Has online skimming made a "slow reading" movement necessary?

“I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”

...Wolf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the study of reading, was startled last year to discover her brain was apparently adapting, too. After a day of scrolling through the Web and hundreds of e-mails, she sat down one evening to read Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game.”

“I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it,” she said. “It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.”

...Several English department chairs from around the country have e-mailed her to say their students are having trouble reading the classics.

“They cannot read ‘Middlemarch.’ They cannot read William James or Henry James,” Wolf said. “I can’t tell you how many people have written to me about this phenomenon. The students no longer will or are perhaps incapable of dealing with the convoluted syntax and construction of George Eliot and Henry James.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/serious-reading-takes-a-hit-from-online-scanning-and-skimming-researchers-say/2014/04/06/088028d2-b5d2-11e3-b899-20667de76985_story.html

don't we already have a thread about rimming?

whence this golden age of students who will read henry james with pleasure?

not that I don't think this is a "thing," but I also don't think there's much to be gained by making it yet another "what about the children" thing.

i read a lot but i have always had a hard time reading the "classics", well before the internet became a part of my life

i think the scientist-author is saying it is a what-about-us thing ryan?

sorry I was skimming

RYAN CAN YOU HEAR ME

LET'S DO THIS ONE WORD AT A TIME

calm down j nobody's gonna be doing time.

i am a prose snob and everything but "are they having trouble with henry james' syntax" is not the metric i would use to determine whether a culture's ability to process language had hopelessly decayed

“It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.”

this happens to me all the time (with george r r martin as often as with joyce) but i feel like it always has? maybe it hasn't always as much. it's usually just cuz i'm anxious abt something honestly.

ok but seriously folks...

i am sure that my reading and concentration stamina is less than it used to be. gone are the days when I could, with nary a smartphone or internet access in sight, go through a big book slowly and with time to digest it. but I don't know if this is "technology" or if I am just more distracted because I'm like a "grown up" now, and that means that I get less pleasure from it. how many times can something really surprise and engross you? there's an "eros" that goes missing.

no idea what Henry James has to do with this but I imagine he'll be fine. I could pick up moby dick and happily read it again though. whenever I set aside time and space to read it's been blissful, if not as exciting.

dlh makes a really good point! maybe kids are just unused to reading.

like I've been on a paragraph of this dense tome for like an hour now, but this is nothing new.

Maybe Henry James just sucks

Slow reading movement was necessary before the internet imo.

Herman Hesse? What is she, in ninth grade?

i have been an online person since my teenaged years, more than two decades now

and before that i was a nonstop reader

and in college i made big strides in becoming a better reader, more patient, reading more wtf henry james syntax style prose

but honestly since round about the time i started grad school my discipline for reading has flagged and oscillated wildly

that was also round about the time the world in general started getting online

now i read pretty much every single day, but i have not finished many books in years

i think it has more to do with desire and interest in connection than with difficulty or distraction or whatever. reading offline is more fundamentally isolating and it's harder to cleave to it.

it's hard not to feel like what you read online will connect you to something, someone—then, when you go back to a book, to be able to withhold that urgency for a while to just gradually accumulate a sense for the book, for what it's saying, work through its ideas, experience it as a thing—it amounts to a delay in the specific kind of gratification which is your feeling that you're connecting to others, the isolated little blip feeling that manifests now in the form of status updates, etc.

in the last five years i've become a marginalia stan, to the point where i will read a novel or whatever that i'm not trying to take too seriously, and feel at sea if it's not something i'm marking up with a pencil in my hand.

i read a book as an undergrad that i went on to write my phd about, and i've read it more since then, so that makes one book i've been reading for ~15 years. in the process i forced myself to start only reading it in the original language because i would look at the english and just be like, whatever, gliding over it, because i felt like i knew so well what it said. reading in a foreign language became a separate thing for me because of that. like a weird double of the reading i used to do.

