In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an article in the Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—that became famous enough to merit its own Wikipedia page—in which he argues that the abundance of information that the internet provides is diminishing our abilities to actually comprehend what we read. Every article written about the article that I found mentioned this particular quote: “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
Perhaps the reason Carr had to discard his flippers is because the sea just got too big and too populated for him to actually see anything. When you encounter so many sentences a day, even if they are well constructed, intelligent, and seemingly memorable, how do you actually remember one intelligent thought when a thousand others are clamoring for your attention?
A UC San Diego report published in 2009 suggests the average American’s eyes cross 100,500 words a day—text messages, emails, social media, subtitles, advertisements—and that was in 2008. Data collected by the marketing company Likehack tells us that the average social media user “reads”—or perhaps just clicks on—285 pieces of content daily, an estimated 54,000 words. If it is true, then we are reading a novel slightly longer than The Great Gatsby every day.
Of course, the word “read” is rather diluted in this instance. You can peruse or you can skim, and it’s still reading. I spoke with writer and avid reader John Sherman about his online reading habits. “Sometimes, when I say I read an article,” said Sherman, “what I actually mean is I read a tweet about that article.” He is hardly alone in this. Using information collected from the data analysis firm Chartbeat, Fahrad Manjoo writes at Slate that there is a very poor correlation between how far a reader scrolls down in an article and when he or she shares the article on Twitter. In fact, people are more likely to tweet a link to an article if they have not read it fully. “There is so much content out there, capital c, and a lot of it overlaps,” Sherman said. “It takes less time to respond to an idea than a complete argument.”
It takes even less time to respond to an idea or argument with somebody else’s article. Have you read this? No, but that’s like what I read in this other piece. Perhaps nothing depicts this exchange better than a particular Portlandia skit, in which Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein rat-a-tat back and forth about what they’ve read, begin tearing the pages out of a magazine and stuffing them in their mouths, and when they run across the street to lunge for a Yellow Pages, they get hit by a car. “Hey, can’t you read?” yells the driver.
Reading is a nuanced word, but the most common kind of reading is likely reading as consumption: where we read, especially on the Internet, merely to acquire information. Information that stands no chance of becoming knowledge unless it “sticks.”
by Nikkitha Bakshani, TMN | Read more:
Image: Rok Hodej
Perhaps the reason Carr had to discard his flippers is because the sea just got too big and too populated for him to actually see anything. When you encounter so many sentences a day, even if they are well constructed, intelligent, and seemingly memorable, how do you actually remember one intelligent thought when a thousand others are clamoring for your attention?A UC San Diego report published in 2009 suggests the average American’s eyes cross 100,500 words a day—text messages, emails, social media, subtitles, advertisements—and that was in 2008. Data collected by the marketing company Likehack tells us that the average social media user “reads”—or perhaps just clicks on—285 pieces of content daily, an estimated 54,000 words. If it is true, then we are reading a novel slightly longer than The Great Gatsby every day.
Of course, the word “read” is rather diluted in this instance. You can peruse or you can skim, and it’s still reading. I spoke with writer and avid reader John Sherman about his online reading habits. “Sometimes, when I say I read an article,” said Sherman, “what I actually mean is I read a tweet about that article.” He is hardly alone in this. Using information collected from the data analysis firm Chartbeat, Fahrad Manjoo writes at Slate that there is a very poor correlation between how far a reader scrolls down in an article and when he or she shares the article on Twitter. In fact, people are more likely to tweet a link to an article if they have not read it fully. “There is so much content out there, capital c, and a lot of it overlaps,” Sherman said. “It takes less time to respond to an idea than a complete argument.”
It takes even less time to respond to an idea or argument with somebody else’s article. Have you read this? No, but that’s like what I read in this other piece. Perhaps nothing depicts this exchange better than a particular Portlandia skit, in which Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein rat-a-tat back and forth about what they’ve read, begin tearing the pages out of a magazine and stuffing them in their mouths, and when they run across the street to lunge for a Yellow Pages, they get hit by a car. “Hey, can’t you read?” yells the driver.
Reading is a nuanced word, but the most common kind of reading is likely reading as consumption: where we read, especially on the Internet, merely to acquire information. Information that stands no chance of becoming knowledge unless it “sticks.”
by Nikkitha Bakshani, TMN | Read more:
Image: Rok Hodej
