The New Reading Environment

This is a consequence of engaging each other over what team we're on (right/left, etc), rather than engage with messy collections of individual ideas.

But humans are hard-wired for tribalism, and hard-wires are the hardest to educate away. I'm not pining for a mystical past where all debate was intelligent and civil, but I do think the current landscape of media consumption technologies have thrown the worst aspects of our tribal habits into sharp relief.

Instead, I pine for a future where behavioral incentives align with the needs of humans, rather than with economic metrics.

I really loved reading this article. Although I had to turn off my twitter brain to get there.

Here is the money quote for me:

"Were his readers not reading well enough, or did he not write it well enough? Disagreement is mostly blamed on miscommunication. The burden of clarity is now entirely on the author, which makes for dull and repetitive arguments  — and a demand that certain people come to represent, unambiguously, certain arguments. One’s cards must all be laid on the table, faceup, and one’s position must be unified. But the rise of misreading doesn’t give permission not to mean what you say."

There are some interesting points. And I do agree that outrage-driven clickbaitiness has too much become the norm.

But I'm somewhat bewildered by the sense of authorial entitlement. I'm reminded of a piece by someone at Salon, maybe 15 years ago, whinging about lack of respect from readers, and resulting emotional pain. Maybe it's just that I grew up in academia, where people might gut your latest work through a seemingly innocent question during a seminar.

I thought the headline was interesting enough to clickthrough, but the first paragraph didn't get to the point so I decided not to invest further time in the article. Reporting on the off chance this ties into the theme of the article I didn't read.

You know, I spent last year subscribed to a bunch of these niche journals with the hope of broadening my intellectual intake. I tried to get a good variety - everything from Jacobin (socialist) to National Affairs (neocon). I'm not sure it was worthwhile. They're full of the same flood of opinions you get from the broader internet - in much more flowery prose.

N+1 is one of those journals and this article falls into that same category. It's an opinion piece about opinion pieces written in unnecessarily flowery and meandering prose. After reaching its conclusion my main thought was "It took you that long to say _that_?" Ironically, that very reaction is one of the things the author is railing against.

There is plenty to pick apart in our media landscape today. With perhaps the most challenging question to address being "When, if ever, is an opinion too dangerous to freedom to be given a platform?" Closely followed by "How can we improve the tenor and character of the national debate, given the constraints of media economics?"

But I really don't feel like this article succeeded in providing a coherent or cogent criticism of that landscape. Instead it just read like a flowery screed against opinions the author didn't like.

I was trying to read it to write a TL;DR

> ... the rise of misreading doesn’t give permission not to mean what you say

But I gave up at this point.