When George Eliot and Henry James wrote their novels, their audience spoke in longer and more convoluted syntax than would be used by any of today's college students in everyday conversation. Their writing was a reflection of this. If their audience more resembled a modern audience, I expect their syntax would have been simpler.

What strikes me as peculiar is that authors like Pynchon and DFW, whose verbal intricacies and crochets are more rococo than anything James or Eliot wrote, find willing and eager modern audiences who dote on these artificialities, however remote they may be from their own use of language. It's as if, for them, life and art are two spheres with very little overlap.

j.'s post very close to my own experience, tho I am still able to power through many books. so many novels these days, though.

Oh and fuck Middlemarch

xps: not so many novels...

I don't know much about that era, but j. also makes me think these difficult novels were probably supported by a different social structure, clubs etc, in which having read all the same things and being able to discuss them was important.

dfw and pynchon were my school of syntax at that college age!

my students will complain sometimes about my syntax and my lengthy sentences, which come out most when i am lecturing and am not super deep into the material to the point of being able to back-and-forth it with them every step of the way. but i honestly think that they literally have not heard people speak out loud at any length in much any relation to non-managerial prose outside, say, rallies and (maybe) sermons, anymore.

in my discipline there is a distinguished historical scholar who started producing dumbed-down/modernized abridgements of classic texts because he became convinced that students were no longer capable of reading the originals, and that it didn't matter that much for them to do so.

it takes fifteen minutes for my brain to calibrate if I'm reading something ambitious/good. I think there's a little something to thinking about this stuff but as usual there's some "oh no! everything will be changed irrevocably!" aspect to the presentation that's like...c'mon. plenty of young people who love books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler

xpost

^^^abridgments have been around forver

they have, but the extent of the case i have in mind is p. egregious to me

i mean like on the level of rewriting sentences, changing vocab, which is anathema to many other values we prize. we've had abridgements of e.g. locke for a long time (b/c locke is widely perceived as a repetitive windbag)

reading online, normally as part of browsing, is a much cooler activity, in the mcluhanite sense, than reading printed prose. connectivity, greater involvement of senses &c. I think it's more interesting to work out how that is changing how ppl think than just to panic, tho iirc mcluhan was in favour of taking some steps to preserve the values/strengths of the more visual (in his sense) previous age

The only Henry James story I ever read was "Jolly Corner" and I found it extremely difficult. As much as I admired aspects of it, I really hated reading it overall. So I read up about him a bit and found out about his fans and detractors. It kind of worried me that I hated reading a guy who was supposedly the best writer of all time. But I liked that he had such stylistic extremity because so few authors are that distinct. The fans seemed so passionate that I'm inclined to believe some people really do relish his work. It also reminded me of Twitter fiends and Stephen King at his worst because it seemed to me that HJ liked to write every single thought that crossed his mind in great detail (but I don't have enough experience with him).

But I'm still wondering two things...
Can anyone read this stuff in a fluid way and fully comprehend it all?
Would a good editor allow writers to write like this today? I always had a feeling that HJ's ways would be seen as incorrect by a lot of people. Did his status allow him to get away with things nobody else could?
Be gentle with my philistine questions, I'm not a great reader.

just a personal thing perhaps, but if impulsively click on another click-bait link about this or that tv show or current event and then dutifully read through it only to find that it pretty much says nothing and has no reason to exist and is terribly written and only at best a half-argument then I may soon find reading Henry James alone in my room a blessed alternative.

i wish that were enough to make me stick with james, or anything, because then it would be done, and i would be stuck

i am happy w/ this thread; good thing i killfiled that one jerk.

When George Eliot and Henry James wrote their novels, their audience spoke in longer and more convoluted syntax than would be used by any of today's college students in everyday conversation. Their writing was a reflection of this.

What makes you say that late 19th century spoken English had longer sentence length and more convoluted syntax?

xp

I forget which author (Mencken?) wrote that newspaper editorials came in exactly two flavors: viewing with satisfaction and pointing with alarm. The OP is the second flavor. It is far more important that societies engage in a certain amount of serious, illuminating thought about themselves and others and what is to be done, than that college students read Henry James with understanding and pleasure. Henry will have to fend for himself.

