Reading, Writing, and The Internet
I have a graphic designer friend who was toying around with a logo for Dreaming Right. In the process of giving him feed back about his beautiful logo design, I realized something about my mission for this project:
I want readers to get clear, warm, and simple information about how to live better. I want them to feel that it is a friend…a kind of goofy, kind of nerdy, flawed but authentic friend is passing them advice that they can take or leave.
The nerdy part refers to my desire to be “literary”, to explain my reasoning, rather than to post links or lists. I guess you could say that I am a writing nerd. A fan-boy of the essay.
But another part of me is feeling frustration that all the tidbits of good information that flow over me are not being passed on. I take too much time tweaking my little essays, and with my current job, it seems like I only have the time, energy and attention span for one post a week.
Maybe I should write short posts. Maybe I should just post short synopses and links to useful life advice like Bruce Barber @ The Real-Life Survival Guide.
I want to share, but not indiscriminately.
I have been avoiding the short post and link-heavy content because of my literary pretensions, but also because I feel like the bite-sized chunks of information might be doing something detrimental to us. The internet may be changing our brains.
As Nicholas Carr says in an article in last summer’s The Atlantic:
…the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
His essay, which took all of my concentration to read even though it was totally interesting and well written, was about how our brains might be losing something that those of us who once read deeply and patiently recognize as valuable.
Nevertheless, short posts are more efficient…and more likely to be read.
I really like where you are going with this, and I can tell you that I would rather read your words than a synopsis of links and good tidbits. It would seem that you are a great processor of all this info, and somehow with your alchemy turn those bits into knowledge and something more sustainable and digestible.
Also, I did the logo– caught my eye right away.
I just came across this article about a study that shows we “live” the narratives we read.
“Overall, the data supported the view that readers construct mental simulations of events when reading stories”
Is this more evidence that we are losing something by not reading longer pieces?