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I'll latch on the point being made about the capacity of long reading being eroded by tech. The author dismisses it as old-timey, but I think this is largely tr

I'll latch on the point being made about the capacity of long reading being eroded by tech. The author dismisses it as old-timey, but I think this is largely true[1] >"The findings on reading comport with some other recent data on American reading trends. Numbers from the National Endowment for the Arts show that the share of adults reading at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the prior year fell from 57 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 2015. Survey data from the Pew Research Center and Gallup have shown, meanwhile, that the share of adults not reading any book in a given year nearly tripled between 1978 and 2014." I think even behaviour like calling a 10 minute video "too long", is now common. It seems absurd to me to just describe this neutrally as the author does and call it an 'adaption' comparing it to us behaving differently than 11th century monks. Reading differently might be fine, but when anything longer than five minutes of sustained concentration is too much you're getting to a point where you physically can't actually engage with anything in long form any more. [1]https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8XPnysn2QvwJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/29/leisure-reading-in-the-u-s-is-at-an-all-time-low/+&cd=12&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8XPnys...

mr_toad 5y ago
In 1982 on a Sunday afternoon, after the shops were all closed, and you’d already read yesterday’s paper, and last months Practical Computing your options for passive entertainment were limited to TV, radio and books. I don’t think we had more ‘capacity’ for long reading, unless by capacity you mean ‘time on our hands’.
- ajuc 5y ago
  I tried to read every single book in my village's library in early nineties. Only skipped later parts of series that I've already tried. We had 4 TV programs, no internet yet, no kids my age in the neighborhood, what was I supposed to do.
PoignardAzur 5y ago
On the other hand, the longest works of written fictions in the world are fanfictions published on the internet. These days I don't read many books anymore, but I still spend 3 hours or more a week reading the latest chapter of Wildbow's Pale, or ErraticErrata's Practice Guide to Evil. The fact that these works have an audience suggests that there's still, in fact, a demand for massive amounts of written prose. Also, the fact that "binging" is a thing suggests that the "attention span" explanation doesn't hold weight either.
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  I strongly disagree and here’s why: your response doesn’t consider the means, which are much more important than some people still do read long-form works, and they do it on new-ish mediums like fanfic. Yes, those traders still do exist. Same is true of the 40% of Americans that still read a book a year. But that number is falling quickly, and both my personal experience (older Gen Z) and scientific literature regarding the collapse of attention spans seems very real to me.

mr_toad 5y ago

In 1982 on a Sunday afternoon, after the shops were all closed, and you’d already read yesterday’s paper, and last months Practical Computing your options for passive entertainment were limited to TV, radio and books. I don’t think we had more ‘capacity’ for long reading, unless by capacity you mean ‘time on our hands’.

ajuc 5y ago
I tried to read every single book in my village's library in early nineties. Only skipped later parts of series that I've already tried. We had 4 TV programs, no internet yet, no kids my age in the neighborhood, what was I supposed to do.

PoignardAzur 5y ago

On the other hand, the longest works of written fictions in the world are fanfictions published on the internet. These days I don't read many books anymore, but I still spend 3 hours or more a week reading the latest chapter of Wildbow's Pale, or ErraticErrata's Practice Guide to Evil. The fact that these works have an audience suggests that there's still, in fact, a demand for massive amounts of written prose. Also, the fact that "binging" is a thing suggests that the "attention span" explanation doesn't hold weight either.

DiggyJohnson 5y ago
I strongly disagree and here’s why: your response doesn’t consider the means, which are much more important than some people still do read long-form works, and they do it on new-ish mediums like fanfic. Yes, those traders still do exist. Same is true of the 40% of Americans that still read a book a year. But that number is falling quickly, and both my personal experience (older Gen Z) and scientific literature regarding the collapse of attention spans seems very real to me.