Forging Fundamentals - Patrick Newman - January 18, 2018
Reading Jeff Atwood’s blog piece entitled “Because Reading is Fundamental” is a bit difficult, and that’s exactly the point. What appears at first to be a semi-confused bit of text smashed together with some images, turns out to be a cleverly written and designed essay on the importance of reading, and making reading more desirable than responding while we are online. His Approach doesn’t exactly draw one in but again, this is by design. Atwood wants the reader to pay attention to what he has to say but intentionally includes a number of distractions that may dissuade the casual reader.
Following the title of the piece, the author includes a single line of text followed by an image and asks a question of the audience followed by bullet points. If this were a traditional article in a magician or a news paper, it would not pass muster, however here, Atwood is writing in this manner to prove his point that most people will not read an entire article. It would be hard to continue through his introduction and initial thesis but the title encourages viewers to press on. Readers that continue will find that the author believes that the internet has encouraged people to talk more and listen less and the result is poor conversations that have a negative effect on everyone. Atwood proposes that the conversations in which people do more listening are much better than those where everyone is just waiting to talk.
He demonstrates his criticisms by citing two different studies; The Ars Banana Experiment, which shows that online readers seldom read very far before they have formed an opinion. An opinion which they readily relay in the comments section and completely miss the point of the article which they would have not done had they read the whole thing. The Slate experiment analyzed user data to demonstrate that people spend far more time talking online than reading. The author of that experiment dared people to read to the end of his article and found that most people read only half the article but looked at the images or other visual media. Both experiments really illustrate Atwood’s arguments.
To counter these problems with online conversations, Atwood says, “We badly need to incentivize listening.” Or in this case reading. Atwood makes a number of suggestions on how ro force the reader to acknowledge they are reading but notes that could have a negative effect. Instead he says that the first thing to encourage more reading is, to remove interruptions such as the the way he has laid out his article with pagination, advertisements or images that splits paragraphs, and links embedded in the text. Second, Atwood thinks measuring the amount of time users spend reading and displaying that information builds trust that people are reading our thoughts and not just glancing at them. His third idea is to reward people for reading by giving them items to display such as badges which act as a source of pride for the reader. Finally the author believes that updating posts in real time to include edits, new comments and likes without interrupting a persons reading position will maintain a realistic sense of dialogue.
At the end of his article, Atwood argues that he is pursuing his agenda because he feels that reading very important in every aspect of our lives. By spending more time really listening to each other instead of talking, we learn to really understand each other and the world around us. He does an effective job of proving his thesis by citing two studies to support his points and by proposing solutions to the issues raised. This article should be included in every communications curriculum.
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