7 ms·
The death of reading is threatening the soul
- cft 9y agoSole is a fish. You meant soul in the title
- ggm 9y agoI had visions of the flatfish. I only clicked to find out how reading affects flatfish populations. I am very disappointed this is not about fish. Fish need souls too.
- openclosed 9y agoIs the utter lack of originality in this article further cause of this so-called "death of reading"? The whole thing reads like a dressed-up humble-brag of how many books the writer has (5,000).
- jrimbault 9y agoIs 5000 books very many ? I can't tell how many books I've read since I was 6 and read Lotr, it might be in the thousands I guess ? But what is "many books" ? Some books are 30 pages long and life time deep.
- mrkrabo 9y ago>The Internet and social media have trained my brain to read a paragraph or two, and then start looking around. I can certainly relate. What's the solution?
- digi_owl 9y agoI fine myself wondering if the problem is not so much the source, but the presentation. I played around with a Firefox extension that would paginate(?) an article for me, and found I could then much better tolerate reading long ones where I before would jump ahead for "the meat". But I also find that way too many "technical" articles these days try to turn what is being written about into a "social" piece. This by adding a whole bunch of back story on the people involved, and many even back story on their parents and grandparents...
- loblollyboy 9y agoMove to Alaska and get eaten by a bear
- prostoalex 9y agoThe Shallows http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=16 http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=16 is a pretty good read on the subject - there are neurological effects related to over-development of frontal core (responsible for quick decision-making, but also anxiety and depression) at the expense of hippocampus (responsible for concentration). In a nutshell, the solutions involve mindfulness, making deliberate choices in regards to checking e-mails, Instagram, etc., meditation or just concentration practice, exercising the hippocampus by reading longer books.
- chadcmulligan 9y agoI find my attention span
- allemagne 9y agoIf you're asking for yourself, then you could just frequently force yourself to read for longer periods of time. I found that this retrained my distraction-prone brain pretty quickly. As for people in general who largely would never force themselves to do anything on their own I doubt there's a quick solution that isn't based on shame and social pressure.
- ktRolster 9y agoTake the bus to the library and sit there. Leave your phone at home.
- atemerev 9y agoLook around, think, and read the next paragraph or two. Not a big deal, if you still finish the damn book.
- Fifer82 9y agoI listen to Audiobooks on a daily basis, in the shower, if I am doing a task alone (fixing stuff, cleaning etc), and always half an hour or so before bed. Everyone is different but if you enjoy reading, yet feel you don't have time, or want to strain your eyes after a day of screen staring, I would recommend trying it.
- icebraining 9y agoI like audiobooks, but I'm constantly giving up on them due to the narrators, alas. I can't focus if they're too monotonic, but the interpretations are often underwhelming. I've just started listening to Player Piano (read by Christian Rummel), and while the narration isn't terrible, it's still not good enough not to be distracting in certain scenes.
- calebm 9y agoSeconded. I love audiobooks! It feels like a serious life hack - being able to read books while driving or doing yard work is like doubling my time during those overlaps.
- illegal_in_ca 9y agoThe death of reading is threatening the soul The death of thinking is threatening the soul. • Bill Gates reads 50 books a year. • Mark Zuckerberg reads at least one book every two weeks. • Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day. • Mark Cuban reads for more than three hours every day. • Arthur Blank, a co-founder of Home Depot, reads two hours a day. Yup. He didn't get those factoids from reading books. Mayhaps he received these gems of wisdom from: When I read an online article from the Atlantic or the New Yorker, after a few paragraphs I glance over at the slide bar to judge the article’s length. My mind strays, and I find myself clicking on the sidebars and the underlined links. Soon I’m over at CNN.com reading Donald Trump’s latest tweets and details of the latest terrorist attack, or perhaps checking tomorrow’s weather. I have 20,000 books to the author's 5,000. I'm not kidding. SQL database provided on demand. # books don't matter so much, it's what you do with them. Reading is a proxy for thinking. Reading is only useful for those eureka moments (now called "a-ha moments" -- I guess it's shorter?) and for information gain. A walk in the woods, a pithy tweet, an encouter (a dialog -- a communiation -- a discussion -- an interaction -- an intercourse) with another human (fucking) being can also provide that eureka moment. Stop reading, start learning. The best education is observation and participation. I'm all for books, but if they ain't teaching us about how to solve our own problems, then fuck them books. Get the knowledge, get the power. But be conscious, be aware, pay attention, did you miss it? You missed it. That's okay, I did when I wrote it, but if you hash the previous paragraph (algorithm you'll have to figure out), you'll get 2 bitcoins. I hear they might still be worth something. I read that in a book.
- cconcepts 9y agoUpvote for holding my attention for 5+ paragraphs
- cobbzilla 9y agonice dead prez reference
- illegal_in_ca 9y agoMy HN reading bot gives an 84% chance that your response was not written by a bot. * Dictated, not read.
