Reading to Not Read

Spritz doesn't strive to fix speed reading's flaws, but to transcend reading entirely.

Ian Bogost

Mar 14 2014, 11:11 AM ET 2



If you’re a person who reads, you may have read about Spritz, a startup that hopes to “reimagine” reading. Like most tech startups, reimagining entails making more efficient. Spritz promises to speed up reading by flashing individual words in a fixed position on a digital display. Readers can alter the speed of presentation, ratcheting it up to 600 words per minute (about three times the speed the average reader scans traditional text).



This method, called rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), isn’t new, but Spritz has added an “Optimal Recognition Point” or ORP to this display technique. They claim it helps readers recognize each word most effectively by focusing their attention on a red letter representing its optimal point of recognition. Public response to the technology has been tremendous. According to Spritz, over 10,000 developers have already signed up to develop “Spritzified” products.





Spritzinc.com

Does Spritz work? Well, it depends on what you mean by “work.” As Olga Khazan wrote here at The Atlantic, speed reading has long been accused of sacrificing comprehension for convenience. University of South Carolina cognitive psychologist John M. Henderson further explains that Spritz’s ORP doesn’t improve matters:



But can you really read a novel in 90 minutes with full comprehension? Well, like most things that seem too good to be true, the answer unfortunately is no. The research in the 1970s showed convincingly that although people can read using RSVP at normal reading rates, comprehension and memory for text falls as RSVP speeds increase, and the problem gets worse for paragraphs compared to single sentences. One of the biggest problems is that there just isn’t enough time to put the meaning together and store it in memory (what psychologists call “consolidation”). The purported breakthrough use of the “ORP” doesn’t really help with this, and isn’t even novel. In the typical RSVP method, words are presented centered at fixation. The “slightly left of fixation” ORP used by Spritz is a minor tweak at best.



Interventions like Khazan’s and Henderson’s are meant to introduce doubt that Spritzing (or speed reading in general) offers an effective alternative to more traditional means of acquiring knowledge through written language. Spritz, it would seem, is just the latest repackaging of a decades-old optical snake oil.



For Spritzers, comprehension isn’t a lost virtue so much as an unshouldered burden.But what if the purpose of Spritz isn’t to improve or eliminate speed reading’s ability to produce comprehension, but rather to downplay or even eliminate the very need for reading comprehension?



In today’s attention economy, reading materials (we call it “content” now) have ceased to be created and disseminated for understanding. Instead, they exist first (and primarily) for mere encounter. This condition doesn’t necessarily signal the degradation of reading; it also arises from the surplus of content we are invited and even expected to read. But it’s a Sisyphean task. We can no longer reasonably hope to read all our emails, let alone our friends’ Facebook updates or tweets or blog posts, let alone the hundreds of daily articles and listicles and quizzes and the like. Longreads may offer stories that are best enjoyed away from your desk, but what good are such moments when the #longreads queue is so full? Like books bought to be shelved, articles are saved for a later that never comes.



With so much so-called content, “consuming” it by means of comprehension is becoming impossible. And while we might lament such an outcome along with Dr. Henderson, it stands to reason that the technology and media companies might want to compress more and more interactions with content (let’s not mistake them for reading) into a smaller and smaller amount of time. Think of it as an attentional version of data compression: the faster we can be force fed material, the larger volume of such matter we can attach to our user profiles and accounts as data to be stored, sold, and bartered.



If Facebook and Twitter and tumblr are the big box stores for online content, then Spritz strives to be its Olestra—the fat substitute that resists bodily incorporation. Just as Olean-oiled snacks provide the sensation of eating without the resulting gut, so Spritz offers the experience of reading without the nuisance of its mental effects. For Spritzers, comprehension isn’t a lost virtue so much as an unshouldered burden. For today’s overwhelmed content consumers, what could be better than experiencing the sensation of reading without the inconvenience of understanding?





