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In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

• JimmyWilliams1 2y ago
  [dead]
• alabhyajindal 2y ago
  Boring article. How does it go from blaming computers in general and then just picking on Twitter and Reddit - as if these two websites are representative of everything a computer is used for.
• yawpitch 2y ago
  The irony of praising print and rhetoricizing reading on a website that is nearly unreadable due to intrusive visual ads is kind of a sign that collapse is an era behind us.
  • dwayne_dibley 2y ago
    I thought you were exaggerating until I clicked the link.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • promiseofbeans 2y ago
    I went and checked the page in another browser with my adblocker off. Wow. Just wow. I started using ad blockers on everything a few years ago because they became a little too annoying. I somehow missed when the web became nigh unusable from them.
  • porridgeraisin 2y ago
    I disabled brave shields for a moment and wow. Especially the youtube-like iframe that slid in from the right. Crazy.
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    The irony is that even the ads on the site are so terrible they take a good 30 seconds to fully load. When I opened the page initially it just looked the same like it did with an adblocker on, but eventually: https://imgur.com/a/L7F7uNm https://imgur.com/a/L7F7uNm
  • tim333 2y ago
    Oh gosh you are right. I turned off the adblocker to check it out. I often kind of forget the adblock-less world is out there.
• hayleyest 2y ago
  The message is fair and valid, and seemingly true, but cripes, that's some thick reading unless you are literally a scholar. Dial it back. Talk about never use 5 words when an opaque and obscure reference will do.
  • ndjdjddjsjj 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • Veen 2y ago
    Essays have traditionally been discursive, referential, and elaborate. The genre is not intended to be a pragmatic information dump digested in the shortest possible time, but an occasion for laying out an argument while taking pleasure in possibilities of English prose.
    • kusokurae 2y ago
      [dead]
  • cess11 2y ago
    It's for people that read books and have done so for a long time. That's all it takes to appreciate it, you really don't need to be a scholar.
  • Mvandenbergh 2y ago
    Which of those references are obscure?
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • the-smug-one 2y ago
    I don't think so, I suspect that this is standard fare for the audience of a website called 'lithub.' In the words of gamers: git gud, scrub. (<- light hearted jab)
  • mathgeek 2y ago
• bux93 2y ago
  It's not what you know, but who you know. Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots, while the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group. The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group. Whether the memes you consume are in print is entirely incidental.
  • ndjdjddjsjj 2y ago
    Well just change your URL to something better, right. The curse is not the lack of information but the lack of will to change the channel from whatever feeds their (our!) biases.
    • mihaic 2y ago
      If drugs flood my community, you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh". If you put the burden on the population when everything in society works against them, it's not productive in any way.
      • nverno 2y ago
        > you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh" But that is obviously the solution at the individual level, and it is always productive to put the burden of solving your own problems on yourself like OP suggests.
        • pjc50 2y ago
          But it's not an individual problem! Me not doing drugs doesn't prevent me from being impacted by people who do, and the same goes for people who consume poisoned information sources.
          • nverno 2y ago
            I mean, it's both right? It's easier to work on fixing policy if you're not a drug addict reading poisoned info.
• blackoil 2y ago
  I agree with two major issues raised here. Importance of reading long form content and harms of environment full of distractions. Saying that solution is not turning back and giving up on digital. It would be same as giving up on printing to embrace a teacher focused learning.
  • nileshtrivedi 2y ago
    Exactly. Most of the author's complaints can be answered with: "Use decent software. And make copies." And I found it disappointing that the author did no attempt to recognize that digital #reading is what enables himself to reach people at all? Where is the accounting for accessibility and reach?
    • vacuity 2y ago
      I think the author would say that certain forms of content, like blogs, can be useful. I don't think they're completely eschewing digital reading, but instead pushing for far more print reading than is common now. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
• hunglee2 2y ago
  That we are entering a crisis of epistemology is a positive sign that we are recognising all produced information is unavoidably narrativization. We can't - and shouldn't want to be - certain of anything. Buyer beware and we'll be ok
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • DanielBMarkham 2y ago
    I feel both strong agreement and strong disagreement with your comment. Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend being 30+ before you read. Before that, in my opinion most folks aren't ready for it. You need to both accept ultimate uncertainty and also deliberately create your own certainty in your life. That's a tough ask even for many older people. I've come to believe that an important part of any society is creating a series of positive narrative myths that are increasingly-detailed and nuanced. Why positive? Because introducing negativity in any form early in the education process turns the kids off to receiving anything more on that topic or from that viewpoint. We need optimistic learners, not pessimistic curmudgeons. So yeah, we're going to lie to you about the number line. We're going to lie to you about history. We're going to lie to you about damned near everything, and a simple search online will prove the lie. But we lie in order to encourage you to rebel, not to indoctrinate. Find the problems and fix them. It's not our business to tell you what they are. Hell, we don't know ourselves. We're in the same boat you are. This is not a declarative, literal topic. Already comments here decry the big words. So while I agree with you, epistemology is just like any other intellectual super-power: you gotta be able to deal with the repercussions or you shouldn't dive in. The water's deep. You lose all of that googling around for Wikipedia articles. Long-form books are the only way forward, along with the confidence and intellectual curiosity needed to eventually make a difference.
