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Post by Reactionary Rage on May 19, 2020 9:36:06 GMT
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Post by tory on May 19, 2020 10:24:53 GMT
Surface-read a bit, but I liked the quote from Neil Postman that "Only in the printed word can complicated truths be rationally conveyed."
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Post by Reactionary Rage on May 19, 2020 11:12:19 GMT
Surface read
That's part of the problem!
My attention span is not what it was. Also I can't spell for shit now when I used to be pretty (pretty) god. I notice a tendency to skim read and I increasingly struggle to finish books.
I've been thinking about this recently....my relationship with technology, my phone, my internet habits etc
The article goes into deeper things than just that but I am really thinking about my whole relationship with technology and how I consume things.
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Post by Crunchy Col on May 19, 2020 11:24:48 GMT
Maybe this is an obvious point - I actually don't know - but I find sometimes it helps to put the book aside (or to walk away from the article) to digest a particularly difficult point. Stay with it, but discuss it with yourself. Even aloud, walking around. 'so what they're saying is....'. No other distractions. Then go back to the article once you think you've got what they're saying.
This idea that reading is actually a dialogue with the writer is something that was only introduced to me a few years ago. I have a hard time with it.
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Post by Deleted on May 19, 2020 12:16:54 GMT
Maybe this is an obvious point - I actually don't know - but I find sometimes it helps to put the book aside (or to walk away from the article) to digest a particularly difficult point. Stay with it, but discuss it with yourself. Even aloud, walking around. 'so what they're saying is....'.  You nutter! |
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Post by tory on May 19, 2020 12:31:35 GMT
I think the issue with this sort of article is that it inevitably talks of decline. There is a grain of truth to all of it - we do surface-read, we read less in general and screens have destroyed a lot of what would have been concentration. Anecdotally - I'd say that the internet transformed my way of thinking and my attitudes. I was able to read more books because I could search for the right ones. Before the internet my knowledge of what was out there was extremely limited. Being able to browse the Goodreads site for example really helped me build up a strong habit for reading "good" books - I could order them off Amazon 2nd hand and be reading it within days. There are upsides to it, but I would say that it seems that the "general" surface knowledge of lots of people does seem to be poor, but again that's just an observation. This is an interesting article on how working-class people in the late 19th century had a very good knowledge of the Bible and Classics. aeon.co/essays/why-working-class-britons-loved-reading-and-debating-the-classics |
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Post by Crunchy Col on May 19, 2020 12:41:06 GMT
Maybe this is an obvious point - I actually don't know - but I find sometimes it helps to put the book aside (or to walk away from the article) to digest a particularly difficult point. Stay with it, but discuss it with yourself. Even aloud, walking around. 'so what they're saying is....'. You nutter! It helps! It's only through dialogue that ideas become understood. And that dialogue can be internal. |
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Post by Deleted on May 19, 2020 12:45:30 GMT
You nutter! It helps! It's only through dialogue that ideas become understood. And that dialogue can be internal. I was saying that to myself the other day, but the other voices within me were disagreeing! |
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Post by Deleted on May 19, 2020 12:48:00 GMT
Anecdotally - I'd say that the internet transformed my way of thinking and my attitudes. I was able to read more books because I could search for the right ones. Before the internet my knowledge of what was out there was extremely limited. Being able to browse the Goodreads site for example really helped me build up a strong habit for reading "good" books - I could order them off Amazon 2nd hand and be reading it within days. You could have done all that in the "old" days just by going to a few good bookshops. |
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Post by tory on May 19, 2020 13:17:10 GMT
Yes, but could you stand in the bookshop and read an aggregation of views about the books on whether they were worthwhile or not?
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Post by Reactionary Rage on May 19, 2020 14:16:14 GMT
Quite a few things in the article have the ring of truth about them.
I need to reread it and digest it a bit more though but I think I need to remove myself from tech and the internet. I do browser Twitter, for example, much less but how much time do you waste just arsing about scrolling through shit?
It's bollocks and horribly passive. Time is running out and I need to paint my masterpiece!
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Post by Deleted on May 19, 2020 14:35:51 GMT
Yes, but could you stand in the bookshop and read an aggregation of views about the books on whether they were worthwhile or not? Well that's true. It has transformed research and made that kind of academic approach much easier. The other side of the coin though is that I would often discover stuff through browsing and coming across stuff that caught my attention in some way. I made all sorts of discoveries and went down all kinds of interesting paths as a result. It felt a more personal way of consuming the media. These days there are no mysteries, you can get information on everything, but because there's so much of everything you become a lot more dependent on received opinion as a way of filtering it all. |
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Post by ~ / % ? * on May 19, 2020 15:48:58 GMT
Agree with various parts, brain plasticity is a major factor for and against our progression/regression, the immediate intensity of the electronic experience will carry most happily away, whilst others will need to find their own way (hence value of brain plasticity, the amino acid Tyrosine has been tied to concentration, etc.,). The weird side trip into Protestantism was a canard, Judaism and Catholicism were built on reams of written scholarship and scholastic traditions way before Protestant Reformation.
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Post by sloopjohnc on May 19, 2020 16:40:05 GMT
I had a narrative class in college and we were asked to read the Color Purple, which is very slight. The professor started asking us questions about it and discussion was halting and disengaged. She stopped class and said, "Go back and read it again. Carefully."
"Close" reading was really stressed in getting my lit degree across all my classes, which was tough sometimes when you are reading 3-4 novels at a time in a semester.
But it's hard for me to do these days. I don't think John's a nut at all in his explanation. Some people write notes in the margins. He talks to himself. . . like Mark E. Smith strung out on crank, but hey, if it works for him, that's okay.
I read a study a few years ago where young people's brains are changing. They can multi-task much better than older people, but they can't focus as strongly on one subject. I think that holds true of us as well, increasingly.
I get the Sunday NY Times, and while a great read, I find myself skimming long articles, which I really feel I shouldn't if I want to get the whole gist or have a more comprehensive take. Heck, if the writer spent the time writing it, I should make more of an effort too.
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Post by Crunchy Col on May 20, 2020 0:22:56 GMT
That thing that you're mocking me for? I've just had to do it now. I'm kind of interested in the periodic table and I have been ever since I was a kid. They're still finding new elements, as you know - every few years it seems the Russians and the Americans work together and find something. The latest is called tennessine (note: names of elements don't start with capital letters). This is a nice clickable table: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table#OverviewBUT - it's not really finding new elements that's going on - it's 'synthesising', because they aren't found in nature. Yet because they're elements, it's not about creating them either. They already exist. Kind of. What's blowing my mind, and why I had to walk away from the wiki article and talk to myself for a minute, is that they don't know what properties these elements have, even though they can create them, and have created them, in laboratories. I'm not entirely sure why this is! It has something to do with the fact that they decay very quickly, I think. They can predict that because they belong to a certain group in the table (alkali metals or halogens or whatever) they possess the same properties as the others - however, this isn't necessarily true. I want to say more but I'll leave this there. For now. |
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