
How the Internet changed the way we read - walterbell
http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/how-internet-changed-way-we-read/
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Animats
_" The truth is that most of us read continuously in a perpetual stream of
incestuous words, but instead of reading novels, book reviews, or newspapers
like we used to in the ancien régime, we now read text messages, social media,
and bite-sized entries about our protean cultural history on Wikipedia."_

In other words, instead of reading stuff written by Important Academics like
the author ("a lecturer in the English department at the University of
California Irvine. .. BA in comp lit from Oberlin College , a MFA in fiction
from the University of Notre Dame, and a MA in English and a Ph.D. in
Literature and Creative Writing from USC"). they're reading stuff by Other
People who Shouldn't Count. Aw. Weep for the irrelevant academic.

That's not the problem. The problem is the decline of journalistic reporting.
Journalism was all those reporters who went out in the cold and rain and
small-arms fire to where something was happening. They knew people who worked
in factories and union halls and police stations. They were accustomed to
digging out news. ("News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is
publicity." \- British tabloid owner, circa 1900.) They sent back stories with
Who and What and Where and When and Why.

There are still some of those people left. They work for the very few
remaining news organizations that can afford them. The rest rewrite press
releases and pontificate. They work for Demand Media and Aol, churning out
glosses on the work of others and carefully watching their page hit
statistics. That's the problem.

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Isamu
The thesis is that we read small bits of text all day, rather than books.

If anyone has a graph to show a decline in book consumption, I'd be interested
to see it.

In my personal experience, I am much more aware of all sorts of books that I
would like to take a look at, and it is much easier to do a quick search.

There are many more places that I see book recommendations. Reviews and
mentions are much more plentiful. And of course tech books have exploded in
the post-internet era.

My book consumption (reading) is way up because the all the local libraries
are connected in a network that pools all their catalogs, and I have an
enormous selection of books.

My book buying is probably about the same, but more informed since I can be
more careful about the books I want to have permanently.

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mbrock
Yes, we've all heard this a thousand times... on random websites like the
"Daily Dot" and from the dozens of writers who capitalize on internet
backlash.

Yes, we all suck at reading, the internet is destroying America, the good old
days when everybody was reading Serious Novels and Coherent Arguments and the
New Yorker is gone forever and youth culture killed my dog.

Marshall McLuhan was way ahead of these guys. He was brought up with literary
print culture, and he went through a phase of fear and loathing the emerging
electronic culture, but then he realized he was ranting and raving to no good
and adopted a different attitude.

From the McLuhan Playboy interview:

> _You see, I am not a crusader; I imagine I would be most happy living in a
> secure preliterate environment; I would never attempt to change my world,
> for better or worse. Thus I derive no joy from observing the traumatic
> effects of media on man, although I do obtain satisfaction from grasping
> their modes of operation. Such comprehension is inherently cool, since it is
> simultaneously involvement and detachment. This posture is essential in
> studying media. One must begin by becoming extraenvironmental, putting
> oneself beyond the battle in order to study and understand the configuration
> of forces. It’s vital to adopt a posture of arrogant superiority; instead of
> scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one
> should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes. They respond
> beautifully to such resolute treatment and soon become servants rather than
> masters. But without this detached involvement, I could never objectively
> observe media; it would be like an octopus grappling with the Empire State
> Building. So I employ the greatest boon of literate culture: the power of
> man to act without reaction — the sort of specialization by dissociation
> that has been the driving motive force behind Western civilization._

> _The Western world is being revolutionized by the electric media as rapidly
> as the East is being Westernized, and although the society that eventually
> emerges may be superior to our own, the process of change is agonizing._ I
> must move through this pain-wracked transitional era as a scientist would
> move through a world of disease; once a surgeon becomes personally involved
> and disturbed about the condition of his patient, he loses the power to help
> that patient. _Clinical detachment is not some kind of haughty pose I affect
> — nor does it reflect any lack of compassion on my part; it’s simply a
> survival strategy. The world we are living in is not one I would have
> created on my own drawing board, but it’s the one in which I must live, and
> in which the students I teach must live. If nothing else, I owe it to them
> to avoid the luxury of moral indignation or the troglodytic security of the
> ivory tower and to get down into the junk yard of environmental change and
> steam-shovel my way through to a comprehension of its contents and its lines
> of force — in order to understand how and why it is metamorphosing man._

[https://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-
mar...](https://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-
mcluhan/)

~~~
dang
That's a great quote. McLuhan had a genius for that kind of objectivity, so
I'm not sure your comparison is entirely fair.

Many of McLuhan's comments that seemed cryptic and oracular in the 1960s sound
commonplace now. It's astonishing how much he figured out decades before the
mass internet.

~~~
mbrock
It's hard to find anything by McLuhan that isn't a great quote!

I vaguely remember some interview where he expressed a bit of dismay at being
received as a wild and out there psychedelic preacher when he was really doing
his best to express the trajectory of media and the world as he saw it.

Of course he must have delighted in the way he used language so prophetically
and aphoristically, and he did make huge claims every other sentence. He
seemed to talk like that naturally; if you listen to live interviews, he's the
same way.

Tons of fact recall like Chomsky, spectacular persona like Zizek, and
futuristic like Kurzweil—it's weird he isn't more popular here. Maybe it's
because if you like him people think you're a hippie.

~~~
dang
McLuhan was a remarkable combination of conservative Catholic and pop culture
proto-troll. His relative obscurity now is probably a reaction against his
original celebrity. Many academics were shocked and embittered by that, and
there seems little incentive to treat him seriously yet, so the attempts that
I've seen to rehabilitate him as a thinker are so far still marginal.

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dominotw
On a related note. Does anyone have any references to how english grammar is
changing because of this.

~~~
freehunter
On a related note to your related note, there's long been a difference between
written language and spoken language [1]. Written language tends to be more
complex, since it's easier to pause and think about what you're going to say,
and it's still easy to understand because the reader can read it over and over
again. Some writers find it difficult to write dialog for this reason, it's
such a shift in format. Spoken language also tends to run on with incomplete
sentences because people want to hold the channel open for themselves while
they are forming a thought, but others also want to break in for their turn.

Now with the Internet and texting, of course you get plenty of regular, formal
written English like I am doing right now. But you also get a new shorthand,
and new information being presented. its like omg lol and you don't need
punctuation

just send another text

this is how we pause for...

dramatic effect

It might be too early in the development of the Internet and smartphones to
really key in on any sort of new grammar rules, but it's really worth thinking
about. Plenty of times I find myself thinking "should I write haha or lol or
just send a smiley", so there will be some rules shake out of it for sure.

[1]
[http://www.omniglot.com/writing/writingvspeech.htm](http://www.omniglot.com/writing/writingvspeech.htm)

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SimeVidas
tl;dr?

~~~
tough_luck
We're skimming good material as we are skimming this bad article.

~~~
SimeVidas
I just want the tl;dr to save time :)