What makes you say that late 19th century spoken English had longer sentence length and more convoluted syntax?

I acknowledge the question, but I must go out now and shall return to it later. The main distinction is that I was speaking of his audience, not all English speakers everywhere.

In college, I skimmed (speed read?) Great Expectations in about three hours. I'm sure I couldn't do that today. In fact, for me, my aging brain has made slow reading (close reading?) a necessity.

Slow reading goes well with rereading. Rereading is where you can relax into the book, without that pressure to conquer it by getting to the end, since you've done that already.

The main distinction is that I was speaking of his audience, not all English speakers everywhere.

My guess would be that they were used to *reading* that style of prose, but probably did not gain any additional facility for doing so by talking that way because they did not talk that way. But this is just a somewhat informed opinion... I'm curious to know either way.

more on topic, I've noticed that I never pause to reflect on a book after I have finished reading it... same goes for movies. As soon I finish them, I immediately pop online and see what is going on. I feel like that is probably a bad thing in terms of reducing the impact of powerful books, films, etc... I go online to see opinions before really taking the time to let my own materialize.

I used to sit there for a while and think about what I'd just seen.

more on topic, I've noticed that I never pause to reflect on a book after I have finished reading it... same goes for movies. As soon I finish them, I immediately pop online and see what is going on. I feel like that is probably a bad thing in terms of reducing the impact of powerful books, films, etc... I go online to see opinions before really taking the time to let my own materialize.

I enjoy my time sitting after a book so much, and don't do it long enough, I think - this post inspires me to want to make time for that, gonna make a habit of it, thank you f hazel!

i don't think it matters too much if other people can't be arsed to read properly tbh

being a steady reader of books is key. if you only read books for school, and because you have to, you are going to have problems with focus no matter what you are reading. if you read books a lot/frequently, the internet isn't going to mess you up too much. a certain amount of unpluggedness is also a good idea. if you are going to read a book, put the laptop away. and James can be tough going for anyone. even James fans. Herman Hesse on the other hand shouldn't be too much of a problem...

(it can take a good 10 or 20 pages to get accustomed to the rhythm of a book and if you are used to quick gulps of info/words, you have to acclimate yourself to the slower pace. but it ain't rocket science.)

(lots of writers have problems with James too. if you want fine writing from that era that isn't a trial or a test of your stamina you can read Hardy or Trollope or Wharton.)

When George Eliot and Henry James wrote their novels, their audience spoke in longer and more convoluted syntax than would be used by any of today's college students in everyday conversation. Their writing was a reflection of this.

Well, James took to dictating his work after he got writer's cramp, mid-1890s, and it was at that point that his sentences got more 'convoluted' and much more abstract, more deliberately elusive. There is a vast stylistic difference between Washington Square (early), The Bostonians (middle) or The Wings of the Dove (late). It's not v. helpful just to say 'Henry James' as a catch-all for complexity.

it's bullshit to imagine that everyday speech in the 1890s wasn't as slangy and snappy as it is today

Detective fiction from the 1920s/30s is a great way to ram yourself into a brick wall of incomprehensibility from short, snappy sentences filled with slang that didn't make it into the present day.

I sure wish we all spoke like in those noir films from the 40s.

Typing a post about what I'm reading/watching gives me the "pause to reflect".

Great thread, prob cos i forced myself to read it slowly

Bunch of dizzy dames in here.

I've got a G.P. for slow reading, I'm gonna throw my computer in the W.P.B.

i find i read more quickly than ever and also more slowly. skim read like crazy, then when i find something impt i'll come to a crawl. but online is harder, because while my mind tries to process i instinctively skip to other tabs and browse around mindlessly and then get distraced.

important sustained reading usually takes deliberate isolation on my part.

subscribing to mags helps a little in this regard, for more serious subway reading, at least.

it takes fifteen minutes for my brain to calibrate if I'm reading something ambitious/good. I think there's a little something to thinking about this stuff but as usual there's some "oh no! everything will be changed irrevocably!" aspect to the presentation that's like...c'mon. plenty of young people who love books.

