How much do you read per day? Excluding articles and social media, only long-form texts

How much do you read per day? Excluding articles and social media, only long-form texts.

Other urls found in this thread:

theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248
psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-wise/201209/why-were-all-addicted-texts-twitter-and-google
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Exactly 9000 words. Thinking of lifting the "no carry over to the next day" rule.

Lately I ve been reading like 4 books a week...when it was the exams period I didnt manage to read at all. Anyway I want to stabilize at 2 books (like 600 pages total) per week or something.

I'm trying to do 3 to 4 hours a day (that's excluding the shitton of news I read whenever I have a spare moment), but it's not mentally sustainable. 3 hours of Dickens is fine, but trying to read Heidegger for more than half an hour after already having expended your mental energy throughout the day is excruciating

Weird. I find reading philosophy much easier than reading literature.

so do you count to 9000 or do you have someone do that for you

If you read Hegel faster than you read BolaƱo, then you're reading Hegel wrong.

15 on 5 off?

I usually do 25 minutes with 5 minute breaks. Sometimes I'll just go for a full hour or two straight if the book's interesting enough

I've not really been able to read more than an hour or two a day since my mid teens. For some reason, the concentration simply isn't there.

i wish i could rock that kind of bourgeois ivy style shiz but due to my horrible proletarian roots i just rock jeans and pocket tee every day, some one give me a howto on how to dress like bourgeois prick, and no Veeky Forums crap plz, i want to look like a wasp not a homosexual

The internet affects your concentration abilities

theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Undoubtedly. I often ponder about the fact that we're in a bit of a transition period, with technology impacting our lives like never before. Even the ability to read, as ancient as civilisation itself, is being affected.

Makes me wonder where all this progress is taking us, and whether it's even progress at all.

>literally spends countless hours reading and communicating using the written word
>durr the internetz gonna make us illiterate!! ho noez!!!11one

get a grip fag

The concern has nothing to go with literacy, but for one's ability to concentrate on a long, uninterrupted text for the amount of time required to read and understand it. The guy who wrote that article wrote an entire book on the topic, and cited some pretty convincing evidence to support his claims

does talking to people in real life conversation fuck up your ability to sit through a play and pay attention? just because you socialize on the internet its not any different when 20 years ago your friends call you on your landline or whatever, sick of this "this time it's different because internet" no that is lazy thinking kys

Coupla hours.

So you're going to disregard the mountains of evidence that Carr brings to the table without even attempting to engage with his ideas just because you think he's a Luddite? And yet you have the temerity to call what he does lazy thinking? He wrote an entire book on this topic, and you think you know enough to disregard that book based on my simple summation of its thesis.

>he wrote a whole book on it therefor he is right!

well in that case i'm convinced!

>He wrote an entire book on this topic, and you think you know enough to disregard that book based on my simple summation of its thesis

Veeky Forums in a nutshell

The point is that since we have the Internet which is an endless stream of things to alleviate boredom, our minds can no longer focus on long form things properly without feeling the need to use the Internet or be entertained. Well, I guess there's no point arguing with plebs who are convinced they're right.

this guy wrote a whole book on how non-whites are inferior intellectually, are you really going to disregard the mountains of evidence he brings to the table?

False equivalence you imbecile

You're saying that the book's wrong without having read it, which is a far more ridiculous than claiming that writing a book on a particular topic makes you more of a expert on it that someone who hasn't even read a book on the topic.

ever heard of the tv? of radio? of motion pictures? of comic books? get a fucking brain.

This guy wrote a A WHOLE BOOK on why whites are the master race. are you saying he's wrong without having even read it? are you really going to disregard the mountains of evidence he brings to the table?

Why are you so hellbent on appearing stupid?

there's this new fangled entertainment medium that's come along and it's ROTTING KID'S MINDS! every generation there is always one guy making his tenure bones with this shtick and it works because there's always an audience for it

The difference between these and the Internet is that with the Internet, you have access to seemingly endless information and things to entertain you. Usually most people using the Internet use it to be entertained and release dopamine for short bursts. With TV or radio, you still needed to sit down and watch a full movie or something but using the Internet you are connected and ready to go all the time. The point isn't that technology makes you stupid, it's that the Internet and other things that give you quick and easy satisfaction are inherently addictive and hampers your attention span

False equivalence. Try again faglord

Our modern society is undoubtedly the most literate in history. It's simply a different kind of literacy than before, one very different from the lengthy novels and letters of old.