    • kusokurae 2y ago
      Disagree about the age threshold on epistemology. Being introduced to Hume in my teenage years is what got me to repeatedly revisit and reconsider old ideas, and look for new ones in much the way you describe. Human mental life & development isn't so simple as arbitrary age boundaries and specific, fixed learning environments. Rather than selective pragmatic bias, maybe better is the ability to consider multiple viewpoints with multiple degrees of skepticism and evaluate the strong and weak points, benefits and negative consequences of a thing in tandem. This is sort of the grander point & motivation behind essays like The Order Of Things -- it's being able to acknowledge how much of what we know & can know is determined for us, and to see the uncertainty of many parts of our existence headon, and see that as something that sets you free and puts the onus on you without defensive denialism or diving straight into flimsy pseudo-certainty. It's no surprise that when philosophers started publishing books like that, they were accused by more conservative contemporaries of trying to undermine all of civilisation and dive into nihilism. It must have been unnerving to be confronted with the possibility that one's deeply-held convictions might not be eternally robust & not tied to any culture or time period, and seeing the only alternative as nihilistic would come naturally to such people over seeing it as something to celebrate and explore.
• retskrad 2y ago
  Times have changed. Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books.I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology. Their way of finding and extracting information is different—not better, just different.
  • clarionbell 2y ago
    The question is if they actually are just as capable, or if they are gaming the metric used by educators. My money is on the latter, but then again I do tend to have a negative outlook.
    • n4r9 2y ago
      Yeah. I struggle to understand how podcasts and youtube are an efficient learning resource. They are slow, unstructured, and unsearchable. Whilst some software can ameliorate some of these (e.g. playback speed control), there's no analogue to the process of "can skip this paragraph, can skip this paragraph, let's search back for the definition of this term, let's cross-reference this term with this other text, let's see how many pages are left in this chapter...". I think most people just find it easy to put a podcast and pay semi-attention on while they do tasks or go on their phone. And the education sector is having to adapt to that and make it possible for students to achieve good grades by learning like that.
      • short_sells_poo 2y ago
        Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I despise this new fad of everything having to be a video. I can read much-much faster than the goober on youtube can talk, and I can easily skip sections which are uninteresting because I can see at a glance what the paragraph is about. But these days everyone has to be a Content Creator and a Personality and there's just no money or celebrity in written text, even though it is a vastly better medium for a lot of knowhow. So if I want to know something that could be a paragraph, I have to seek through a 15 minute video padded with 10 minutes of "Like, comment and subscribe and don't forget to smash that bell because it helps me so much"... </old man yells at cloud>
• red_trumpet 2y ago
  Funny typo in the subtitle. > Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies" The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
  • tomgp 2y ago
    For me Guttenberg is an actor famous for Police Academy, Short Circuit, and Three Men And A Baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Guttenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Guttenberg
    • rpeden 2y ago
      His role in The Day After is the one that always stands out in my mind.
  • Anthony-G 2y ago
    There’s also a confusing typo in “the ceding of material books to the ephemeral gauze of the online”. I presume “gauze” was intended be “gaze”.
    • edflsafoiewq 2y ago
      Why presume that? "Gauze" makes sense.
      • Anthony-G 2y ago
        I read the sentence a couple of times to try to figure out what the phrase “ephemeral gauze” was intended to convey but failed to make sense of it. So, I figured that “gaze” may have been the intended word, i.e., readers pay particular attention to text while they’re in the process of reading it (gaze) but that it’s quickly forgotten when they move on to the next unrelated thing they see on the Internet (ephemerality). I’m only familiar with gauze in the context of first-aid kits and other medical usage so I’d appreciate hearing your interpretation of “ephemeral gauze”.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  What's special about the book? It's the cost, proof of work if you will. If costs nothing to write or read an internet post, so bots, cheap workforce and gullible people can be employed. Only selected few buy books, because it costs money, so it's their vote that counts for the author, the publishers and for fellow readers.
  • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Only selected few buy books, because it costs money I doubt money is the limiting factor for book uptake in the West, particularly in towns with a library. You're instead selecting for curiosity, intelligence and attention span. (Say this as someone without enough of the last.)
  • nileshtrivedi 2y ago
    Writing digitally is cheaper but that's exactly why distributing or getting reach is not cheap at all. You still need cost and proof of work in getting noticed by algorithms, as well as people who usually set trends. In fact, the lower cost of production means that more niche things get written than there would have been a market for.
  • falcor84 2y ago
    I see it from the other end - what counts is not the cost of producing the book, but the opportunity cost of the reader sitting down with a particular book. A computer or phone allows you to context switch to a million different things, and even an e-reader allows you to easily switch between hundreds of books. But with a physical book, you commit yourself to carrying, holding and focusing on a particular work. There's something deep about this commitment, and I think we would get almost the same result if we had digital devices that were made to hold exactly one book, and you had to take yours to the library/store to return the old one and download a new one - such that even if the cost of copying the bytes is zero, you pay the cost of physically carrying that one book that you took the time to pick out.
    • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
      That's true too. Both costs matter.
• m-i-l 2y ago
  A couple of references to the Nazis, but no reference to the Nazi book burnings, an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction, which I'd have thought would be very relevant in this context, i.e. in the praise of physical books? Perhaps it wasn't mentioned because it doesn't quite fit in with the narrative of digital being all bad, given digital knowlege can be more resistant to suppression and physical destruction. Also some great quotes from 30 years ago, e.g. Carl Sagan's "when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few" the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness". But did it actually have to end up this way? And is it still possible (with enough collective will power) to push Big Tech profiteering back enough to deliver some of the society enhancing changes originally envisioned in the mid-1990s? Just as it took decades for the full positive implications of the invention of the printing press to come to fruition, perhaps we still need more time before we decry the internet as a net negative?
