Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

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nonrandomstring

Or maybe "tools for promoting a culture of writing".

Increasingly I find I may be in a "minority of writers" in org teams who are primarily visual, memetic, kinetic and leave only fragmented records in mixed medias. I've also encountered younger engineers/programmers who pretty much cannot type! (only thumbs on a phone screen) - not even hunt and peck... just staring at the keyboard like it's an alien technology.

I actually understand this way of being. Using a visual programming language like PureData/LabView (dragging cords) and interacting via sliders, visual indicators/meters all day long I've inhabited the zone where I have been solving hard DSP problems in a visual-kinetic way, and hardly "thought in language" for hours on end. If someone comes into the workshop and asks me a verbal question it takes a few seconds to reboot that part of my head in order to speak.

But what I notice is that this mode of being in the world (Dasein?), is becoming dominant as people wander around all day, smartphones in hand (I don't use them), and so there's fewer moments when people process what they are doing/thinking qua language.

So for example; As desktop person who spends a good deal of the day interfacing to the world through a full keyboard and screen my fingers and textual brain are engaged, but some colleagues may do things like send a photo of a schematic taken on their phone, no accompanying text or explanation, not even a relevant subject line. So I get that they are not "thinking" in language. I wonder if I am part of a shrinking/dying culture of symbolic communicators.

I've worked with a guy who simply could not understand what he had to do if told in writing... email, IM whatever. When you told him in conversation he got it and did decent (not brilliant) work.

He was a programmer. You'd think writing code all day would allow you to understand writing...

could it be an issue of confidence? i know people who trust the spoken word over the written.

I worked with a similar guy: he would not do anything without first having a conversation about it. According to him, the act of writing notes based on a conversation helped concepts stick in his mind more durably than simply reading what others had written. While I'm sure there's some truth to that, it's absolutely possible to synthesize written thoughts in one's own words without directly interrogating the author. I suspect that the skill of "critical reading" is the missing link here.

I wonder if you and I and the sibling commenter are talking about dyslexia without realising it? I don't know much about it. A friend of mine has a similarly wired brain. Definitely there's a spectrum from very language orientated minds to those who greatly prefer picture, sound and face to face spoken communications. I wonder if smartphones and iconic interaction are making us all more dyslexic?

> I wonder if smartphones and iconic interaction are making us all more dyslexic?

No. Dyslexia is an actual learning disability, it isn't a lack of skill, aversion, or a missing habit. Dyslexia causes the reader to have difficulty recognizing words by, for example, scrambling letter order, and making it harder to distinguish similar letters (eg. confusing the mirror image letters b and d, or p and q), and similar visual confusion. It has very little to do with an inability to comprehend sentences.

Smartphones have actually increased the amount of text people read and write, but it is true that for most people little of that time is spent on text in longform formats rather than texts, tweets, memes, and shorter blog posts.

Certainly people who don't read and write longer essays and similar documents habitually are less likely to reach for that sort of reading and writing as tools for thought, and may not be as skilled in their use when they do, but that can generally be remedied with practice.

But none of that means that people are 'more dyslexic'.

There are other mental configurations (like ADHD) that make digesting longform text more difficult; those can sometimes be accommodated by using different (generally more atomized) documentation formats instead of continuous longform prose. Atomized formats will generally also help non-habitual readers, non-native speakers, the young, non-experts, and so on.

Of the four documentation types (tutorials, how-tos, explanations, and reference), only one (explanation) will tend to be expressed as longform text, but it doesn't have to be. Shorter explanations, or breaking the document up into shorter passages, is often well worth doing. There is no downside from making documents easier to digest. For the other documentation types, longer passages are a bit of a "smell" that should be eliminated if possible.

As in other contexts, accommodating a broad range of ability in people produces benefits for everyone, including for those who are more able.

I'm looking for another word, that (ironically) I can't find :) Something to mean a disposition to think and communicate (perhaps in a superior way) without recourse to language. Non-linguistic? Illiterate? (that sounds a bit harsh/critical). But you see the space I'm shooting for (divorce the idea of illiteracy from "stupidity").

> As in other contexts, accommodating a broad range of ability in people produces benefits for everyone, including for those who are more able.

Yes, I'm all for that, minus the use of "more/less able" (and say so in my example of "coding without code"). But returning to the OP essay, there's a problem that the structures of business and politics, formalisms, records, bureaucracies, project management.. are deeply rooted in the written (and often tortuously long-form) culture that mobile technologies, short attention spans and nonlinguistic semiotics are supplanting.

And to me that also suggests a widening class-gap, or rather a growing gap between modes of understanding the world that determine who are deciders or followers. It's more to do with technology use than any level of education or neuro-atypical "disorder" (the way you use "dyslexia" in a strictly "medical" way.) I hope that makes sense.

Well, one angle is to qualify the use of the term "literacy", as in "visual literacy". Here is an article about the movie Pacific Rim that pointed out how much of the story (or rather, backstory) was visually communicated to audiences via production and character design in ways that entirely whoosh over the head of most viewers focused on dialog and acting:

https://www.stormingtheivorytower.com/2013/07/the-visual-int...

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