― Now I Am Become Dracula (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Tuesday, 8 April 2014 19:41 (Yesterday)

that is a misreading, wolf is arguing that neuroplasticity is not merely a developmental phase in children or adolescents but a continuous process; with conscious direction adults can amend their skim-reading habits

“The brain is plastic its whole life span,” Wolf said. “The brain is constantly adapting.”

....

It took me two weeks, but by the end of the second week I had pretty much recovered myself so I could enjoy and finish the book.”

Then she read it again.

“I wanted to enjoy this form of reading again,” Wolf said. “When I found myself, it was like I recovered. I found my ability again to slow down, savor and think.”

My guess would be that they were used to *reading* that style of prose, but probably did not gain any additional facility for doing so by talking that way because they did not talk that way.

The only evidence I can bring to bear for my contention can be challenged, because all of it is either mediated by writing (which is why it still exists as evidence) or else it is mediated by the artificiality of early recording technology. But the best evidence I have any familiarity with would be journals and letters, which are much more informal than writings for publication, the speech put into characters mouths in various theater pieces, and recordings made back when wax cylinders were in use. All of them I've seen or heard from the period of 1880 - 1910 or thereabouts strike me as somewhat high-flown by today's standards.

The evidence I would love to look at would be transcripts of court testimony, which is yet another somewhat formal setting, but it would be impromptu enough to be the best reflection we can get at for how educated members of the middle and upper classes spoke when they were answering a direct question they did not have much time to think about before they spoke.

The reason I think some credence can be placed in such stuff as dramatic dialogue is that, in the same way that Hollywood's snappy dialogue inspired hundreds of thousands of young people to emulate it, the theater (especially melodrama) played an equivalent role in its day, so what begins as artificial seeps its way into the everyday culture and life tries to imitate art.

people on ilx can be kinda wordy

henry james isn't all that bad. i've found that i have an easier time sustaining the attention to enjoy "difficult" writing now than i did when i was 21 or so. however, i have a harder time believing my own opinions and so subjectively feel dumber than i did then.

Reading well is hard work

My day job is hard work but it's not really reading well

When I go home I don't want to do any more hard work

Maybe one day when I don't have a hard day job I'll read better

but I don't know if this is "technology" or if I am just more distracted because I'm like a "grown up" now, and that means that I get less pleasure from it. how many times can something really surprise and engross you? there's an "eros" that goes missing.

When this started happening to me I started really getting into poetry

The line break makes words strange again

But then I stopped because I didn't have the stamina

xxxpost, i find that im now writing down my thoughts after a film, as i also find it hard to keep thinking about it like i once did otherwise. now i seem to have a 'that's that' approach to it, which is a bit sad, though maybe expected as you get older (or when you work a job you dont really want to).

it's hard not to feel like what you read online will connect you to something, someone—then, when you go back to a book, to be able to withhold that urgency for a while to just gradually accumulate a sense for the book, for what it's saying, work through its ideas, experience it as a thing—it amounts to a delay in the specific kind of gratification which is your feeling that you're connecting to others, the isolated little blip feeling that manifests now in the form of status updates, etc.

otm. i think it has a lot to do with the attraction of connectivity vs the isolation of long/slow/deep reading

tl;dr

oh, wow, warning: this page is self-referential

Reading well is hard work
My day job is hard work but it's not really reading well
When I go home I don't want to do any more hard work

this also is a very good point!

When George Eliot and Henry James wrote their novels, their audience spoke in longer and more convoluted syntax than would be used by any of today's college students in everyday conversation. Their writing was a reflection of this.

haha no one on earth spoke like Henry James, then and now.

I used to sit there for a while and think about what I'd just seen.