  • Barrin92 2y ago
    > an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction Important distinction here, book burnings are an example of knowledge destruction, but not all information is knowledge, and not all knowledge is truth. That is why this isn't applicable to the internet age, or in fact even the reverse is true. In an environment of digital mass communication there's much more information than knowledge, and the way to destabilize knowledge and truth is not to destroy knowledge but to flood you with information. This is why the most important skill today has shifted from finding knowledge to filtering out noise. The Nazi of today isn't going to hunt a library for a book, he's instead going to create an environment so entropic that truth and fiction become indistinguishable. And that's also of course why you find people in that camp today as defenders of free flow of information. Because you need to realize that the signal to noise ratio has been turned on its head. When Google deletes 90% of my emails this isn't because they pursue evil plans like someone who burns 90% of a library down, quite the opposite, it's the only way I don't end up being scammed. https://philosophicalsociety.com/html/BaudrillardsThoughtsOnMedia.html#Information%20Devours%20Its%20Own%20Content https://philosophicalsociety.com/html/BaudrillardsThoughtsOn...
• usrbinbash 2y ago
  The issue isn't about "screen vs. print", the issue is about "critical, discerning, questioning mind" vs. "mindless consumerism". The epistemological collapse we are experiencing wasn't caused by information being online and disseminated via browsers. It was, and is, caused by a mass of uninformed people, with strong tribal behavior, shutting out any information that doesn't fit their preconceived world views, and industries and politics designed to benefit from that behavior. And btw. misinformation can be, and has been, spread via print [even today][1]. [1]: https://english.nv.ua/nation/russia-delivers-nine-tons-of-propaganda-textbooks-to-mariupol-50377550.html https://english.nv.ua/nation/russia-delivers-nine-tons-of-pr...
  • everdrive 2y ago
    I think it's much more fundamental than this; the new speed and new methods with which information can be spread are themselves the problem. Misinformation is downstream of this. The more fundamental problem seems to be tribalism, which sort of information can be spread quickly, (anything with strong emotional content, outrage, etc.) and the uncomfortable fact that most people acquire knowledge through social transfer than through actual understanding. (eg: do most people really understand the geometry or science to prove the earth is round? Or, do they know the earth is round because this is what they've been taught. I'll bet most of HN does understand this, but most people could no produce this if asked without any sort of preparation.) The new methods of spreading information are the problem, and it's unclear just exactly how we're all going to adjust.
    • lordnacho 2y ago
      > the uncomfortable fact that most people acquire knowledge through social transfer than through actual understanding This hits the nail on the head. In the end, I am trusting other people to do the experiments and reporting the findings. I can regurgitate a lot of stuff about science, but in the end I believe it because I grew on the scientist side of the fence. If you look at conspiracy theories, the thing they always do is come up with a reason not to believe in the established authorities.
    • anal_reactor 2y ago
• Sam6late 2y ago
  My 2 cents: 1- 'The Department of Education’s most recent survey, released in June, was sensational: it found that text comprehension skills of 13-year-olds had declined an average of four points since the Covid-affected school year of 2019-2020, and more alarmingly that the average drop was seven points compared with the 2012 figure. The results for the worst-performing students fell below the reading skill level recorded in 1971, when the first national study was conducted.' More here https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-printed-books-are-better-than-screens-for-learning-to-read-q-a/2023/03 https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-printed-books-a... 2-Bloomberg has this one recently 'The Print Magazine Revival of 2024: Several factors are driving this revival but the focus is a niche and on high quality which translated into resources,aka money, it also cites the following: Nostalgia and Tangibility: Many readers still appreciate the tactile experience of reading a physical magazine. -Niche Markets: Smaller, independent publications are thriving by catering to specific interests and communities. -Strategic Repositioning: Established brands like Bloomberg Businessweek and Sports Illustrated are adapting by reducing frequency and focusing on high-quality content. I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.
  • typewithrhythm 2y ago
    Are demographics controlled for here? We know the proportion of foreign born has been increasing since the 70s, are these results attempting to remove the effect of non-native speakers?
    • bayindirh 2y ago
      There's another, more global research: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-failed https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-faile...
    • hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
      >foreign born Its probably more useful to distinguish between foreign educated vs born here. Interestingly the last stats I remember seeing about ESL students is they tend to out-perform english students in a number of subjects depending on the age group, so factoring them out might lower the overall stats and show an even worse trend among native born english speaking American students.
• dr_dshiv 2y ago
  “when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few… [and] when the people have lost their ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority” the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” Hmm. Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they excessively question those in authority…?
  • vacuity 2y ago
    > Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they excessively question those in authority…? At least today, that doesn't actually happen. The sense of authority has just shifted from "nebulous leader figures" to (implicitly) "producers of this content I trust". And then when the conventionally powerful people own the content producers...even for an example like Snowden or Assange, there are plenty of competing narratives. Hell, my opinion of Assange as an example of morally rejecting authority has shifted recently because I was exposed to another narrative. It's not simple at all, who to listen to.
