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Guttermouth's avatar

>> For a long time it seemed that cultural capital was mostly accumulated by consuming literature, music and art (before that was superseded by having the right beliefs). It still paid social and professional dividends at various times when being excellent at maths or tennis might have just seemed kind of meh.

This is a really important statement because I think it could honestly tl;dr about half of the essay (don't actually do that, though).

We are NOT grazing on the cognitive fast food of social media and Buzzfuck and blog posts with time estimates at the top as an apology for their length for anything like the same motivations as reading a book or even a longer-form post like this.

We are mostly consuming this kind of "information" not as enrichment but to keep up with the instinct to remain apace with The Discourse in the same sense that broad awareness of celebrity gossip, trending music, and broadcast TV was 30 years ago. It's just the rat race element of popular culture in its final form- and I do mean final, because I think the media of delivery have run up against the cognitive maximum for humans; we have arrived at being completely out of attention and cannot possibly consume any faster.

"Reading" social media and other shit is motivated by wanting to stay apace. Reading a book (or similarly "challenging" experiences) is usually motivated by other things.

Pop culture and (please forgive me) FOMO are hijackings of primal brain social instincts to keep up. When I look at how information is presented online, there's very little doubt in my mind that it is largely crafted, and consumed, in alignment with that urge- not curiosity, a will for self improvement, or anything else that prompted you to pick up Dostoevsky.

I started reading when I was 2. It was a tremendously accelerated, high school kids handing me their textbooks to read as a freakshow kind of thing. Fathermouth was obscenely proud of this fact and bragged about it far into my childhood well past any value it had to impress. I was and still usually am an obsessive reader- if something is sufficiently engaging I will sit at it for many hours to get the job done. It had a voracious quality to it- at one point I recall being so bored, having exhausted everything in my room, that I began reading the fold-out pamphlets that used to go in prescription medication bottles in the bathroom.

If I had been that age with that sort of cognitive practice today, with devices being among my first reading sources, Freyja pity me. My mind would have broken on 8-hour Reddit binges and I'd probably have been intellectually useless- a midwit at best (being able to spout quite a lot of verbal content as shallow as a plate), literally cognitively impaired at worst.

I really pity a lot of the developing minds I see around me when I'm in a child-rich environment and am disproportionately happy to see a kid who has no apparent access to a tablet or smartphone.

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Mari, the Happy Wanderer's avatar

Great article! I love the idea of monitoring how often our attention is hijacked. The first step to change is the awareness of the problem.

I first read Infinite Jest (one of my all-time favorite books--and yes, I agonized with Gately over his gunshot wound and his heroic decision to forgo painkillers) when I was a high school English teacher and routinely putting in 65-hour weeks. I decided to read the book over one month, giving it the attention it deserved. I don’t know what my excuse is these days, when I have so much more free time, for avoiding the more challenging great books that are out there. You are inspiring me to pick up Bleak House again!

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