― erry red flag (f. hazel),

Can't do this! I think about what I've seen and read while cooking, showering, driving, cutting toenails, and so on.

I think about movies on the TRAIN home after seeing them (usu in a repertory house/museum)

As someone said upthread, "Henry James" is a metonym for complexity, as if "The Golden Bowl" represented his output. I usually send newbies to "Washington Square" or "The Europeans," whose prose is so hard and declarative that he's like an 18th century aphorist.

Surely most well written prose should be easy to read? But I'm not really well read enough to know when difficult prose is poorly written or when I'm not smart enough to read it properly.

i'm not sure any of those distinctions are valuable or wholly true

Probably depends on the genre

For me, "well written" prose makes me stop and think and ponder on a new connection made

Giving new value to a coin whose face is worn from wear

But you wouldn't want to do that in a CNN article

I generally make it a point to watch the entire end credits of a movie just to force myself to think about what I just saw for at least a couple of minutes.

xxxp

xp

yeah i was gonna say a car manual shd probably be "easy to read" but ease of reading, lucidity of prose, the gap between a pre-linguistic idea to be expressed and the most utilitarian means of expression, reading for a particular kind of meaning - this is mostly problematic or unintersting for me personally

Giving new value to a coin whose face is worn from wear

In the days of yore, this was more the function of poetry, not prose.

I'm increasingly more often deciding that something is poorly written if it flows awkwardly. Not to say that well written prose is everything.

The distinction collapsed at some point like 100 years ago. Poetry doesn't need to have line breaks and prose can be trippy and free associative.

Maybe more like 150 yrs ago

i'm reading as much (or more!) long-form books as i ever have, but i've gotten into the habit of reading everything on my phone out of convenience. i have no problem reading something long or complex but sometimes i worry i've lost the taste for reading physical books...there's definitely a different sensation to reading the same book in small, fast-moving chunks of text vs larger pages made out of trees.

I've mostly been under the impression that good writing was not as subjective as painting or singing but not as objective as car driving. How people decide what good acting is confuses me more.

The distinction collapsed

Too much of what passes for lyrical prose or 'fine writing' is what used to be known as purple prose. I have very limited patience for it. But we digress.

yeah there is definitely beginner/intermediate/expert James. i like James and yet i have the same problems a lot of people have with him. he can be way obscure and tedious. and dense. i can read looooooong descriptive paragraphs and have no clue what the hell someone is doing or feeling. i end up re-reading things a lot (of the denser stuff. the earlier books and stories are no problem to read). and sometimes i have wondered if it was worth the effort. i only read the first two books of proust and i re-read a ton and i definitely felt like it was worth it. it was enjoyable to study those books while reading. with James i will have the urge to yell: dude, just spit it out! i find him weird. i like the weirdness. and his sentences can be fucking crazy. and i dig that. i just read some author interview where they said they didn't like James because in the end he DIDN'T really know people and life that well. that everything he wrote was hermetically sealed in his head and didn't come from life. it was all just an exercise for him. i don't agree with all that but i saw what they meant. devoting zillions of words to emotions and people and having so much of it seem like an academic exercise in writing. i also feel like he just isn't as important to a lot of people as he used to be. that people are fine not reading him. they don't feel like they HAVE to like in the old days.

I love good purple prose more than anything.

I'm hardly "literate" in the way a lot of you are, but I do feel that with James, what was once groundbreaking and kind of superhuman-ly created about his writing has become the de facto method in which a lot of artists work. Inventing whole worlds in their heads, and being taken seriously because, well, anyone can be taken seriously now. If I published a 1000 pages of highly stylized prose, that someone who cared enough to analyze would find contained a peculiar inner logic and decided that it could, under some reasonable set of criteria, be judged a masterpiece -- well, I'm not sure anyone would care. Why should they? Peculiar inner logic and expert idiosyncrasy is no longer the domain of geniuses.

haha wherein your author has written a lot of bs about henry james but thinking of james joyce

expert idiosyncrasy is no longer the domain of geniuses.