Is it better? Worse? I can't say, but it does seriously impact literature as a medium.

so what about when i go into a research library and grab random books and journals that look neat and flip through them and skim a little of this and a little of that? did that rot my brain? or it only rots my brain if it's ON THE INTERNET oh shiiiit this time it's DIFFERENT! wait wait, what happens if i'm reading on campus and every time a hot chick walks by i look up to check out her ass and get a shot of oxytocin? oh fuck, hot chicks asses have rotted my brain! how will humanity survive the invention of hot asses!? need more funding to get to the bottom of this!

You must be literally retarded

umm excuse me u didn't even engage with his evidence. do you really think you know more about the rising tide of colored masses than a guy who wrote a whole fucking book on it?

The idea of white supremacy is one we're all already familiar with and have formed opinions about. The idea that constant screen stimulation affects attention and retention is a new idea, and therefore deserves to have its day in court like any other new and consequential idea.

you sir are a middle brow piece of shit, read your big long dfw and feel smug, and spare us your brainlet posts

Well it's certainly rotted your mind.

tell me how it's different? if i'm in the library and go in the classics section and flip through some virgil, and then get bored and go down a couple aisles and grab some scholarship on the russian revolution, but then get bored after ten minutes and then go and read some stuff about the labor movement have i rotted my brain? has all the information in this library overstimulated me and ruined my concentration? oh no oh no what ever shall we do

>the latest technology is rotting kids minds is a new idea

kys

First, new media have had profound effects on the human mind. Gutenberg lead to the Reformation. And second, the thesis of the book isn't that the internet is a bad thing in itself, only that a particular use of the Internet likely leads to a diminished capacity for concentration.

that fact that you got your mind blown by a shitty pop psych book shows "jeff mangum died for your sins" is a true pleb and you might want to retire that trip

The arguments people made against the development of writing, the availability of printed books, and the invention of television were all distinct and had to be dealt with on an individual basis. What does the fact that people were wrong about writing destroying the oral tradition have to do with how the Internet affects concentration?

i usually read for ~2 until ~4 hours. do you guys think it is too bad having an entire day without reading? can it prejudices my understaing and interpretations of the book i'm currently reading?

Can you discuss this without being an insufferable piece of shit?

>guy wanting to be a pop professor writes book telling people what they want to hear
>believing any of this shit

it's so easy to poke holes on all those idiotic studies, even worse:

nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248

>this thing you love doing is making you dumb
>what people want to hear

every baby boomer on the planet thinks the internet is rotting everyone's brain, it's not a novel idea, and here comes some dickhead with a bunch of shabby research to confirm what "they knew all along"

Try to get at least 2 hours of uninterrupted book reading every day. I also read about 2 hours of blogs and other forms of online writing

Do you honestly believe that how a particular message is disseminated has absolutely no effect on how that message is perceived? That brains don't adapt to the various cognitive demands of different media? I understand that your addiction to the Internet makes you feel threatened by these studies, but this is demonstrably not how the human brain works.

reading is reading, sorry just because it's "on the internet" instead of a papyrus scroll changes nothing, kys

Reading a post on Veeky Forums that's about 2 sentences long, then immediately switching to another tab where you skim through a Wikipedia article, then clicking on a hyperlink that sends you to another related article, then switching to your facebook tab where you're talking to a friend is a fundamentally different act to sitting down and uninterruptedly reading a single book for an hour straight. They're barely in the same universe.

yep

so when someone skims the newspaper in the morning while they drink coffee and take a shit is somehow different? give me a break man, you seem a bit stupid to be honest

Newspapers don't have hyperlinks, videos, access to music and pornography, social interaction, and the sum total of human knowledge all immediately available to you at an unlimited pace. It's not the same thing. I'm also talking about reading books in relation to surfing the Internet, not newspapers in relation to the Internet.

so when some babyboomer was studying in his form he could still put down his text book and pick a comic book or a porno, yet somehow everyone's brains didn't melt, man that shitty book totally blew your mind lol probably because it gave you an excuse for being a low productivity pleb

The question is does regular Internet use affect your ability to concentrate on a long text for an extended period of time. It's not a philosophical debate, it's a physiological one. Your arguments don't really pertain to the issue.

so if i'm reading some text and find something i want to look up but search on jstor instead of going to the library and looking it up in the stacks my brain is ruined? ok dude this just gets more retarded by the minute

Stop arguing like an absolutist lunatic. It doesn't "rot" or "ruin" your brain, it just makes certain things more cognitively tasking than they'd otherwise be. It discourages long form reading by making it more difficult, it doesn't turn you into an illiterate retard.

if you noticed your atlantic article didn't actually have ANY research to back up his anecdotes, but since it was what people wanted to hear he expanded into a book with shoddy research giving the results he wants to find, the shit is stupid, but since it gives you an excuse for not being able to read long boring shit it makes sense to you, like the guys in his article "oh i COULD have read war and peace when i was younger, but now the internet like totally warped my brain and now i can only write pseudo-scientific blog posts"

I agree with you desu it's like the people who say social media has made everybody fake etc. etc. The Victorians already had the concept of a fake public persona, hence the book Jekyll and Hyde. The internet only facilitates things, it doesn't change how people are. If you were easily distracted without the internet, you'd be more easily distracted with it.

