's been more work to include non-East Asians in the conversation lately.