Hi, last class over but I am totally sitting in my room finishing the book and I must admit defeat here.. I think it's because I'm so connected and so invested in it, while unwilling to admit my lack of power over my brain's plastic bits that makes me hate to admit that he's super onto something here. The biological perspective is usually the more convincing set of data to me, but here I was writing it all off. His conclusion isn't overblown, our reactions are.
Also: I am writing this from my phone, while still in the middle of reading... You got me, friend.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
To: Martin
This started as a response to Martin's post, but I decided to give it its own space:
One of my greatest pleasures as a constant consumer of media (ick) is when I'm reading a book that is still pretty fresh and I get the tickle in my brain tell me that I'm reading something outdated.
Working at Staples this past holiday season, we had so many people come in for Kindles that we sold out of them every two days. I'm not sure what happened all of a sudden, but it was like a switch was flicked in people's brains. Suddenly, instead of only nerds and travelers, just about everyone who came in was frothing at the mouth for them and in many cases, they barely knew how it worked.. just that they needed one.
More digital books than real books were sold this last quarter. Fuck.
I think we will/should keep them both around. They've got great battery life, but analog backups are pretty important.
The unbundling of albums only really matters to prog. musicians; albums were collections of singles before the Beatles. I dig Martin's point about television/movies; there's no way that people are actively watching clips INSTEAD of consuming the main show. It looks to me like a double dip for advertisers much more than a problem for them.
I am distracted by the outside world at a level that smashes the distraction I feel when I'm at a computer. I'm not sure if this is an argument for or against Carr's point (for, I think, actually?) but I have ADHD and one of my favorite things is this table of test scores I have from my psychologist that contrasts my level of proficiency at doing a task in silence (or with smooth jazz playing, he's a cool guy) versus when a tape of a city is playing (quietly, really) in the background with all the hustle and bustle, cars, conversations, etc. It's a comical drop in performance. When I'm at a computer, I am actually a lot more task oriented than I am when I'm OFF the computer. I DO stop and check my Facebook and my email and the news and whatever, but mostly when I am NOT on the computer and I'm obsessively doing it on my phone. On the machine, I do those things first and then I get to doing the thing I'm doing.
One of my greatest pleasures as a constant consumer of media (ick) is when I'm reading a book that is still pretty fresh and I get the tickle in my brain tell me that I'm reading something outdated.
Working at Staples this past holiday season, we had so many people come in for Kindles that we sold out of them every two days. I'm not sure what happened all of a sudden, but it was like a switch was flicked in people's brains. Suddenly, instead of only nerds and travelers, just about everyone who came in was frothing at the mouth for them and in many cases, they barely knew how it worked.. just that they needed one.
More digital books than real books were sold this last quarter. Fuck.
I think we will/should keep them both around. They've got great battery life, but analog backups are pretty important.
The unbundling of albums only really matters to prog. musicians; albums were collections of singles before the Beatles. I dig Martin's point about television/movies; there's no way that people are actively watching clips INSTEAD of consuming the main show. It looks to me like a double dip for advertisers much more than a problem for them.
I am distracted by the outside world at a level that smashes the distraction I feel when I'm at a computer. I'm not sure if this is an argument for or against Carr's point (for, I think, actually?) but I have ADHD and one of my favorite things is this table of test scores I have from my psychologist that contrasts my level of proficiency at doing a task in silence (or with smooth jazz playing, he's a cool guy) versus when a tape of a city is playing (quietly, really) in the background with all the hustle and bustle, cars, conversations, etc. It's a comical drop in performance. When I'm at a computer, I am actually a lot more task oriented than I am when I'm OFF the computer. I DO stop and check my Facebook and my email and the news and whatever, but mostly when I am NOT on the computer and I'm obsessively doing it on my phone. On the machine, I do those things first and then I get to doing the thing I'm doing.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Easy target
Ok, let's get this out of the way: The article about tweets spurring interest in long-form articles is exclusionary and anecdotal. He is talking about himself and his reading habits; I have similar reading habits, too. To provide my own anecdote, I didn't used to read status updates at all because they didn't exist; status updates take away from my long-form reading time. So what? The data he provides only applies to readers of blogs or people who regularly use Twitter. I can't figure out why I'm supposed to find this insightful in any broad sense.
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