• devnullbrain 2y ago
  >“If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more than I value the specific contents,” This is a great representation of everything I've come to hate of the way reading is praised as a means to an ends, divorced from the writing itself. I assume this comes from people being praised for reading as children - when they're developing a novel skill - and carrying the same value into adulthood, uncritical and unchanged. So we end up with bookshops full of erotica with cutesy covers, proudly read by people who think they're doing something intellectual. We end up with the 'Torment Nexus' argument, where a political view becomes an unassailable truth as soon as it's committed to sci-fi print. If you're doing anything in technology, pray that it doesn't bear superficial resemblance to Skynet. Pray that it doesn't sound like Soylent Green. TFA starts with the Terry Pratchet anecdote about Holocaust denial. It's an impressive prediction - but it's a also a prediction made by every other Usenet nerd in 1995 that didn't have a financial interest in being ignorant of it. His and Sagan's arguments are elevated above expert contemporaries just because they wrote fiction and pop-science. Ironically, it's the loathed Silicon Valley nerds who might more fairly celebrate the prescience of people like rms. Terry Pratchet didn't write to advocate for truth of the Holocaust. He wrote fun fiction, without much to take from it other than boot-themed economics. It doesn't stop being entertainment - or escapism - just because it's a book. >Dean Blobaum of the University of Chicago Press castigated how The Gutenberg Elegies makes electronic media the “whipping boy for the ills of western society,” claiming that Birkerts’ argument is too all-encompassing, blaming computers for the “Decline in education, literacy, and literate culture.” Here’s the thing some thirty years later, however—Birkerts was right. Except, here's the thing: he wasn't.[1] Ignore the demise of truth propagated by this online article, because literacy rates are rising rapidly globally. And I can think of no invention - not even the printing press - that can be thanked for this as much as the personal computer. Even in developed nations, literacy rates continue to rise. But the most damning part is what the author shows this belief results in. Do unqualified 'reading', and you too can write guff like: >The frenetic, interconnected, hypertext-permeated universe of digital reading is categorically a different experience. Even more importantly, a physical book on a shelf is a cosmos unto-itself, while that dimension of interiority and introspection—of privacy—is obscured in the virtual domain. No need for evidence, or argument, or even decent prose. Maybe this self-satisfaction is why so many book protagonists are quiet, misunderstood children who long to be librarians. You're just reading. You're grown adults. Get over yourselves. [1] https://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs45-literacy-rates-continue-rise-generation-to-next-en-2017_0.pdf https://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs45-li...
• nataliste 2y ago
  Cronus eats his children. In 1494, Johannes Trithemius printed De laude scriptorum, "In Praise of Scribes" assailing the development of the printing press. The same argument was made, but from the perspective of the manual scribe, that a printer doesn't understand a work as well as a scribe does, as the speed of reproduction doesn't have the same intent that a person lovingly copying by hand does. Similarly, Plato made the same argument aginst books themselves in the Phaedrus (circa 370BC): "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." And I'm sure in the murky recesses of human evolution, a curmudgeonly man felt the same about speech itself: "How will child know own breath when choked by breath of others?" And I'm also certain in the near future, when ergodic literature has replaced the solitary linear author, there will be nostalgia for the same: "When everyone chooses for themselves which path the large language storyteller takes, we deprive ourselves of the common ground that is the unchanging epub. As Chesterton wrote one hundred and fifty years ago, 'Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.' We might write today 'In chaos, the Tolkien model might take Frodo to Erebor, or the Southron Lands, but the author is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he writes Mordor, and lo! It is Mordor.'" In short, Cronus eats his children.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • le-mark 2y ago
    Thanks this is the perspective I was looking for. Like how television was imagined to bring Shakespeare to the masses, but instead met the masses where they are. And how people in the losing party lament the ignorance of the voters when it has always been so, or worse.
  • vacuity 2y ago
    It's basically constant that many people will fearmonger and some will embrace new technology. I think this is basically independent of the actual merits and drawbacks of the given technology. Regardless of these strange asymptotes, I would say technology has been advancing from less benefit/risk to more in time, and so we will get closer to the fearmongerers being right. I suppose it could mean that we harness the benefits and waive the risks, but in practice it seems unlikely.
• bostonwalker 2y ago
  Just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death on the recommendation of some commenters here. Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of entertainment. One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard. Viewed that way, the YouTube algorithm and TikTok represent a natural progression of the way that TV news has already primed us to consume information. In fact, almost all of the arguments made in Amusing Ourselves to Death have only become more relevant in the age of social media. More than ever, we are losing our ability to place information in context, to think deeply, and to tolerate what makes us uncomfortable. No doubt these things would be reflected in test scores. On the other hand, the one possible saving grace of an internet world vs. a TV world could be the relaxing of the restrictive time and ratings constraints. I would argue there are niche content producers out there doing better contextualizing, deeper thinking, and harder-hitting investigative work than was ever possible on TV, and that this content is hypothetically available to us. The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it? On the contrary, I think most of us are getting swept up in the firehose every day.
  • bloomingkales 2y ago
    One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard. David Milch kind of touched on this when he talked about John from Cincinnati. He goes to say that TV News is actually TV shows that we watch, like the Iraq War, and the American public basically get bored of television shows and thats when the news changes shows. The show is exciting at first, thats why we watch, but then we get bored. The implication here is that we don't get outraged, we get bored.
• xtiansimon 2y ago
  > “Wen Stephenson at the Chicago Review claimed […] he experienced no difference in parsing Seamus Heaney on the page as opposed to the screen, asking “does it matter that it is transmitted to me, voice and word, through a computer? …the question is beginning to bore me by now.” Well said. For the act of reading digital origin changes the quality but only in minor ways. What we all failed to anticipate we’re the gross effects of segmentation, disintegration, infinite duplication of media.
