Reading is Listening

            In the age of smartphones, high speed internet, and unlimited data plans, society is able to always stay connected with one another. But has this idea of always being in touch actually weakened our ability to have intellectual conversations with each other? In a blog post by Jeff Attwood titled Because Reading is Fundamental, the idea of the value of conversations had today are criticized by the amount of time people spend actually reading and listening.

            Attwood begins his argument with a statement that, “Most discussions show a bit of information…” This is directly followed by a visual example of an online entity which displays a name, occupation, join date, and a post count of 3,360. He then purposes a question to the reader, “What message does this send?” By supplying such little information, Attwood draws the reader in to reveal his ideology.

            He exclaims that by showing the post count number next to every online entity’s name, it actually implies that the more they post the better things are. Which in actuality its more likely just a failure to communicate. Attwood’s theory is based on his assumption that the value of direct and online conversations has little to do with the amount of talking, and more to do with the amount of listening; and online, reading is listening. “Nobody has time to listen to the resulting massive stream of conversation, they end up just waiting for their turn to pile on and talk, too. The best conversations are with people who spend most of their time listening.”

            To prove his theory, Attwood provides two pieces of evidence. The first, an experiment performed in 2011 by ARS Technica that had viewers read an article titled Guns at home more likely to be used stupidly than in self defense. Embedded in the 7^th paragraph of the article, ARS Technica challenged their readers to mention the word, “bananas” in the comments section. But it wasn’t up until the 93^rd comment the word was mentioned.

            The second piece of evidence is a collection of analytic data by Farhad Manjoo which shows the percentage of article content actually viewed by online readers. In You Won’t Finish This Article, Manjoo illustrates that most online visitors will only read or scroll though about 50% of an article. He states that, “so many smart-alecks jump in to the comments to make points that get mentioned later in the piece.”

            Attwood’s research definitely proves his point, but there is still something missing. It would be nice to have slightly more context to each piece of evidence, or even one more piece to complete his, “We badly need to incentivize listening,” puzzle.

            Attwood asks his readers; how do we do this exactly? How do we encourage reading? He then gives a quick summary of 4 possible solutions: remove interruptions to reading, primarily pagination, measure read times and display them, give rewards for reading, and update in real time.

            A few very plausible solutions. However, these solutions may actually counteract with Attwood’s main purpose of his argument; that reading is fundamental. People are going to read what they want to read. That’s how society works. If we start offering rewards to people for reading, they aren’t going to read for the sake of wanting to read. They are going to read to obtain the reward. A lot of the time too, with a reward or timer in mind, most of the information read will be forgotten.

            This post by Jeff Attwood is truly compelling and it raises some serious questions. Do we need to start talking less and reading more? Does this depend on the value of our conversations? Will we need to start rewarding people for reading? The answer to these questions is only just grazed in Attwood’s post. It still needs more. More research, more evidence, and more facts. But in all fairness, even I just skimmed through this article at first. Maybe it’s time to start listening more and talking less, but when will I get my reward?