Olestra label (flickr/roadsidepictures)

If ordinary readings are read to be understood, to be pondered and discussed and reflected upon rather than to be completed or collected, then perhaps it’s best to think of Spritzing as reading that is done to have been read. Indeed, the idea of Spritzing is the apotheosis of speed reading: reading in which completion is the only goal.

Spritzing is reading to get it over with. It is perhaps no accident that Spritze means injection in German. Like a medical procedure, reading has become an encumbrance that is as necessary as it is undesirable. “Oh God,” we think. “Another office email thread. Another timely tumblr. Another Atlantic article.” We want to read them—really to read them, to incorporate them—but the collective weight of so much content goes straight to the thighs and guts and asses of our souls. It’s too much to bear. Who wouldn’t want it to course right through, to pass unencumbered through eyeballs and neurons just to make way for the deluge behind it?



It’s easy to blame “the Internet” for the decline of reading. But reading hasn’t declined, or so we’re told. We read more than ever, don’t we? You may have read a statistic supporting such an idea in this very publication:



We now read an average of 54,000 words a day by some estimates, roughly the length of a novel.



Except, we don’t really read 54,000 words a day. Rather, “The average social network user receives 285 pieces of content daily, including 54,000 words.” Such reception doesn’t only include thinkpieces and long reads, but also many other things: your friends griping about this article on Twitter (“tl;dr, needs an editor!”); the PR rep email “reaching out” to arrange an interview with the CEO of a company you’ve never heard of; your former classmates vaguebooking about God know’s what. In the face of so much content, Henderson’s hope for “full comprehension” isn't quaint so much as it is intolerable. The goal isn’t to achieve comprehension but to eradicate it. Mere reception is reading in form alone. It’s reading done to get done with it.



We’ve been spritzing even before we even knew about Spritzing. What choice had we? Nobody can read a novel a day, even if it’s the only thing they do. Spritz hasn’t stepped in to sabotage comprehension, but to formalize and excuse its eradication. Reading already died. Spritz is just the undertaker who injects it with embalming fluid so it looks pretty at the funeral.

5 Predictions for the Web that were WAY off

BY James O'Toole
CNN
11 March 2014

In March 1989, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee published a paper proposing an "information management" system for his laboratory. His supervisor, Mike Sendall, scrawled some brief comments on the cover: "Vague, but exciting."

Sendall couldn't have been more right. Berners-Lee's proposal, conceived to improve information sharing between universities and researchers around the world, paved the way for the World Wide Web as we know it today.

Countless pundits have followed Sendall in the years since, prognosticating about how the Web will and won't transform society. Not all of them were accurate... and some really missed the mark. Here are five that were dead wrong.

The prediction: Spam will be gone within two years. - Bill Gates, 2004

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) founder said spam would be gone within two years.

Email filters and "human challenges" -- forcing the sender to solve a puzzle, for example -- could help cut down on unwanted emails, Gates said. He also predicted a "payment at risk" system in which email senders were forced to pay fines when their messages were rejected.

"Microsoft is pursuing all three approaches, and spam will soon be a thing of the past," Gates said.

The reality: Filters have helped. But 10 years later, Internet users still are getting deluged with emails for Cialis and mortgage refinancing programs. As of December, spam still constituted 68% of inbound email, according to Greenview Data.

The prediction: Websites will never replace newspapers. - Newsweek, 1995

Fifteen years before plunging ad revenues forced its owners to sell Newsweek for $1, the magazine published an anti-Web screed from cybersecurity expert, astronomer and author Clifford Stoll. He called the Web "a wasteland of unfiltered data", and complained that reliable voices were being drowned out by the rabble.
"The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper," he wrote.

"Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet," Stoll added. "Uh, sure."

The reality: You know how this one turned out. You're reading this online, right?

The prediction: The Internet... will explode? - Robert Metcalfe, 1995

Robert Metcalfe is no techno-phobe -- he's actually a highly regarded engineer who was one of the inventors of Ethernet networking technology. But Metcalfe worried that mass adoption of the Web would overload it. As more and more people connected, Metcalfe said the Internet would "go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."