• karel-3d 2y ago
  This article is too long, I will let NotebookLM make a fake podcast out of it
• lazystar 2y ago
  this type of situation is not unique in human history - it happens after the invention of any device that disseminates information on a mass scale. for example, see the printing press: > The spread of mechanical movable type printing in Europe in the Renaissance introduced the era of mass communication, which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and (revolutionary) ideas transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation, and threatened the power of political and religious authorities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press in my opinion, the author of the blog post wastes the readers time by not delving into historical comparisons; no effort is spent analyzing the solutions that society implemented in the past when faced with this problem.
  • vacuity 2y ago
    I think the Internet medium is sufficiently different from past advancements that such analogies don't work. It's not necessarily that the Internet brings fundamentally different capabilities, perhaps we can reason about how its new scale makes some capabilities emerge as others, but it's the same outcome either way.
• pavlov 2y ago
  I suspect print magazines are undergoing the same kind of cycle of destruction and resurrection as happened to vinyl records. In the 1990s, vinyls were the clunky old things that your mom gave away in a yard sale. Now they’re produced again as a high-end tactile media experience and sales are increasing every year. Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently from the ad-filled old media products.
  • bradfa 2y ago
    Totally agree! I subscribe to one magazine which is published once a quarter, it costs me about $40/year for the subscription but is well worth it to me as the content is not available anywhere else. Definitely a niche market but the rag does a very good job of catering exactly to its market. There’s still some ads but only a handful per issue that normally has 60-100 pages total.
  • privong 2y ago
    > Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently from the ad-filled old media products. This has been attempted in the outdoors world for 20+ years. E.g., Alpinist[0] and The Surfers Journal[1]. It works, kinda. Alpinist now has more ads and is a smaller physical size and lower-quality paper than it was at the start. I think it's also had a couple close calls with bankruptcy. I wasn't reading TSJ over a long enough time span to tell if they had similar issues. [0] http://www.alpinist.com/ http://www.alpinist.com/ [1] https://www.surfersjournal.com/ https://www.surfersjournal.com/
  • Mistletoe 2y ago
    We still get Architectural Digest and I enjoy looking at it in a way I never would online.
• benreesman 2y ago
  We really fucked up when we didn’t regulate smart phones like weapons grade uranium. It’s so fucking toxic. And I’m well aware there are gems in the museum of YouTube math lectures after walking through kilometers of gift shop TikTok shit (and it’s plausible that YouTube will be Alphabet’s undoing because YouTube is great for education and a well educated body politic would hang Pichai and his ilk from a dockyard crane). Our system (call it capitalism if you like, got a lot of rent in it to appeal to Adam Smith: the father of capitalism thinks low capital gains are rape) can’t cope: it’s no longer just implicated in mental health crisis after mental health crisis, society destabilizing radicalization of (dumb) politics, human sexuality being substantially mediated by people who consider a successful match “churn”, and just every godawful thing. The HN guidelines quite sensibly admonish everyone to strive for the “best version of the argument”. Smartphone social media whatever is the worst form of the argument that biological humans can put a morally human life form in charge of anything worth a billion dollars. There are gems, it’s not all garbage, but if every smartphone on the planet was hit with a hammer tomorrow humanity would look less suicidal in a week. People would start going back to third places, even more importantly fucking at any kind of plausibly sane level, bankers / sociopaths / serial genocidaires / Chamath would go back to being the pariahs with jet skis. And humanity looks awfully, awfully glum for however awesome GDP astrology says things are.
• grantmuller 2y ago
  The irony of reading this article surrounded by a cacophony of flashing and scrolling ads is not lost on me.
• ByteExplorer 2y ago
  Ed Simon's reflection on Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies in In Praise of Print thoughtfully challenges the prevailing assumption that digital media will inevitably replace print.
• iandanforth 2y ago
  This is a frustratingly bad article. The primary argument is hedonistic. The author is arguing that the state of mind created by reading books is what's valuable, and not the content. This infuriating for me. This is like writing an article in defense of pistachio ice cream. The author has a sensation they enjoy that they want more people to enjoy. I would have trouble coming up with a more trivializing case for physical books. You might as well just talk about the joy of the smell of old books. It's pleasurable, unique, and completely missing on the internet. The author fails to connect that pleasurable sensation to anything meaningful and so can be easily dismissed. Whereas other writers, ones the author quotes even, have pointed out how long form content trains concentration, short and long term memory, and critical thought, this author fails to convince that books are anything more than a warm blanket for the mind.
  • vacuity 2y ago
    Perhaps the author doesn't make the case well, but the implication is that reading print primes the mind in a way that presents better emotional and intellectual consumption of the content.
• tempodox 2y ago
  > Now, consider what the Nazis were able to do with flimsy IBM punch cards, and the difference today, the sheer amount of data concerning all of us, saved on servers owned by the very people now enabling authoritarianism. Not really news by now but it merits repeating again and again.
• tapanjk 2y ago
  > "What's been sacrificed is not reading in the most prosaic sense, but the particular experience of a certain type of reading, perilously endangered among all of us attracted to the alluring siren-call of the smartphone ping." Product idea: I think it's just a matter of time that the basic e-reader technology will be so cheap that it should be possible to order one with a set of prepackaged books. You can read the books on the device, period. No internet, no word look-up (a dictionary can be a standalone book in the library), no highlighting / commenting, no adding or buying new books, no nothing else except the text of the books in the library. It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    That seems a bit wasteful? Any time you want to read a new book you buy a whole new reading device? It might be cheap but that's more e-waste we don't need. Why not a re-usable e-reader that reads books from an SD card? You can order or download books onto the cards, the reading experience can then be totally offline as you describe.