Exhibit A: Sport coat with a hoody underneath it.

if someone asked me what henry james to read i think i would say: have you read any flaubert?

Listening to Eric Sevareid read his commentaries aloud on the CBS evening news in the 1960s and 1970s, one understood --or imagined one understood-- the relationship between complex sentence structure and complex thought.

tl;dr

iswydt

/Giving new value to a coin whose face is worn from wear/

In the days of yore, this was more the function of poetry, not prose.

I was hoping someone would catch the Nietzsche reference

i think there should be more internet think pieces on this subject, broken into 6-8 page articles that require clickthroughs

15 clickthrus you won't believe about this thinkpiece!

i have felt stupid a lot, recently, about books, because i really don't read books anymore, novels super rarely because i just can't get in the zone but even books more generally, books just as objects, reading a book being something i do partially, consequent of feeling interested enough in something to pull it from the library, but inevitably dropping it for something else before i finish because of the attention span thing being discussed here. the thing that is making me feel stupid is that each of the last few books i have read have been just my absolute favourite thing; i read white girls by hilton als (i guess 70% of it? 7 or 8 of its 11 or 12 essays), & was pretty much emotionally reshaped by its first half; i read the 2500 random things about me too book, by matias viegener, probably 75% of it, it had to go back to the library, i would have finished it (& actually i kind of want to shout out to it here as a kind of "read henry james? read THIS!" style shock-of-the-modern to anybody advocating for hitting the classics, its form itself kind of a reconsideration of what reading something means), & loved it & think of it really pretty often, & the same with whichever books i read before that. some plays i think. & to elicit such reward from my reading but to seemingly be unable to responsively up my input to yield more of the same? i feel stupid. but!, i can't not view this all through the same lens that, like people are saying itt, is applicable to any romantic back-when argument. like things are just different now. there's a part of the conversation that's just ... Is TV The New Shitty American Seventies Cinema? Is The Novel Still Relevant Amid The Fractious Blinking Cursor Strewn Landscape Of The Seventies? Is Reading Singing Around A Piano, retired through replacement? & i don't know, i guess i kind of do vibe with that, i read less & really just chose breadth over depth a couple of years ago & am satisfied with my pot luck conversational dip-in thought diet composed of new yorker articles, some ilx posters who have areas of expertise, reading journalism & having friends relay the general thrust of things they learned about reading a whole wikipedia page. suddenly i know about plane crashes. i'm okay with all of these trade offs according to the ratio employed in that speech in inherit the wind, about gaining the aeroplane involving sacrificing the unknown, gaining the telephone meaning forgoing some of the cyclical thrills imposed by reunion after distance. & it gets old hearing people decry cellphones or whatever without simultaneously feeling their obvious new romances & enhancements & facilities. for somebody to be suddenly able to feel their wrist mitten-strung with the hand of a distant other; swoon. but i guess what i think about when i think about the novels thing is just that i can get so trapped by indulging impulse over yielding to intellectual control. if i know i like drawing but always am more immediately interested in checking my e-mail, i will never end up drawing & i will miss it. so i have to tame myself. i have to take an active step. i feel like what a slow-reading-society would look like would be just the same as anything else we have to actively cultivate; it actually really would just be book clubs, right? because the point wouldn't be necessarily to monastically secede from society & dedicate yourself to learning to internally pray, it would just be trying to make sure that the things that are probably true about Attention Spans, Now - that it's hard to concentrate, that you're distracted all of a sudden - are mitigated by infrastructure, like you read with somebody or you make it your thing you do on tuesdays without the internet happening. i think if things move toward nobody reading henry james, it will be because an experience of being alive - presumably previously memorably simulated by james' robust & peripatetic prose - will be available through other means. i just went to see the strange little cat, projected digitally, & between seeing it in public, the brightness of its representations, its attention to what noise is like now (proprietary-technology capsule-based coffee-making machine whirr you inhabit so fully in the mornings), it spoke to me about what life is like now. like that david foster wallace thing about leaving the house & being hit by fifty thousand discrete stimuli. & nobody's saying james' life was less complicated but wouldn't us updating our software to deal with multivalence be a necessary thing, rather than a failing of the old technology? i'm in love with some of what is getting left behind but that's the thing that has been happening forever.

suddenly i know about plane crashes.

