2 ms·
I'm pretty sure that I read more longer pieces than I used to, as so much is available for any topic of interest. In fact, I must decline to read some things si
by dwc 13y ago
I'm pretty sure that I read more longer pieces than I used to, as so much is available for any topic of interest. In fact, I must decline to read some things simply due to time constraints. Contrast that with getting a magazine once per month, where I was much more willing to "curl up with a good article" even if it wasn't so good, where I was willing to wade through asides on the colorful characters of the main players.
These days, I want non-fiction articles to get to the damned point. I'm fine with long articles, but I don't want my time wasted. Not long ago I began reading popular coverage of an exciting scientific finding. The article began with something like this: "John grew up in a small Ohio town. His father was a clerk at a hardware store and his mother worked for an optometrist." Close tab. That might have been fine pre-internet, but it's not what I want now. Things have changed, but writers and editors are still operating in the old model. I don't mind humor, style, interesting biographical bits, et al, but I want them to occur in reasonably sized chunks inline with the actual subject matter. But mostly I want the information that was promised in the headline.
For fiction... I still buy books and read them on kindle. I buy and read more new books now than I used to.
I don't think I'm all that unusual among people who habitually read.
- crpatino 13y agoI don't think this is the same phenomena the article was talking about. It is not that online readers lack the ability/patience to read long pointless text-walls. It is that they seem unable to grok longer, come complex texts. As a programmer, I have been reading online my whole adult life, and probably spend online much more than the average (but "civilians" seem to be catching up, fast). I do not feel I am particularly affected by this effects, but I (and I suspect you as well) have do deal on a daily basis with complex, artificial, information dense constructions all the time. Contrast that with the mindless stream of tweets, likes and lolcats that fall on the typical user every day. Also, I as well as you read fiction but online and in paper. It's hard to measure but I'd say at least a million words per year. This quantity is not typical at all. On the other hand, even amateur fanfiction is authored with an audience in mind and goes to at least an order of magnitude more composition and editing than whatever piece of crap we send/recv over the privacy of out SMS on a daily basis. So yes, I think you are pretty well protected from the debilitating symptoms of these new disease (if you allow me to call it that way).