  • vegetablepotpie 2y ago
    > It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out. Oh no, that’s just… why? At least with a paper book you can give it away, sell it to a book reseller, or put it in one of those little lending library boxes people put in front of their houses. If nothing else, if it has no more value, you can recycle it for paper pulp. I mean if you’re a publisher, hoping to cash in on people wanting to disconnect, and trying to evade the first sale doctrine, sure. That is a way to do it. But the environmental consequences are just bad. Maybe have the sleep screen list what books are on the device and make it repairable. At least make it possible to open, and replace the battery.
• Yawrehto 2y ago
  I recently read Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf, which makes many similar arguments, and found myself agreeing with this. I've been finding it harder and harder to lose myself in a book, to finish books, to read as I used to read. It's as if the lens through which I view reading and books has shifted - from a way to be thrust into another world, to something to be browsed in short, easy-to-read snippets, like social media but with things like covers and jackets and spines. I'd also like to note that, while the printed book is certainly not perfect at staying through the ages - something like stone tablets are probably best for that - it's a lot more reliable than online things. Maybe that'll change, but for now, tech companies go out of business a lot more frequently than floods or fires or other disasters strike the average house. And while, if Simon and Schuster go out of business, that doesn't do a thing to the books you have purchased from them, if Amazon goes out of business, there's no guarantee any of your Kindle will be readable anymore.
  • vacuity 2y ago
    I envision that meme of having large bookshelves filled with books, something I could show off to friends as a proof that there is still plenty to be found in books, that I've found valuable in books. That on some days I might take the time to sit down, brew some tea or something, and read a book.
    • nataliste 2y ago
      >The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.
      • 2y ago
• wobbles1995 2y ago
  When you live in a society that no longer values knowledge or compassion, there’s no point is wasting your time trying to go back to the old golden years. Maybe just accept anti intellectualism is the only way to succeed in the world and work around that? Elon Musk, the most successful man in the world is anti intellectual, why would you fool yourself into thinking there might be another future?
• blackoil 2y ago
  IIRC one of the common factor with genius/prodigies of yesteryears is they all worked 1:1 or in a small group with some reasonably talented teachers. Unfortunately that is not scalable for mass, so may be custom designed Device + LLM may work better than giving up digital.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
    Birds of feather and all that. I was lucky enough to end up in a class full of kids much smarter than me. As for LLM replacement for talented teacher,even though I kinda worry that it would be subverted by organizations and various interests intent on stripping anything of value from LLM thus rendering LLMs role as a talented guide/teacher role largely useless, I personally found exploring new subjects even more engrossing than ( at one point in time, following down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia entries on some obscure subject ). Part of the problem is that this thing would need to be marketed as safe, but safe is staying within rigid parameters that do not allow for a genius level individual to grow. Smart is probably a lot easier so safety features will likely not be triggered that often. The other problem is that only some kids will take advantage of that mode. Not everyone is inclined to explore like that. I have no real solution here. My kid is not at the age I need to worry about it yet, but I am slowly starting to plan my approach and I think tuned LLM with heavily restricted digital access will be the initial approach.
• rixed 2y ago
  Internet is a faster printing press therefore more people can be subjected to more lies than before, but the issue at hand, the one mentioned in Sagan's quote, is orthogonal to that question and predates it. Did the printing press started a revolution in knowledge, or wars of religions? Can printed books save us? I admit I oftentime rejoice that printing felt out of fashion, so the printed books that are left are saved from the progress of psyops and the invasion of AI, which may make it easier for future generation(s?) to see through the blindfold of fantasies that will be setup for them. The article site 1984 as an illustration of how printed books can help resist surveillance. Well, it did not turn out that great for the main character of that book. Books are a sedative not a cure.
  • bookofjoe 2y ago
    Quote of the day.
  • marcosdumay 2y ago
    > Did the printing press started a revolution in knowledge, or wars of religions? That's a great question. The answer is very well known. It started both.
    • esafak 2y ago
      The Ottoman sultans saw those wars and banned the press. The missed the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and eventually disappeared.
      • rixed 2y ago
        They were also a bit far from the Americas, which might have contributed to the economic boom of Europe more than the faster spreading of new ideas via books, no?
        • marcosdumay 2y ago
          The kind of colonization that happened in America also happened in several other places, again and again, through history. In no other case is was followed by an industrial revolution. In fact, China was just fading away from a very similar boom when Europe started expanding. And the Otomans have had their own boom some centuries before. And China did develop a mechanical press, and decided to control an censor it too. But I don't think the GP is correct on using that as a strong cause.
• bookofjoe 2y ago
  How do e-readers fit in here?
• hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
  This seems to conflate short-form media as "digital" and long-form media (books) as paper. This is patently untrue. I can experience the disconnection same while 'digital' reading on my e-reader in a cozy chair in the middle of nowhere, with much less RSI and eye strain. Magazines, newspapers, short stories and other short-form written paper works pre-digital age are as guilty (or not guilty) of changing the consumption experience the author attempts to pin on 'digital'. When it comes to the cultural impact of what we consume, there is I think a quantity vs quality argument that can be made with the introduction of digital and the lowering of barriers. There is also a counter argument that 'quality' was subjectively gate-kept by small groups that colour and bias the narrative intentionally and unintentionally. The weighing of these two arguments seems to come down to personal views on culture and media and I find its often a grey area for many.
