4 ms·
Right. Did people clutch pearls over "paper time" when they would wake up and read a newspaper, stare at papers all day at work/school, a magazine during their
by raldi 6y ago
Right. Did people clutch pearls over "paper time" when they would wake up and read a newspaper, stare at papers all day at work/school, a magazine during their lunch break, and read a book before falling asleep?
- jfim 6y agoThe difference between newspapers and internet news is that the newspaper for a given day is finite. Once one has read whatever articles they were interested in for that day, that's it. No refreshing multiple times per day, no reading long comment threads, no frustration about said comment threads ("how can people be so wrong on the internet, must reply"), no live updates on stories, and more time to think instead of mindlessly consuming more information that's of lower quality.
- raldi 6y agoClearly you've never been a New Yorker subscriber.
- jfim 6y agoI'm not sure I follow you here, can you elaborate on what you mean? The New Yorker has long form articles that take longer to read than the typical daily newspaper article, sure, but I'm not sure how that makes it non finite or more engaging than daily newspapers.
- raldi 6y agoEvery subscriber has an endless stack like this in one or more rooms of their home or apartment: https://www.google.com/search?q=stack+of+unread+new+yorkers&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=stack+of+unread+new+yorkers&... They don't throw them out because they really intend to finish them one day.
- yarcob 6y agoMost daily newspapers have plenty stuff to read for hours, and often come with extras with even more stuff to read.
- zests 6y agoSome people, I’d venture a guess at 1/100 people, can and do use printed text compulsively. Other people, I’d venture a guess at closer to at least 9/10 people, can and do use screens compulsively. This topic comes up a lot and I am always astounded at how people so candidly compare screens to books. Many people I meet in my day to day life do not have the concentration required to read a novel. Maybe its time to put my glowing rectangle down.
- raldi 6y agoIt wasn't a novel for everyone. For others, it was Sports Illustrated or a comic book or the crossword or Reader's Digest. Or, if they weren't reading, they'd flip on the TV and watch whatever was on for four hours, then brush their teeth, then Johnny Carson in bed. It's not like the average American was spending their evening sculpting before the internet.
- aeternum 6y agoIsn't this just because screens now do more? Even before screens, some people talked on the phone compulsively, some played chess compulsively, some sat in their basement building things out of legos compulsively. Now it's possible to do all those things via a single screen. When looked at in this way, a screen is basically just a tool that takes on the form of many different physical objects rather than something nefarious.
- onecommentman 6y agoWhy, in the 1700s, they did. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/media’s-first-moral-panic https://www.historytoday.com/archive/media’s-first-moral-pan... https://didyouknowfacts.com/facts/as-novels-became-more-prominent-during-the-1700s/ https://didyouknowfacts.com/facts/as-novels-became-more-prom... https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Novel-Reading-Panic-in-18-th-Century-in-England-Vogrin/ea07e5f58509e8b2bf9db1f9777b9ef614294825#paper-header https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Novel-Reading-Pani... Some went so far as to ban reading for certain groups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_during_the_slave_period_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_during_the_slave_per...