It takes me about 3 hours and 20 minutes to read roughly 100 pages, but since I read .epubs I'm giving a very rough estimate based on what the book page count is on goodreads compared to what percentage of the book I finish in that time.

When I read, I l try to read this long, but I don't do this every single day.

The Atlantic article poses a question that the book attempts to answer.

>shoddy research
Seriously, how would you know? Making a claim about the thesis of the book without having read it is one thing, but making a claim about the research methodologies of papers you haven't even attempted to read is actually insane. Being this transparently bias doesn't do your point-of-view ant favors

actually i am aware of at least one study he used which doesn't even really address his thesis, but check out this quote showing his pleb level:

>Carr acknowledges that prolonged, solitary thought is not the natural human state, but rather "an aberration in the great sweep of intellectual history that really just emerged with [the] technology of the printed page."

is he not aware there were likely thousands of years of oral tradition before "the printed page" which of course isn't even close the first kind of writing, homer, the mahabarata, etc. you can just tell that guy is a fucking pleb tier thinking from the weak shit he says, but go ahead link us to some of the papers he cites and let us examine them shall we, and keep in mind that nature article i already posted saying as much as 2/3 of psychology research is not reproducible

You're making physiological claims and your argument has to do with an historical analysis of something competely unrelated.

>it doesn't change how people are
Brains aren't static objects that exist separate form their environments

But he's not wrong. People who already enjoy reading long texts would've probably had the natural tendency to gravitate towards more substantial internet articles. People who were forced to read long texts would naturally gravitate towards short Buzzfeed-style articles. The internet just gives freedom for people to choose what they prefer.
>inb4 yeah but what about Veeky Forums or forums
That'd be like what he said, saying regular everyday conversations makes you not be able to enjoy a play

And in no way did I claim that. Guns made it easier to kill people, but a person who wouldn't have killed people still wouldn't kill people with the invention of guns.

He was referring to the democratization of this mode of thinking since Gutenberg. The book goes into the origins of the phonetic writing system and how it was perceived as a threat to the oral tradition. He's not saying that thinking started in the 15th century.

What does that have to do with anything? Carr's claim is that the Internet itself changes your brain; a gun existing doesn't affect your propensity for violence.

>The book goes into the origins of the phonetic writing system and how it was perceived as a threat to the oral tradition.

and this blew your mind? have you never read any literary theory in your life?

The Internet may be full of distractions but so is the real world. Whether you get distracted is because of you and not the Internet. You think Bill Gates or Elon Musk use the Internet and get distracted by clickbait articles and porn and random advertisements?

I hate to have to keep explaining this. Carr's claim isn't that the internet doesn't allow one to indulge in long form reading, but that its usage affects our ability to find pleasure in long form reading in the first place. It diminishes our capacity to enjoy something that doesn't give us the ability to chace new information whenever we feel like it.

You suggested that he didn't know that. I'm replying to your criticism, not explaining the virtues of his book

>so is the world
No it's not. The amount of effort it takes to indulge in something in real life acts as a bottleneck for distraction. No one talks to someone while reading a book and listening to music in real life, but we do that on the Internet for hours at a time.

does reading the bible rot your mind? when people read one verse here, and then stop to discuss it (shitpost about it) or look up commentary on it from some theologian etc. without reading it all the way through?

>No one talks to someone while reading a book and listening to music in real life

dude, what? get out of the basement once in a while

People in this thread get so mad about the prospect that the internet is making it harder to concentrate that they caricature the thesis and then mock it into submission.

Just sit on the internet for a few hours and try to read a difficult book, tell me how that turns out for you. Maybe pick one from a hundred years ago and note how much longer the sentences are, how much more complicated the syntax is. It's not necessarily that people in the past were smarter than we are, but they sure as hell could sit and concentrate for longer and had better memories.

Socrates was right. Letters are a tool for forgetting.