  • asdff 2y ago
    The biggest eye roll for me is the underlying assumption that these behaviors are new with the internet, new with even ticktock. We have a blindness towards how we used to receive our propaganda. No one probably noticed it was the prince paying off the town cryer to speak their praise. Or that it was the chief telling the shaman what to utter in prophecy to control their position. It has always been useful to control the mindshare of a people and emotional half or less than truths can always be dressed up in ways that innately satisfy us like music notes completing a chord progression. Rationality, fact, and logic often has no such advocate crafting the message towards maximal monkey brain compatibility. It just exists.
• grey-area 2y ago
  The title seems to make the incorrect assumption that print (ink on paper) is the only way to read.
• cafard 2y ago
  >> Mine is an estimably materialist variety of mysticism though, Esteemed by whom?
• mlsu 2y ago
  The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration. When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time. But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale. By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.
  • paulyy_y 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • mlsu 2y ago
      I'm interested in what people think about this. Maybe offer some constructive criticism instead of restating what I said and adding lol at the end?
      • vacuity 2y ago
        I think the delivery might be sensational but I agree with the sentiment. Especially since you acknowledge that it isn't purely harmful. Normally I don't watch short form video but occasionally I do and I do feel it's a somewhat different state of mind. I would be worried about myself if I found it happening often.
      • stouset 2y ago
        I think it’s pretty clear the GP (and others) believe this is pseudopsychology bunk supported by neither any available evidence nor by professionals in the field. It takes 1,000x less time and energy to come up with a pet theory de novo and sans any evidence than it takes to debunk. Without backing evidence provided for an idea, it should be as easy to dismiss out of hand as it was to create it in the first place.
• d_burfoot 2y ago
  Reading great books has been one of the best experiences of my life. But even as an ardent bibliophile, I can't deny that the medium has several serious shortcomings. Books are often far too long. Their quality is uneven (anyone remember the Wheel of Time series?). In the modern era, the production, marketing, promotion, and review of books has become highly politicized. Internet text - blogs, tweets, etc - has the potential to repair these issues.
• spudlyo 2y ago
  Electronic books are, in my opinion, far superior to that "living animal with flesh of paper and ink of blood". I can go to Standard Ebooks and quickly download incredible works of imaginative fiction[0] in EPUB format that sync to my phone, my tablet, and my laptop. My notes and highlights[1] also sync. I can select a word that I don't know from the text and quickly look it up in my Electronic copy of Webster's 1913 dictionary. Best of all, I can prop up my tablet on the elliptical trainer and read for an hour while my heart rate moves through the first four zones as increasing amounts of oxygenated blood rush through my brain causing the words to burn like fire in my mind. Also, I'm learning Latin, and it's been an incredible experience to read graded readers with optional interlinear translation[2] as well as the ability to hear the text expressively narrated in Latin at a touch of a button. None of this is possible with paper. [0]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-eliot/middlemarch https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-eliot/middlemarch [1]: https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/middlemarch.png https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/middlemarch.png [2]: https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/latin.jpg https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/latin.jpg
  • absoluteunit1 2y ago
    This. I couldn’t agree more. The text is searchable, indexable, word definitions can be searched right within the text, highlights are saved and indexable, etc. Anytime I hear the arguments for print vs digital, aside from the personal preference of holding a physical book ( and the experience that comes with it; the smell of the books, the feel, etc), digital is by far superior in every other aspect.
• southernplaces7 2y ago
  The title and apparent argument of this confound me somewhat. For those of us who read many, many books very frequently, but stick mostly to digital versions simply out of space and access convenience, it's not hard to feel as if we're somehow being looked down upon because we're not hauling around a bundle of weighty tomes.. Why should print be so specifically necessary if a book's content is what defines it? That I might read, say, Umberto Eco, in digital makes it no less intellectually valuable than if I bought a paperback version, or if you want to get really fancy about things, a hard cover, if those are still even released... If anything, being able to carry hundreds of books of all kinds around with me nearly anywhere on my Kindle, or even on my cell phone, makes it all the easier to read more voraciously. With this it requires no extra effort beyond that of having with you a device that you'd in any case carry, and thus taking advantage of many more spare moments between daily activities..
  • IncreasePosts 2y ago
    I read digital and dead tree, but there is a spatial understanding I gain from books that I don't get with ebooks. Like, if I want to re find a passage, I usually have a physical sense of where in the book it is, and can flip to it within 10 or 20 pages. That's the major difference for me at least between the two.
    • southernplaces7 2y ago
      I understand what you mean about spatial understanding, and personally do love the the comforting reference value of having actual books on your shelves and being able to go back to specific parts of them no matter what. However, it's not hard to compensate for this with digital books, through bookmarking options, copy-pasting specific parts and storing them elsewhere (with tiny notes on page number and book title) and other options. I keep all of my own digital books DRM-stripped in my own device folders and back those up too. This to at least partly replicate the possession security that physical books give. I also absolutely never trust storing large collections of them on something as absurdly untrustworthy as, for example, "Kindle on Demand", which is on-demand right until your access demand arbitrarily gets ignored no matter how much money you spent on what were supposedly owned purchases.
• renewiltord 2y ago
  The reason for epistemological collapse is that people peeked behind the curtain and found that the experts were just normal people endowed not with some magical knowledge but just making things up as they go. I can do that, too, and sometimes I am better at it. Given that, I prefer reader-side filtering over writer-side filtering.
