4 ms·

You didn't have books?

by jlees 17y ago

randallsquared 17y ago
I did, and read voraciously, at a pace and with a scope that now seems incredible to me. However, even while reading, there's more than one thread of thought going on in your head, wondering about whether this historical figure in the book really did that thing, or whether you need to have that report in Tuesday morning or Thursday morning, or what this typeface is called and what its history is, and so on. Before the internet, I had to ignore most of these to get anything done, since I would have ended up spending a very large percentage of my time writing them down and researching them, and most of those thoughts just weren't worth it. Now, though, I can put the book down for a moment and look up most of these instantly, and then go back to the book. Or not, because often the new questions that arise from the answers to these, and their answers, are more interesting than the fiction novel I was reading -- and this is part of my point: that the internet has both vastly increased the number of things I can find out about and my total consumption of information, and has greatly increased my average interest in what I'm doing, since I can stop and do something more interesting (in my own time) at any time. Usually whatever novel or textbook I was reading in the 80s was so boring that I wouldn't bother with it at all now, but at the time it was just the most interesting thing I had, and all the immediate alternatives to "read this book" were even more boring. I didn't have a great childhood, in retrospect, but at the time it seemed that my major problem was boredom. I guess that's enough self-examination for one post. :)
- jlees 17y ago
  The ability to look stuff up while absorbed in another task, and even get distracted in this side-road ("the Wikipedia effect") is what has caused my current horrendous attention span. I miss the ability I had to sit and lose myself in one thing for a long period of time, frankly.
  - dkarl 17y ago
    You haven't changed. It's just that now you're distracted by all the new possibilities the internet provides. Going off the grid is a matter of getting rid of those possibilities. Resisting them is stressful; giving in to them is trivializing. The problem is that subconsciously, we don't see clearly. Consciously, we know that staying immersed in a book is more rewarding and is what we want to do right now, but subconsciously, every trivial impulse we don't follow up feels like a valuable opportunity lost. Truly believing, at all layers of consciousness, that those temptations have nothing to offer is the right solution, but it's hard to achieve. In Buddhism this is called the elimination of doubt or uncertainty. It means bringing your subconscious or emotional mind into accordance with your conscious convictions.

You didn't have books?

by jlees 17y ago

You didn't have books?

I did, and read voraciously, at a pace and with a scope that now seems incredible to me. However, even while reading, there's more than one thread of thought going on in your head, wondering about whether this historical figure in the book really did that thing, or whether you need to have that report in Tuesday morning or Thursday morning, or what this typeface is called and what its history is, and so on. Before the internet, I had to ignore most of these to get anything done, since I would have ended up spending a very large percentage of my time writing them down and researching them, and most of those thoughts just weren't worth it. Now, though, I can put the book down for a moment and look up most of these instantly, and then go back to the book. Or not, because often the new questions that arise from the answers to these, and their answers, are more interesting than the fiction novel I was reading -- and this is part of my point: that the internet has both vastly increased the number of things I can find out about and my total consumption of information, and has greatly increased my average interest in what I'm doing, since I can stop and do something more interesting (in my own time) at any time. Usually whatever novel or textbook I was reading in the 80s was so boring that I wouldn't bother with it at all now, but at the time it was just the most interesting thing I had, and all the immediate alternatives to "read this book" were even more boring. I didn't have a great childhood, in retrospect, but at the time it seemed that my major problem was boredom. I guess that's enough self-examination for one post. :)

jlees 17y ago
The ability to look stuff up while absorbed in another task, and even get distracted in this side-road ("the Wikipedia effect") is what has caused my current horrendous attention span. I miss the ability I had to sit and lose myself in one thing for a long period of time, frankly.
- dkarl 17y ago
  You haven't changed. It's just that now you're distracted by all the new possibilities the internet provides. Going off the grid is a matter of getting rid of those possibilities. Resisting them is stressful; giving in to them is trivializing. The problem is that subconsciously, we don't see clearly. Consciously, we know that staying immersed in a book is more rewarding and is what we want to do right now, but subconsciously, every trivial impulse we don't follow up feels like a valuable opportunity lost. Truly believing, at all layers of consciousness, that those temptations have nothing to offer is the right solution, but it's hard to achieve. In Buddhism this is called the elimination of doubt or uncertainty. It means bringing your subconscious or emotional mind into accordance with your conscious convictions.