
The New Reading Environment - miobrien
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-32/the-intellectual-situation/the-new-reading-environment/
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CptFribble
This is a consequence of engaging each other over what team we're on
(right/left, etc), rather than engage with messy collections of individual
ideas.

But humans are hard-wired for tribalism, and hard-wires are the hardest to
educate away. I'm not pining for a mystical past where all debate was
intelligent and civil, but I do think the current landscape of media
consumption technologies have thrown the worst aspects of our tribal habits
into sharp relief.

Instead, I pine for a future where behavioral incentives align with the needs
of humans, rather than with economic metrics.

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mathgenius
I really loved reading this article. Although I had to turn off my twitter
brain to get there.

Here is the money quote for me:

"Were his readers not reading well enough, or did he not write it well enough?
Disagreement is mostly blamed on miscommunication. The burden of clarity is
now entirely on the author, which makes for dull and repetitive arguments —
and a demand that certain people come to represent, unambiguously, certain
arguments. One’s cards must all be laid on the table, faceup, and one’s
position must be unified. But the rise of misreading doesn’t give permission
not to mean what you say."

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readcarefully
”Readers lose patience, and the careful quoting, like snipping coupons with
precision, becomes tearing — into lines, phrases, and points."

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mirimir
There are some interesting points. And I do agree that outrage-driven
clickbaitiness has too much become the norm.

But I'm somewhat bewildered by the sense of authorial entitlement. I'm
reminded of a piece by someone at Salon, maybe 15 years ago, whinging about
lack of respect from readers, and resulting emotional pain. Maybe it's just
that I grew up in academia, where people might gut your latest work through a
seemingly innocent question during a seminar.

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noelwelsh
I thought the headline was interesting enough to clickthrough, but the first
paragraph didn't get to the point so I decided not to invest further time in
the article. Reporting on the off chance this ties into the theme of the
article I didn't read.

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readcarefully
Nah.

It's about everything written now is becoming an op-ed and inducing outrage.

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dbingham
You know, I spent last year subscribed to a bunch of these niche journals with
the hope of broadening my intellectual intake. I tried to get a good variety -
everything from Jacobin (socialist) to National Affairs (neocon). I'm not sure
it was worthwhile. They're full of the same flood of opinions you get from the
broader internet - in much more flowery prose.

N+1 is one of those journals and this article falls into that same category.
It's an opinion piece about opinion pieces written in unnecessarily flowery
and meandering prose. After reaching its conclusion my main thought was "It
took you that long to say _that_?" Ironically, that very reaction is one of
the things the author is railing against.

There is plenty to pick apart in our media landscape today. With perhaps the
most challenging question to address being "When, if ever, is an opinion too
dangerous to freedom to be given a platform?" Closely followed by "How can we
improve the tenor and character of the national debate, given the constraints
of media economics?"

But I really don't feel like this article succeeded in providing a coherent or
cogent criticism of that landscape. Instead it just read like a flowery screed
against opinions the author didn't like.

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KineticLensman
I was trying to read it to write a TL;DR

> ... the rise of misreading doesn’t give permission not to mean what you say

But I gave up at this point.

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echion
Why are there not more upvotes than downvotes? It's not like the quoted
sentence wasn't a terrible counter-example to the resistance against the fight
against layering negatives and the lack of the active voice.

