Question: How many tabs do you have open at the moment? How many have you looked at in the last 5 minutes? How many have you come through to end up here? How many have you flicked to already since you started reading this? My guess is probably quite a lot, well, apart from maybe for the last one. If you can’t even get past a few lines without being distracted than the problem is worse than I thought.
There is an acronym on the internet you are probably fairly familiar with, tl;dr, literally too long; didn't read. I think that pretty much sums up the problem. When it comes to anything that actually requires more than a few minutes attention to absorb it is made easier and easier to just dismiss it. There is a strong consensus that if something is not presented in a manner such that any actual depth or analysis is lost then it is too long to bother concerning oneself with. But, shockingly, it turns out some issues are complex and require some actually contemplation to get any meaning out of. And these are often the issues that are actually important. A couple of sound bites and a cool little graphic may give you the impression that you are expanding your knowledge but often people seem to know no more than, for example: “Oh there is this guy called Assad and he is like, bad, and his people are revolting. They’re in this country called Syria, or Serbia, or Sudan, oh you know, one of those sort of counties.”
We are constantly bombarded by information and because of the shear volume of it we can easily feel like we are absorbing it and learning more. But that just isn't the case. We as a culture seem to be losing the ability for sustained thought and analysis and that can't be good. Take this four and a half thousand word essay on tumblr. It's a pretty interesting read and in the time it took me to read and think about it I got far more than I would have through any amount of casual browsing through various tabs. Yet I expect the vast majority of people will look at it and immediately give up and go find something requiring far less thought to look at. (I don't mean to sound all superior with that line, all to often I find myself doing the exact same thing I'm complaining about.)
Now, I’ll be honest, four and a half thousand words was a longer essay than I would expect to see on tumblr, you can say a lot in that many words and what is said is going to take a lot of thought afterwards, but that was an exception. I am forever seeing tl;dr written in response to blog posts easily less than a thousand words. Take this one, around eight hundred words, it will take only a few minutes to read through . And yet I would put good money on many people who see this (okay, assuming people did actually read these posts) taking a look at the whole five paragraphs and immediately going to look for something that they can look at for a number of seconds before getting bored and looking for something else to momentarily rest there focus on. Very few people seem to be willing to take the time to read longer essays even if they would actually get a lot out of them.
“Longer essays? Pah! I could read the headlines on a news site, watch a short clip on youtube, check facebook, check twitter, maybe update my status and make a tweet myself. Why on earth would I want to read five hundred words on the Syrian revolution when I could do all that? In fact, one of the tweets I saw was talking about revolutions in Syria so see I already know about that! Something about there being too many chemicals in the country or something, maybe it's polluted. What? You mean it actually takes more than that to actually learn about a topic? What do you expect me to do, actually take five minutes to read the article, and then what, you expect me to actually pause and think about what I have just read? But someone could have updated their facebook status by then!”
Yeah, to hell with that. I know I'm guilty of it at times too but if you have actually bothered to read this far then please, next time you see an interesting headline take the time to actually read the article, not the first paragraph but all of it, and then actually think about what you have just read. I promise you you’ll get far more from it than you ever would from spending that time refreshing facebook.
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