The reality: It may seem like the Internet has exploded when Gmail, Facebook or Twitter has a service outage for a whopping half hour. But as we said earlier, you're reading this online, right?

The prediction: The Web means the end of Big Brother. - Columbia Journalism Review, 1995

Lawyer and researcher Peter Huber was a digital optimist. The increasing ease of communication in the Internet era, he predicted, would make it impossible for governments or corporations to control the flow of information.

"Orwell's world, the world of computer and communications monopolies, will not be seen again in our lifetime," Huber wrote. "The loose ends and the forgotten comers have taken over."

The reality: Anyone who's been reading the news this past year knows how far off this one was. Tech giants like Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Facebook (FB, Fortune 500) have vast troves of data on their users, and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has revealed government spying programs that can track people around the world wherever they go online.

The prediction: No one will buy anything over the Web. - Newsweek, 1995

We return to Stoll for this last one. He managed to get a staggering amount wrong in just a few hundred words. He also scoffed at the idea of "virtual communities", doubted the Web could have practical applications for government, and wondered how anyone could get any research done in the maze of online information.

But with regards to retail, he thought the lack of human contact would doom the Web as a sales medium. The evidence? His local mall "does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month."

"Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople," he wrote.

The reality: In a word, Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500). In another word, Borders.

What Animates the Tea Party

Is This Really What’s Driving the Tea Party?

March 7, 2014



As the tea party celebrates its fifth birthday this month, Ian Haney López, author of Dog Whistle Politics, talks to Bill about how the movement has used strategic racism to get voters to the polls.

The fears that animate the tea party at the grassroots, Haney López says, are racial narratives that blame minorities for what’s going wrong in America.



When you look at what animates the tea party, there are several different hatreds that are core to the tea party. They hate welfare. Especially, or particularly welfare that’s understood as going to minorities. Not social security, for instance, but rather food stamps. Next, they’re obsessed about Muslims and Islam. And they really see this sort of threatening, this external threat in the form of the Middle East, but also ostensibly an internal threat of Muslims coming into the United States … They’re deeply concerned about undocumented immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Finally, they hate President Obama. And Obama seems to combine both this sense of welfare, of being a Muslim, of being a brown foreign other, right?

The Dylan Library VII

One of the discs is called Side Tracks---a collection of songs from various sources.  One is called "Things Have Changed" from The Wonder Boys from 2000.  Wasn't this a movie?  Anyway, what a great song!  I keep playing it over and over.

The Week in Review

Arianna Huffington


This week was consumed with the drama in Crimea, where 30,000 Russian troops provoked a tense standoff. Right on cue, the usual Beltway suspects whose foreign policy acumen gave us that glorious and tidy success, the Iraq war, sprang into action. "It started with Benghazi" (Lindsey Graham). Obama is "weak and indecisive" and "invites aggression" (John McCain). The situation raises many questions, including: why are those who've been so wrong on foreign policy still taken seriously? What Obama should do, beyond sanctions that were in place by Thursday, was unclear. Troops? Bombs? Nuclear war? Maybe we could send Mitch McConnell, who showed up at the CPAC panderfest brandishing a musket rifle. Then Ted Cruz fired up the crowd with that moldy oldie, 'repeal Obamacare.' Meanwhile, Darrell Issa shut down Elijah Cummings' microphone during Issa's fishless I.R.S. fishing expedition: a perfect metaphor for our current political debate.

12 Years a Slave

What a movie.
What an emotional experience.
A visceral experience.
Maybe the best movie I've ever seen.
After winning the Academy Award the movie came back to town.  I am glad I went to the Summitt to see it on a spring-like afternoon.
The horror of chattel slavery is brought to life.
This country has yet to come to terms with its history of slavery.
The theatre was as quiet as any theatre I've been in.
Every American should see this movie.

Peter Beinart Says

dumb ukraine oped formula: 1) say BHO weakness caused invasion (offer no causal link). 2) accuse BHO of weak response (give no alternative)