A Twenty First Century Read

A lot of us like to spend most of our “reading life” on the internet nowadays. Thirty years ago, a person would spend the majority of their reading time with a newspaper, a religious text, or a book. Then along came the computer and things slowly began to shift towards hurting your eyes by reading from this large glaring grey box.

I remember when I was in secondary school in the late 90s and I started to use Encarta 95. I would be given some homework on Henry VIII and instead of the local library; I went to the computer in the spare room. My mum would mutter at me that I should go to a library because they have many books with lots of information. Even with the limited resource of Encarta and at such a young age, I still scoffed at the suggestion. Encarta 95 had the answers and it was so much easier, more accessible, and most importantly - it had a copy and paste option. Encarta may have had the answers for a 12 year old but at this time, it wasn’t particular useful for many adults. So they didn't use it. It was left in the capable hands of the kids who were becoming very comfortable with searching for information and manipulating it clearly using Word.

The teachers were quick to catch on to Encarta so you learnt from a young age to plagiarise well. An important lesson that proves very useful when progressing through school and onto higher education. Then along came the internet, or at least the internet that resembles somewhat the wealth of information that is on there today. Essays became about Google searches, plagiarising other people’s work in a coherent way that answered the relevant question, while adding your tiniest bit of insight into the solution. We became experts at skimming and summarising.

Not only did we use computers for work, it started to become our main source of information on all things. An endless volume of knowledge that rivals the world’s greatest library available at our fingertips for a tiny cost. We now have more information available to us, whenever we want it, than at any other point in the history of humankind. You want to learn something, it’s on the internet and if it isn’t, someone will put it up for you. Let that sink in for a moment… We have access to so much useful information, which we could use to change the world, right now in front of us. Yet we use this time to read about celebrity gossip and read articles by idealistic writers.

This mountain of knowledge was unthinkable for Tom Average 20 years ago, let alone 60 years ago. No wonder how overwhelming my parents find the internet.

And what’s even crazier is we don’t just use the internet for information. We use it for everything: shopping, news, marketing, music, TV, friends, dating, events – the list is literally endless. But I digress, I want to talk about how the rapid expansion of the internet in the last 10 years has revolutionised the way we consume text.

We are now bombarded with choice for where we get our written information. It’s no longer Encarta, a real encyclopaedia, a newspaper, or a library that we have to choose from. For something like a film review, we have dozens of ways of checking information. We have IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and a host of others, as well as bloggers and the scores of news networks with media divisions. Who do we choose? Well we form certain favourites for things, such as YouTube for videos – unless it’s only hosted on another site like Vimeo. These alliances with websites are temporary but strong. YouTube is my first stop on the music video search and will be for a long time I think. This alliance may eventually break away if a rival service comes along – maybe something that incorporates YouTube and all of the other video sites in a convenient and easy way.

When it comes to reading text and by text I mean current news, and “old” information. “Old” information being ideas that have been around for a while and are not related to current events, such as philosophy or established science. Now when it comes to “old” information, I think we read the volume of information we find interesting and necessary to answer our original query. Unless we enjoy the writing style, we read the bare minimum to answer the question. I think this a big difference when compared to how we used to find information from books. We haven’t invested into the webpage so we have less motivation to finish reading all the available information. The investment we made before the internet could be financial by buying a book or even just investing our time into going to the library to search out this understanding. All we do now is click.

This instant and abridged version of events presented by websites breeds a short attention span. Just like using Encarta, we are taking exactly what we need and nothing more. Often we don’t continue to read in more depth because not only have we zero investment in the webpage, but there is this endless source of data available to me. Why read more on this subject when there are millions of other things I can learn about!? Thirty years ago, you might have finished reading the entire explanation in an encyclopaedia, or studied in more depth the theory of evolution, just because you had invested time into finding the source of knowledge.

The source is right there now, it’s called Google and it can get you about 13,920,000,000 results in 0.17 seconds with seven soft button pushes. You can then just read the synopsis, get the gist, and your imagination feels in the details. Or more commonly the details are never filled in, they are lost. I think a consequence of this attention deficit and abridged version of the story is that we lose out on our focus and concentration of that particular subject. We have found the answer in 0.17 seconds and read it in 10 seconds. This rapid way of answering questions has a consequence; it doesn’t have time to stay in our long term memory. It is forgotten before it is accurately analysed. It’s in one synapse and out the other. 

I wonder if this type of information intake has caused a generation of people who find it difficult to concentrate for long periods. I know I do. No wonder all these kids have attention deficit disorders. They have been born into the instant internet age. Another consequence of this is the instant gratification age we are now in as well. Do you remember when you couldn’t remember who was in a film? You’d recall the actor’s name days later and phone up your friend to tell them. There was great satisfaction in diving into the realms of your mind to retrieve that knowledge. Now it’s a simple search and the answer is there. An instant gratifying moment – very common to the 21^st century person.

My final concern over this new type of learning and reading is for the writers and articles themselves. As a writer you are forced to come up with a snappy summary in your first paragraph and an even snappier title. How many times have you clicked on a link because of a witty title? I do it all the time. And let’s not forget that clicks = cash. My favourite recent headline was a BBC article called Nazi Buddha 'came from outer space'. How can you not click that!? It could easily be a real life fourth Indiana Jones storyline… and there is no way that this article can be worse than that film. No way.

In order to entice us – the scavengers of news – the articles must have a clever title. That is something I have noticed from the response I get from my own writing in relation to a snappy title. This title obsession can devalue a story, especially one about a complicated issue, but worse it can mislead about the content.

The twitter-verse is a bizarre world of 140 characters and this means that snappy titles are all you have. So sometimes a jokey news article title can turn into a hot bed of confusion. A serious debate can break out because people have misunderstood a title and invented a fabrication. They have then spread this fabrication and before long, people are reading tweets as facts. Tweets are thoughts. And thoughts are not facts. An example of this misunderstanding is when a “joke” news website posts a ridiculous headline, which is obvious satire, but eventually is copied and passed on to someone who takes it at face value.

It happened to me with a fake satirical Sky Sports News account on twitter. Sky Sports are my go-to sports news internet alliance so I trust them. So an account using their brand has tricked me… No harm done because I found out, but what if I hadn’t. I would’ve looked like a fool in this instance. But how about when it comes to something more serious than John Terry being a white c***. I can get fooled and not realise it and then I have this idea in my head, which I may even share with others, and I don’t even know that it’s codswallop.

Do you remember that story about Samsung paying their fine from Apple in coins? It was bullshit but it got reported on a number of news networks, including the Guardian. It stemmed from a fake story that spread on twitter and made it on to our trusted news outlets. It’s still available to read on news websites over a month later. This Samsung coin story is a great example of a successful meme. I’m not talking meme, like breaded cats, I’m talking meme in terms of an idea that spreads. Therefore a successful meme is one that spreads far and high. A story about Apple and Samsung with the concept of paying a billion dollar fine in coins is a very infectious and sharable idea.

The internet is making us read and learn about things that make catchy titles. 24 hour news entertainment networks are capitalising on this and are dumbing down or more frequently humouring up titles for this exact reason. We are far removed from the time where we bought a book on a subject and read the thing in its entirety. We just want the gist, the story in a nutshell please.

Tl;dr: We are no longer investigative explorers of knowledge, we are short study learners looking for our quick fix. We have become slaves to slogans.

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