Today I came across this short article on reading versus listening on 3 Quarks Daily, which I usually peruse once a week on Sundays, and thought I'd comment on it. As I've said, I don't think that I was a natural reader when I was growing up, and, because no one encouraged me to read, I don't think that I became particularly proficient at it until I was in my thirties. I probably wasn't that great of a listener either, but I was always able to pay attention. My appreciation of reading developed very gradually, when I found out that you could learn new and interesting things that you might never know otherwise. The end result, I think, is this blog, which probably covers more topics in a small space than most blogs.
What made me think of this topic is that I know a highly intelligent person who was able to read by about the age of four and graduated from Cambridge. I had long noticed that she liked to multitask and, before I even met her, she became accustomed to listening to recorded books and rarely actually read physical books. In the more than twenty years that I knew her, I don't recall her ever reading a demanding book. She usually listened to light fiction. Although this is only one example, it came to represent for me how new technology may actually induce cognitive decline. According to the Dworak study, there was a cognitive decline in the U.S. from 2006 to 2018 in all areas except spatial reasoning. On a broad scale, since about 2004, I have noticed a general decline in American intellectual life, a general increase in the number of social influencers, a general decline in news quality, and, especially now, an increase in the number of completely incompetent political operatives. Arguably, a major source of these changes has been social media, which has also created some of the wealth imbalances that we are currently experiencing.
As a personal matter, as I've written, I have found that by weaning myself from a daily consumption of internet material and switching to serious nonfiction and fiction in printed form, my psychological state has improved considerable since 2015. I've taken down that noose. An unfortunate side effect of this improvement is that many people are unable to relate to me, because they are still in that internet trance. For example, thousands of people from all over the world (currently about 20,000 per month) click onto this blog and never express their opinion.
Of course, I see this as a subtopic of the broader subject of the corrosive effects of capitalism. Essentially, the U.S. is up for sale. Maybe, in a few years, we'll luck out, and Xi Jinping will buy the U.S. and fire Donald Trump!
Hear, Hear. I noticed people prefer videos over sharing an article or other piece of the written word. People are reading less and less. I myself need to get back to reading books instead of journals, magazines, articles and blogs online. Intellectual life is on the decline. A Tragedy for the life of the mind. Social media is so easy and distracting. I don’t use it much but I wish my attention was more planned.
ReplyDeleteI agree completely. I also have cut back on magazines.
DeleteI became a reader later as well. My parents read the newspaper and that’s about it. At University I learned to love reading as like you I realized that is a way to learn new and interesting things. As someone intellectually curious, I found my Raison d'être. I can read short stories but I’m still struggling to finish a fiction book. It’s a huge flaw of mine not enjoying literature. My library is 95% nonfiction and textbooks. Hopefully I can get evolve.
ReplyDeleteI recommend "Middlemarch" by George Eliot. Although it is set in the nineteenth century, I found it to be the most intellectually stimulating novel that I've ever read. My father mainly read cheap detective novels.
DeleteThank you! I will pick up the book. Glad I discovered your blog just by googling random thoughts. Take care.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great blog! I caught the bait, and I want to opt out of those 20,000 who never comment. I would like to know if you have tried Google's NotebookLM; it converts a given article/book to a realistic interview with AI. In case you give it a try, do you think it is going to empower more people to access books (non-fiction in this case)? I wanted to know what your thoughts are on this.
ReplyDeleteNo, I hadn't heard of that. It may be an improvement over typical podcasts, but, as noted in the first article mentioned in my post, listening doesn't work as well as reading when the material is complex. If NotebookLM is in audio form, that could be a problem for complex material. I do listen to podcasts occasionally. I try to single out speakers whom I know are extremely articulate and to the point. In theory, AI could clean up a podcast, but there would still be the possibility that you might not follow it all that well. At the moment, I only use AI in Google searches with text responses. I find that vastly more efficient than the old Google searches. You can get very specific answers to questions without wading through irrelevant articles.
DeleteJust wanted to say that from time to time I regularly check what is new on your blog. Stumbled upon it while preparing presentation on Bertrand Russel. Not that everything on the blog is of interest to me, but I like reading about prosperous tomatoes (here, in Central Europe they're also very nice this year), weather in Vermont and your faith in decline of Donald Trump.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that you like the blog. This is just a hobby for me (I've been retired for 18 years), and I get no revenue from it, so I just write about whatever interests me. It isn't surprising that some people don't enjoy all of my posts. In a way, I am writing for intellectually-oriented people, because, when I used to surf the web, I hardly ever found anything that I liked. I prefer psychologically interesting topics that don't get much attention. Most internet users aren't well-read and don't write well themselves. There are many demanding biographies out there that practically no one reads.
DeleteThe popularity of the blog has increased a lot over the last year, now that I've accumulated a lot of posts. People from all over the world are reading it.
Although my career was in the printing industry, I was originally a philosophy major and value good writing. I'm a slow reader and a slow writer, so my posts are generated slowly.
I am sort of a contrarian, and I like to deflate the reputations of people who are overvalued in one way or another. For example, I was shocked about how bad Bertrand Russell was as a person. But you still have to be cautious regarding some of the biographers. I think that Ray Monk disliked Russell before he even started the biography, because he was a Wittgenstein fanatic.
I wouldn't go so far to call Bertrand Russel a bad person. There are many great men in history who wouldn't fit into our contemporary notions of bad/good person. Shelley, Byron, Rousseau: some of them would be even easier to judge and make a verdict. Casanova? Or my favourite, Alice Miller, polish-jewish-swiss pioneer of child psychology who terribly neglected her own son. Anyhow, I will very gladly read your posts about Emily Dickinson.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely didn't mean to criticise the content of your blog. Many entries are very interesting, and particularly, excellently written. This is why I return to it.
Yes, it's true that practically everyone has at least some undesirable characteristics. But if you're too desirable and good, even that can be bad. In the case of Russell, I was shocked that pretty much all of his relationships with people, including family members, were terrible. He was a terrible father, husband, colleague and friend. In his case, I don't think that his intellectual work was important, so he ends up seeming a bit pathetic to me. Though I also dislike Shelley, I like some of his poems. Similarly, Beethoven's life was chaotic, but he was still one of the greatest composers ever.
DeleteEmily Dickinson actually had a pretty boring life. I am just trying to understand her better. Victorian New England was not a pleasant place to be, and I have always found the American upper middle class to be a bit repulsive.