- sohkamyung 9y agoI usually save on-line articles to Pocket and read them in Reading mode (a Reading mode also available in browsers). That cuts out a lot of the distracting ads and links.
- z3t4 9y agoIf you have kids, make sure you read with them. Reading comprehending is going down, and we need to stop it, or there will be a whole generation where TLDR > 256 chars.
- illegal_in_ca 9y agoVery clever. Your response is only 168 characters. If you were trying to fit it in a tweet, however, you'd have to make it only this long :)
- DrScump 9y agoWP missed the irony that they paywall their own site, which inhibits reading of their content, anyway.
- atemerev 9y agoWell, I have now no physical books at home (used to have a nice library, but moving through 6 countries and 30+ living places in the last 10 years pretty much excludes the possibility). But my Goodreads account is still alive and kicking, and my Kindle account is full of crispy new releases which I do read. Books are the world.
- zmix 9y agoHow can/could Elon Musk read two books a day?
- zer0tonin 9y agoTurning the pages of two books a day isn't hard.
- arkh 9y agoLot of technical books are short. 150ish pages. And the more you read the faster you get: you don't decipher every word. You notice a standard structure and get the meaning. That's why reading things written by a foreigner can be slower. And honestly after some time you learn to not read useless paragraphs: read the first, read the last, if it is mainly the same thing you can forget about what's in-between. The worst offender is LotR: song? Pass; character description? Pass 5 pages.
- a_imho 9y agoReading 2 average length books a day is certainly feasible and doing that for years paints the picture of a exceptionally committed reader. While I don't know much about Elon Musk's reading habits, outlandish sounding unfalsifiable claims are sometimes just that.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoTL;DR is the generation I skim pretty often too. There are several reasons. One, a little of what the author was contending; it is harder to hold attention. But there is more to it. Most media is not worth my full attention. I used to love fiction. But most plots are old, and few scenarios are new to me anymore. News articles tend to be 1 paragraph of new information, then blah blah blah a recapitulation of everything I already knew. When I read science as part of my job, I read it in two ways. One I scan vast numbers of abstracts. This gives me a sense of the lay of the land. Then I do a deep dive of reviews. Then I read critical papers, with a pen, every sentence carefully, building ideas, bridging concepts, and also, evaluating the method. Can you imagine doing that with a report from cnn? Why?
- chiefalchemist 9y agoI agree. When I stand outside myself, I find that 95% of what my senses consume is noise and/or unimportant. Some of that is unavailable. What matters is your ability to stay on the front foot of being mindful, and reduce noise as much as possible. It's not easy.
- gnicholas 9y agoKind of ironic that this article about online distractions has auto-playing video advertisements. Not just one, either. Even after you pause the first one, if you keep scrolling you hit another instance of the same video ad.
- tamersalama 9y agoSome relevant HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10686212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10686212
- martinmusio7 9y agoLuckily, there is a reading mode in most browsers...
- rwnspace 9y agoAs far as I'm aware, average book sales per capita have never been higher. The headline of this article is a wonderful example of how news outlets are scare-mongering for clicks. People are reading more, actually, and even those not buying books are reading thousands more words per day on their smartphones than they would ever have before. Sure, it's not high literature, but that's a majority of human communication. Newspaper sales have declined, but news readership among young people has massively expanded. I'm also quite dubious of the attention-span theory. It doesn't seem to have much science behind it, only cultural momentum. The most interesting study I read recently was how the proximity of smartphones can diminish cognitive abilities. But that, to me, is a question of notifications and social functions. [Edit: I just saw The Shallows below, I'll look into it] We are more interconnected than ever. We can instantly find stimulating discussion on an incredible depth of topics. We read more than ever. What we are experiencing, in my reading, is a measurement/phenomena bias. Now we can find out what the [Jones' next door] think of what's on the news, which disappoints us, rather than allowing ourselves to consider it private and so never give it a second thought. It's not necessarily that the world, or humans, have changed in some ground-breaking, global-depression-explaining manner - simply that the doors to our opinions and habits are more open than before. Perhaps this does indeed have some effect, in a more permanent sense. But I regard this more as a function of the tendency for people to out-source beliefs. It only takes an hour or two to find the worst of all humanity, and the best. The drafty corridors between people these days carry beliefs across the degrees of separation faster than ever before. My pet theory is it's the beliefs about ones capabilities or 'type-destinies' which hurt the emotive liberals for supporting liberal democracies. It's the cultural-state beliefs that hurt the 'realpolitik' conservatives in gripping the real politics. On both accounts, I do think this can be resisted, but it takes time and psychological space that we have replaced for 'productive' work in mostly zero-sum economic activities. When it comes to fashionable (and effective) practices like CBT and meditation, I like to ask whether they are assistive for the human condition generally, or just our present condition. Marrying an internalised locus of control with an ebb-and-flow outlook on life could be the healing function. Or perhaps we simply need to arrest our sense of personal identity, and alight the cultural train every so often.
- mto 9y agotl;dr