The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains | Hacker News Reader

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

jseliger.com

12 pointsjseliger7 comments

The problem seems to be a little different than stated.

I like this quote from Jorge Luis Borges:

"Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary."

Perhaps one of the consequences of this shallowness is that we become more concise in our communication. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact today many books today have a pretty simple premise and waste hundreds of pages giving examples just to fill out the premise.

The truth probably is that most of the world have always been shallow in their understanding of any subject, it's just more obvious today.

But what many people perhaps lack in depth they will gain in diverse knowledge which itself is a kind of depth.

Quite a few breakthroughs have been made by connecting two seemingly unrelated areas to create new meaning.

To me it seems like an evolutionary necessity.

That doesn't mean that we don't need experts or that there wont be any, just that expertise will manifest itself differently.

  >  (I’ve now distracted you and you’re probably less
  > likely to finish this post than you would be otherwise;
  > if I offered you $20 for repeating the penultimate
  > sentence in the comments section, I’d probably get no
  > takers)

Tripping over the word penultimate, brought me to an interesting train of thought. Distraction is not necessarily a bad thing when we are reading.

One of the reasons that we are told to read a lot is to increase our vocabulary. But how is that supposed to happen? We're supposed to come across a word that we don't know in a book, and then look it up in the dictionary. Isn't this the ultimate form of distraction? Unless you read next to a dictionary, you have to put your book/newspaper/magazine down, go find your dictionary, look up the word, and reapply that new knowledge to the content again.

Not only that, when we read content, aren't we supposed to be inspired by it (at least sometimes)? I was inspired by this small revelation to drop reading the essay/blog post and come back to HN to post this comment. The article triggered a small epiphany in me that inspired me to create/share information. Isn't this a good thing?

I've never heard it said that we read merely to increase our vocabulary. That may be a happy side effect, but it's certainly not a fundamental justification.

I think most people read 1) to educate themselves and 2) for pleasure.

On learning new words: my wife and I keep a set of flash cards on which we write words we don't know. We don't always look up the definition immediately, but eventually we do and write it down and then we review the words later until we can remember it's definition.

I think most people read 1) to educate themselves and 2) for pleasure. This describes me, although I probably read for 2) more than 1). Some people also read to appear intelligent, or so they have unusual things to lord over others, which might be a component of 1).

We don't always look up the definition immediately, but eventually we do and write it down and then we review the words later until we can remember it's definition.

Wow: that's far more discipline than I have. If I find a word I don't know, I usually look it up and write it in the margins of the book (if it belongs to me). It took about six repetitions of looking up the word "candid" when I was a teenager for it to sink in.

One nice thing about looking things up is that eventually the words stick and you no longer have to look up very many, unless they're technical.

Expanding vocabulary when reading online is a huge advantage. A dictionary and wikipedia is just a click away.

But if you don't go and track down the meaning of a word, you may be missing something. Obviously, meaning can be gleaned from context, but if you really want to understand the message the author is attempting to convey, it's worth the momentary distraction.

I largely agree with the author and I don't buy into the idea that online reading is destroying our attention span, rewiring our neurons or will kill the long form. What's changed is the ability of poor writers to fill the channel. We now have more of a challenge to sift through the junk but good writers and good editors will always be in demand and will find a way to be read.

We need to put a stop to the drivel about the death of this or that form of culture or art - if it can't rise through the spam it doesn't deserve to survive.

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