There is this strange attitude towards books, where people overfocus on the number of books they read and what "counts as reading", as if finishing a book is in itself a form of self-improvement or prayer or something. My theory is that it comes from the education system somehow.
I reckon that you're right about the education system being at fault, but if you're going to be "reading" a summary made by the pollution-bot, then you might as well just watch a youtube-video on the subject instead. At the very least you can use the comment section on youtube to ask questions about the subject matter (and get told that whatever issue you're having is a bolshevik plot made by the Talmudic Demons)
I was going to say it's like "gamifying" books, but the attitude is even older than that. It reminds me of people who will pick what games to play based purely on reviews, like their optimizing their Aggregated IGN Score Experiential Index.
I had to try to stop myself from doing that, because I would end up forcing myself to finish every single book I picked up, setting page count goals for the day, and not re-reading books because it cut into my goodreads goal for the year. When really... you should just read what you feel like, and for it's own sake, and not really worry too much about intentionality.
I think at least a part of this has to do with neo-liberal "self-betternment" and marketability/self-branding through consumption. Why else would goodreads and other such sites be so popular? People seem to be turning books into these lists of achievements with time limits that they perform to meet some ideal norm of an "educated citizen".
It kind of kills the idea of reading for myself at least, because it just becomes a performance and a chore.
I can also see how this makes everything very superficial. People who never seem to get anything from the books they read are a mystery to me, but I suspect that many just read and not necessarily digest the reading or reflect on it much. Because it is consumption.
I definitely see how we got here. Even the people I know who most love reading will just buy unreasonable numbers of books well beyond their capability to get through them meaningfully. Like their goal in life isn't to be fulfilled through literature, it's owning a large enough home someday to house their personal library.
I used to get ads for a subscription service that takes the endless stream of self-help crap the industry churns out and turns it into short podcasts or whatever. It's aimed at business folks who are too busy generating value for the economy to sit down and read, but I also wonder if there's really more than a half-hour's worth of content in these books anyway. They mostly seem like they're organized around a pretty simple concept that gets dressed up as hidden knowledge so there's a product to sell, and then they need to get padded out to book length so that the product seems worth the purchase price. Sure, some books (mainly textbooks) need to be huge because the information density there is actually high, and you can't condense a novel the same way because reading fiction is supposed to be an aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experiences are not compressible, but I imagine people get taught that a lot of the nonfiction they read is basically fluff and end up with the instinct to strip it out of everything because we've collectively lost the ability to understand or enjoy art.
i guess this is a product of over consumption, feeling you need to shorten stories so you can consume more of them faster
...
god that fucking sucks dude
There is this strange attitude towards books, where people overfocus on the number of books they read and what "counts as reading", as if finishing a book is in itself a form of self-improvement or prayer or something. My theory is that it comes from the education system somehow.
I reckon that you're right about the education system being at fault, but if you're going to be "reading" a summary made by the pollution-bot, then you might as well just watch a youtube-video on the subject instead. At the very least you can use the comment section on youtube to ask questions about the subject matter (and get told that whatever issue you're having is a bolshevik plot made by the Talmudic Demons)
I was going to say it's like "gamifying" books, but the attitude is even older than that. It reminds me of people who will pick what games to play based purely on reviews, like their optimizing their Aggregated IGN Score Experiential Index.
I had to try to stop myself from doing that, because I would end up forcing myself to finish every single book I picked up, setting page count goals for the day, and not re-reading books because it cut into my goodreads goal for the year. When really... you should just read what you feel like, and for it's own sake, and not really worry too much about intentionality.
I think at least a part of this has to do with neo-liberal "self-betternment" and marketability/self-branding through consumption. Why else would goodreads and other such sites be so popular? People seem to be turning books into these lists of achievements with time limits that they perform to meet some ideal norm of an "educated citizen".
It kind of kills the idea of reading for myself at least, because it just becomes a performance and a chore.
I can also see how this makes everything very superficial. People who never seem to get anything from the books they read are a mystery to me, but I suspect that many just read and not necessarily digest the reading or reflect on it much. Because it is consumption.
That'd make sense, I remember being rewarded in school for reading the most in my class (just like a sticker or something, but still).
Funnily enough, nowadays I rarely read because of how much and how fast I had to read in University burning me out so bad
I definitely see how we got here. Even the people I know who most love reading will just buy unreasonable numbers of books well beyond their capability to get through them meaningfully. Like their goal in life isn't to be fulfilled through literature, it's owning a large enough home someday to house their personal library.
I used to get ads for a subscription service that takes the endless stream of self-help crap the industry churns out and turns it into short podcasts or whatever. It's aimed at business folks who are too busy generating value for the economy to sit down and read, but I also wonder if there's really more than a half-hour's worth of content in these books anyway. They mostly seem like they're organized around a pretty simple concept that gets dressed up as hidden knowledge so there's a product to sell, and then they need to get padded out to book length so that the product seems worth the purchase price. Sure, some books (mainly textbooks) need to be huge because the information density there is actually high, and you can't condense a novel the same way because reading fiction is supposed to be an aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experiences are not compressible, but I imagine people get taught that a lot of the nonfiction they read is basically fluff and end up with the instinct to strip it out of everything because we've collectively lost the ability to understand or enjoy art.