The examples you give aren't comparable. Reading The Bible with a commentary is still linear thinking. Its demands are that you read one thing, then stopping, then listen to something. It's not the aimless jungle of endless information known as the Internet.

you're still not telling me how the internet is different from a decent research library

There will always be people who read for information and people who read for understanding. The burden isn't on the Internet to stop being what it is. The burden is on people to learn how to adapt to the internet. It would've been like claiming written language stopped people from finding pleasure in stories because most people didn't know how to read. The fact of the matter is, even before the advent of the Internet, people did shallow readings for the sake of information and not understanding. The ease of pursuing new information doesn't change that. Most people need to read How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler.

Because it's constant nonstop stimulation, you fucking sperg. It's the difference between jerking off because you're horny and existing in a constant state of near horniness as you mindlessly diddle yourself for 9 hours at a time. This is not a difficult concept to grasp and your inability just to say, "I see your point but disagree," rather than continue to argue and misconstrue Mangum's makes me suspect that you are arguing because you, personally, feel indicted by the idea that the internet is making you dumber.

no, my point is i have spent nine hours in the university library flitting from one thing to the next, and every time some book references some other book i go and search if they have and then go get it, it's the same thing. nicholas carr is a pleb that can't think.

Not just ease of access, but the outright encouragement of distracted thinking. Going from one concept to another on the Internet requires just the clicking of a hyperlink, while the same concept in a library would require one to search for another book. This bottleneck keeps one from going from one body of text to another constantly

>existing in a constant state of near horniness as you mindlessly diddle yourself for 9 hours at a time

actually if somebody edged for 9 hours would't that be more of a "deep wank" and would be nicholas carr approved as opposed to those quickies where u see a kim kardashian ass pic and wack it real quick

First, you make a dubious claim of the Internet making it harder to concentrate. Second, your example of longer sentences made no sense. A novella with long sentences would not require more effort than a novel with short ones. You could claim each sentence is an attention gap but one could as easily claim each clause is a gap.
>Hurr durr I don't know how to read so even language is a barrier to learning
Shut the fuck up and read How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler you autist

>wanders around the library and pretends that this is concentration
Bro, please. I'm a grad student. I've made a career out of this nonsense. But keep in mind that the German scholars of the 19th century used to have a capacity they called "sitzfleish;" i.e. "sitting flesh," they would sit in their chairs doing nothing but reading and writing on one fucking subject for hours at a time. You think Wilamowitz and his buddies compiled all those commentaries and concordances by flitting around the library for six hours before going to get a drink with Stacy after? Buddy.

or you could just bookmark the link for later, or holy shit just not click it, kys

I don't disagree with anything you said. I'm not claiming that the Internet needs to change, only that our relationship to it needs to change if we want to retain our ability to comfortably read long form texts.

>going from reading to masturbating takes one move of the hand
>going from reading to playing with your pen takes one move of the hand
>going from reading to finding food in the kitchen takes a few swinging of the legs
>going from reading to talking to your parents takes a few vibrations of the throat

no shit, but like someone said elon musk and jeff bezos are still concentrating for 10 hours at a time, while the peasants outside browse buzzfeed, it's not like everyone in germany was some beastmode scholar, most of them were drinking beer and fucking around, just like today

I'm arguing from the perspective of how people actually use the Internet, not of how they would ideally use it. Of course you could just focus on one text at a time, but that's not how most people surf.

>You could claim each sentence is an attention gap but one could as easily claim each clause is a gap.
Where are you getting this argument about "attention gaps" from? You are, again, caricaturing the argument in order to attack it. Just prove it for yourself: go pick up John Locke and try to read him. It's hard and not just because he's old. His English is not so different from ours (as Shakespeare's would be) but his syntax and sentence length just flat-out make it more difficult to read, even if conceptually he's not too difficult. Just pick up an old book and tell me that we can concentrate as well as they could.

that's what i'm saying, the internet is just one option if you're avoiding reading, the internet didn't cause your lack of interest in boring doorstoppers

i read a hell of a lot more "long form texts" now than i did before the internet

Those things don't give you the immediate dopaminergic release that clicking on a new link does. That's a major distinction.

The difference between now and then is that everyone educated was educated to be a "beastmode scholar." The problem is that democracy has raised the floor for education but not by as much as it has lowered the ceiling.

You're one anecdotal data point

>citation needed

you still never did post any of those supposedly many studies backing up carrs shitty book

>Those things don't give you the immediate dopaminergic release that clicking on a new link does.
>eating food and touching your dick doesn't give u a dopamine hit

ok

psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-wise/201209/why-were-all-addicted-texts-twitter-and-google

It's a pop psychology site, but it does show that the concept is pretty well established in the field of its trickled down that far