Cloudy Thinking

I still read books, magazines and newspapers, but I don’t read your full blog as often since you stopped putting complete content in the RSS feed…

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At least when I read printed material it’s MY DECISION if I want to read the whole article or just skim the parts that I think are important. In most cases…

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…I never go your website to read the full post. If it’s partial content in the feed, then that’s all I’m going to read. Because even if you have something better to say after the jump, I want it to be MY DECISION and not yours on what I’m going to read.

Dude.

Hmmm…even David Maister posts full content in his RSS feed. Guess he wants his audience to read FULL POSTS without having to switch applications. How considerate.

I have not altogether stopped reading books, but the number of them I read in a given period has certainly dropped over the last 10 years. One obvious factor is that more of the information that formerly was found only in books is now available online. What’s more, given the power of search engines, one can quickly zero in on precisely the information one is seeking without having to wade through very much extraneous stuff. This has sometimes been dubbed “Just In Time Information”. (A friend of mine once disparagingly called it “Artificial Erudition”.) It’s difficult to justify spending minutes, hours or even days to look up something in a book when in all likelihood you can find out at least some answers to your questions in seconds with Google.

Another factor is that, at least in technical fields, static information stores such as books rapidly become obsolete. Few of my college textbooks on computer science have stood the test of time. I’m sure that most of the O’Reilly paperback tutorials and manuals on my shelves will be out-of-date within 10 years, if not much less. Of course, non-technical non-fiction books tend to go stale more slowly, and fiction books even more slowly than that.

Maister alludes to a third factor, namely, the changing pace of our lives. It has become difficult and even unusual to sit for long times focusing on a single book. Due to a lengthy illness and recovery period, I have recently had a lot more time than usual to sit and read. As a result, I have read many more books than I would normally have during this time at home. However, I still find that my computer is a bigger draw to me than my reading chair. I am not happy with that.

I’ve tried very hard to avoid this problem by deliberately attacking large, dense books. Right now, I’m in the middle of Neal Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle” trilogy, and with new books by Thomas Pynchon and Richard Powers coming out, I know what’s next on the agenda. Have also read several large nonfiction works of Medieval-Middle Ages history of late, and am slowly working my way through Will and Ariel Durant’s “Civilization” series. There’s no better antidote for superficial “insta-culture” than getting off the blogs and IM and forcing your way through large works. With all the great new fiction coming out in late 2006, you’ll be glad you did!