Man if you could choose any sentence to talk about what being on the internet feels like now

i know that yearning for the days of long attention spans and solitary spaces are kind of a common thing, even historically ("the world is too much with us" and all), but there seems to be a contemporary wrinkle with it that's becoming more and more prominent.

there's an apologetic tone, a sheepish sense that we're skimming along the shallowest parts of the inner life and feel bad about it, that's really prevalent on the internet. i feel like jokes on twitter take this form quite often, flipping over the casual diversion of the meme of the day to reveal a kind of despair that, given the medium it's expressed in, can only be expressed through a knowing OTT cliche. maybe im reading too much into it, but there's a sense in which the omnipresence of media tends to raise the specter of what's *outside* all of that, in which being at the mercy of communication technology leads to an increasing sense of being manipulated or controlled by it.

im not trying to say that people are more depressed than they used to be (i dont know), but that the *internet* seems kind of depressed, if that makes any sense.

That makes total sense

*does back flip into a swimming pool filled with pudding*

a pudding as described by Henry James in 1905

ha! ok I'll amend it to: internet writing seems shaped by anxiety to a degree that non-internet long form writing doesn't--hence our desires to escape back into it.

Brains are perfectly happy to be stimulated by smartphones and the internet, because brains enjoy a steady stream of moderately stimulating inputs. So, if the point is what makes you feel pleasantly stimulated with the least effort, then the internet wins hands down. The iPhone is a hedonist's delight and not incidentally provides a powerful distraction from the discontents of modern life.

This is not evil. Possibly it is beneficial compared to the anodynes of earlier times. Books are no panacea, either. But you can't construct a sturdy person from a steady stream of moderately stimulating inputs. The most important parts of life all happen somewhere which not on the internet. The slow plodding through a book happens to allow a conversation to develop between your thoughts and the book's ideas. That's all.

It isn't as if the internet magically shuts down your brain. If anything, it overfills it.

http://biblioklept.org/2014/05/19/as-books-multiply-to-an-unmanageable-excess-selection-becomes-more-and-more-a-necessity-for-readers-thomas-de-quincey/

As books multiply to an unmanageable excess, selection becomes more and more a necessity for readers, and the power of selection more and more a desperate problem for the busy part of readers. The possibility of selecting wisely is becoming continually more hopeless as the necessity for selection is becoming continually more pressing. Exactly as the growing weight of books overlays and stifles the power of comparison, pari passu is the call for comparison the more clamorous; and thus arises a duty correspondingly more urgent of searching and revising until everything spurious has been weeded out from amongst the Flora of our highest literature, and until the waste of time for those who have so little at their command is reduced to a minimum. For, where the good cannot be read in its twentieth part, the more requisite it is that no part of the bad should steal an hour of the available time; and it is not to be endured that people without a minute to spare should be obliged first of all to read a book before they can ascertain whether in fact it is worth reading. The public cannot read by proxy as regards the good which it is to appropriate, but it can as regards the poison which it is to escape. And thus, as literature expands, becoming continually more of a household necessity, the duty resting upon critics (who are the vicarious readers for the public) becomes continually more urgent — of reviewing all works that may be supposed to have benefited too much or too indiscriminately by the superstition of a name. The praegustatores should have tasted of every cup, and reported its quality, before the public call for it; and, above all, they should have done this in all cases of the higher literature — that is, of literature properly so called.

wasted too much time reading that paragraph

I can't remember the last long-form book I read. It may have been 2 or 3 years. I'm totally OK with not reading anything long again, it's not that enjoyable for me. Or more precisely, the amount of joy rarely makes up for the required time investment.