• hydrolox 2y ago
  I think the main issue with this line of reasoning is that before all of these internet based forms of content, did many people actually read literature, like is mentioned in the article? I am not sure, but I would expect that the books that were read were probably not some high form of art but entertainment - which is fine of course, and it is different to a large extent from scrolling tiktok, but does it like up with the authors thesis about reading providing some deeper form of enlightenment? Maybe it still does, since it's still the same act of reading, but maybe not as much, since it's not normal "intellectual content"
• zuluonezero 2y ago
  What I found particularly disturbing about this was that I had to swipe away two pop ups and a lower banner just to start reading. All the while my subconscious was asking if I would like to just pick up a book. Then I got distracted by an ad for another article on the right of the screen. .
• sourcepluck 2y ago
  Someone mentions Postman below so I'm tempted to add: can the tech crowd try a bit of Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord and the Situationists, Mark Fisher, Marhsall McLuhan, presumably loads of others I don't know about who have done work in these areas, and then maybe Michel Desmurget on the more science-based side of it if they want to avoid any airy-fairy theory. It's arguably especially wild that Desmurget doesn't get a mention in these discussions. Or, I mean, it would be wild in a world where there was a smooth and effortless flow of good ideas and arguments between people, maybe over some sort of transcontinental network... A lot of the topics that people have opinions about when it comes to screens and devices and health and etc have loads of studies on them. Which doesn't mean that everything is all solved, there are unexplored and uncertain areas, but reading these discussions you'd think there was no data out there whatsoever. There's tons! It doesn't mean either that people can't enjoy sharing opinions, some of the anecdotes are interesting and insightful, but there seems to be a few obvious arguments which are basically non-arguments that get trotted out, and which seem to be hindering a more fruitful discussion. How many times have we seen someone make a point about the bad type of screen-use for someone to say: "yeah, but I use ________ like _________." or "yeah, but when you read books you're being antisocial as well." and so on. The research on the topic distinguishes carefully between the different types of use! Etc etc, I could go on. This comment is intended constructively
  • jaco6 2y ago
    Tech employees don’t engage constructively with tech criticism because of self interest.
  • dlkf 2y ago
    I implore everyone reading this to google the Sokal hoax before decide whether these guys are worthwhile.
    • sourcepluck 2y ago
      Michel Desmurget is a well-respected neuroscientist working in research in France, so the Sokal thing is totally irrelevant to him, presumably? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Desmurget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Desmurget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair - for the curious. The Sokal affair is a funny thing yes, which I'd seen before (and I presume many people here are familiar with). I don't see how it's relevant here? I mean - it was one journal, in 1996, that had no peer review process, that published a fake article someone sent in to prove a point that the journal publishes at least some crap... What should we reject based on that in your opinion - all cultural and media studies presumably, at the very least, you seem to be clearly suggesting. And every philosopher too? The logicians? The linguists? All of social science? Economics too? Is it just STEM-type stuff that's acceptable then? Seems preposterous to me. The soft sciences are looser, and definitely have a higher proportion of hand-wavy nonsense, but rejecting it all to avoid stuff you don't like is just silly. Learning to avoid the crap and find the good stuff is pretty similar to other fields. And often, anecdotally, it seems to me that the more interesting figures in the experimental sciences tend to be very intrigued by the softer, arguably sometimes "trickier" questions that the non-STEM sciences can explore.
• netbioserror 2y ago
  The content committed to print needs to be worth it. I'm a fan of old-school sci-fi, the kind that asks how technology might enhance or undermine the human experience and how that might change, collapse, or raise society to new heights. Right now, the entire genre is in trough of unimaginative, vacuous current-day allegory. Most published work is entirely wrapped up in gender, sex, race, and labor politics. Everything is a stand-in for current political movements and figures, where the setting may as well be set-dressing. No curiosity, no prescience, no fundamental philosophical questioning. My only reprieve is that sci-fi short story omnibuses contain maybe 20-30% true sci-fi that's exactly what I'm searching for. But buying a print novel off the shelf got to the point where it was wasting my money. And I can only re-read the classics so much. Waiting for the "sci-fi was always current-day allegory!" sophomorists to flood the comments.
  • rexpop 2y ago
    Sci-fi was always a current-day allegory. That's why I prefer cyberpunk: rather than allegorical, it tries to be literal and concrete. But cyberpunk is not imaginative in the way you're looking for. I can appreciate that. What are some examples of the old-school, non-allegorical stuff? Maybe Exhalation?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• dlkf 2y ago
  There is no epistemological collapse. Access to accurate information has never been so fast nor so easy. To be sure, lies are spread on the internet - but people believed all sorts of bullshit before the internet. Those who want to claim there is a crisis don’t have a principled argument as to how things are worse.
  • djbusby 2y ago
    I frequently hear there are more lies and they spread even faster in 2024 than 2014 and for sure faster than 1994.
    • plewd 2y ago
      But surely there are also more truths, and they spread faster than ever before? The amount of lies has increased but so has the amount of information in general, any question you have can be answered within 10 seconds.
• tim333 2y ago
  I'm skeptical there is any epistemological collapse. Checking Wikipedia because I'm rusty on that stuff, it has epistemology as "the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge." As someone old enough to have been reading paper books pre internet I don't think that's collapsed at all. The very fact that I can look it up on Wikipedia and reference Reddit is a step forward. The article reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes 'Academia here I come' (Reddit reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/academia_here_i_come/ https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/ac...)
• bargainbot3k 2y ago
  [flagged]
• snthpy 2y ago
  Haven't read the article but this just sparked a thought that this is similar to email spam: given there's cost to printing you'd expect higher quality. Of course there are still bad actors and the deluded unfortunately.