Speed Reading Apps

Google succeeded in its mission of organizing the information of the world. So it's now our move: how do we consume more of that information? Speed reading apps claim to help do that, at least on our phones.

Many criticize such apps saying that promote reading without any comprehension. But were we really reading and comprehending much even before these apps, asks Alex Balk:
“Basically nobody reads anything, the few people who do read things don't read all of it, and the two people who do read all of it are basically the ones tasked with checking for typos, so they are not actually retaining anything anyway.”
Harsh, you say? Balk rubs it in further:
“You might as well be lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna for all the actual comprehension and retention going on.”
Don't bother Googling the Latin sounding parts of the lines above. The phrase has the appearance of an intelligent Latin idiom. Actually, it is just nonsense. Really.

On the other hand, as Balk says in another article:
“Nobody has anything super-valuable to say anymore anyway so it doesn't really make a difference how much of it you retain…The odds are that anything flashing by you on a screen will be for the most part ignored and even more importantly ignorable so whatever helps you breeze through the barrage of verbiage at this point is probably worth it.”
and goes on to ask:
“You only have so many breaths remaining. What are you doing with them?”
One thing we should not do with our remaining breaths is to curse those speed reading apps. It's just lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna!

Comments

  1. KumarApril 25, 2014 at 12:16 PM

    Somewhere at the start your blog I saw this is there"Basically nobody reads anything..." And, having seen what your point through various quotes, I agree with what is is all about.

    By the way, the way life is leading us, not only nobody reads anything, but actually nobody listens to anything that is being said! We may keep hearing vaguely and then nodding to avoid being drawn into discussion or comments, or saying something vague or polite in return too - but very little we listen to actually.

    The need to be like that is due to our circumstances. We surely live a world which differs from that in which relatively primitive people lived. I recall what the native Indians said to the sophisticated white man, who found that the native Indian was not given to polite conversations without need for directness or substance. He said it seems, "When I have something to say, I say it. When I don't have anything to say I keep quiet." And, the native Indian did listen when there was need.

    At the other end, that is Japan, there are still those Zen masters, who declare clearly and simply, "When I eat I eat, when I play I play, when I read I read etc." This simple looking almost naive and idiotic statement is indeed profound. Do we understand?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more