This reminds me of an episode of 99% Invisible [0] that I listened to. That episode also covered a bit about the history of indexes (which is relevant to the history of alphabetical sorting), including how scholars feared and resisted the adoption of indexes. It was super fascinating and I highly recommend giving it a listen if you found this article interesting!
Imagine if we could sort Google search results alphabetically. Imagine if we could sort Facebook "News Feeds" by any criteria. How would this affect advertising.
There is a book some folks mention written about alphabetical order. There was also a book written some years prior about the telephone book. Google has obliterated alphabetical business listings.
> Imagine if we could sort Google search results alphabetically. Imagine if we could sort Facebook "News Feeds" by any criteria. How would this affect advertising.
AAAAAASEO.com will be the first result for every search.
On a side note, I've always wish there was an API that could recommend media content.
Like you could just plug it into any playlist of songs, movies, or books, have it do some algorithmic analysis, and spit out what you would probably find fascinating.
There are still modern authors who buy into this kind of argument. E.g. the late John Taylor Gatto, who refused to use footnotes because he thought they made readers dumb. I forget whether or not his books have indices.
As soon as I saw this post I thought it that podcast. It was quite interesting how we take the alphabet as so fundamental. (And with a surname beginning with "V" I was always frustrated at school at being down the back of the line unless an enlightened teacher occasionally mixed it up)
>... on the Continent Galileo grumbled at the armchair philosophers who, “in order to acquire a knowledge of natural effects, do not betake themselves to ships or crossbows or cannons, but retire into their studies and glance through an index or a table of contents to see whether Aristotle has said anything about them.”
That quote does not appear to be dismissive of indexes to me. It appears to be about people who appeal to authority rather than doing their own empirical research.
I didn't see other quotes to support the claim that [a significant number of] scholars feared that the index would destroy reading, and I'm a bit skeptical of the claim offhand. I wish there was some information structure that would allow me to find such supporting evidence more easily...
I have heard (yes, somewhat recently) some classicists argue that the move from scrolls to books, with the text segmented in pages, was also harmful with arguments along similar lines.
In a modern context, PDF (pages) or websites (infinite scroll).
Personally I like scrolling, usually with a 2-finger gesture on a trackpad. For keyboard-only navigation (e.g. UNIX "less"), pages make sense though, controlled with the spacebar or Page Up/Page Down keys.
Scroll and pinch-to-zoom on a single trackpad is particularly user-friendly in my opinion, as well as two-finger tap to right click and search/define/copy-paste/etc.
I'll latch on the point being made about the capacity of long reading being eroded by tech. The author dismisses it as old-timey, but I think this is largely true[1]
>"The findings on reading comport with some other recent data on American reading trends. Numbers from the National Endowment for the Arts show that the share of adults reading at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the prior year fell from 57 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 2015. Survey data from the Pew Research Center and Gallup have shown, meanwhile, that the share of adults not reading any book in a given year nearly tripled between 1978 and 2014."
I think even behaviour like calling a 10 minute video "too long", is now common. It seems absurd to me to just describe this neutrally as the author does and call it an 'adaption' comparing it to us behaving differently than 11th century monks. Reading differently might be fine, but when anything longer than five minutes of sustained concentration is too much you're getting to a point where you physically can't actually engage with anything in long form any more.
On the other hand, the longest works of written fictions in the world are fanfictions published on the internet.
These days I don't read many books anymore, but I still spend 3 hours or more a week reading the latest chapter of Wildbow's Pale, or ErraticErrata's Practice Guide to Evil.
The fact that these works have an audience suggests that there's still, in fact, a demand for massive amounts of written prose. Also, the fact that "binging" is a thing suggests that the "attention span" explanation doesn't hold weight either.
I strongly disagree and here’s why: your response doesn’t consider the means, which are much more important than some people still do read long-form works, and they do it on new-ish mediums like fanfic.
Yes, those traders still do exist. Same is true of the 40% of Americans that still read a book a year. But that number is falling quickly, and both my personal experience (older Gen Z) and scientific literature regarding the collapse of attention spans seems very real to me.
In 1982 on a Sunday afternoon, after the shops were all closed, and you’d already read yesterday’s paper, and last months Practical Computing your options for passive entertainment were limited to TV, radio and books.
I don’t think we had more ‘capacity’ for long reading, unless by capacity you mean ‘time on our hands’.
I tried to read every single book in my village's library in early nineties. Only skipped later parts of series that I've already tried. We had 4 TV programs, no internet yet, no kids my age in the neighborhood, what was I supposed to do.
My take away: People often think they know whats best for others and create needless roadblocks in their 'best interest'.
Or the roadblocks were created to address a narrow problem set, while ignoring the broader benefits of doing so. So everyone gets punished in the interests of a few who don't like to read.
It did, when it turned out you could game the system to move eyeballs from reality, to fiction that confirmed peoples biases. (both search engines and other content ranking systems).
That's a good point, and undoubtedly true for some. But I honestly believe that the discoverability of knowledge that Internet search enables is the most powerful and beneficial tool humanity has ever made. It certainly is for me personally.
People don't know how to use google search to find answers anyway.
And University libraries have had search engines since before the web existed and a part of scholarly learning was supposed to be understanding how to use them, so you could find whatever article you were looking for in the library.
I'd be happy if the kids today would get even better at using search engines.
Readit News
[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/
There is a book some folks mention written about alphabetical order. There was also a book written some years prior about the telephone book. Google has obliterated alphabetical business listings.
AAAAAASEO.com will be the first result for every search.
Like you could just plug it into any playlist of songs, movies, or books, have it do some algorithmic analysis, and spit out what you would probably find fascinating.
Yay or nay, pedants of HN?
That quote does not appear to be dismissive of indexes to me. It appears to be about people who appeal to authority rather than doing their own empirical research.
I didn't see other quotes to support the claim that [a significant number of] scholars feared that the index would destroy reading, and I'm a bit skeptical of the claim offhand. I wish there was some information structure that would allow me to find such supporting evidence more easily...
Personally I like scrolling, usually with a 2-finger gesture on a trackpad. For keyboard-only navigation (e.g. UNIX "less"), pages make sense though, controlled with the spacebar or Page Up/Page Down keys.
Scroll and pinch-to-zoom on a single trackpad is particularly user-friendly in my opinion, as well as two-finger tap to right click and search/define/copy-paste/etc.
>"The findings on reading comport with some other recent data on American reading trends. Numbers from the National Endowment for the Arts show that the share of adults reading at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the prior year fell from 57 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 2015. Survey data from the Pew Research Center and Gallup have shown, meanwhile, that the share of adults not reading any book in a given year nearly tripled between 1978 and 2014."
I think even behaviour like calling a 10 minute video "too long", is now common. It seems absurd to me to just describe this neutrally as the author does and call it an 'adaption' comparing it to us behaving differently than 11th century monks. Reading differently might be fine, but when anything longer than five minutes of sustained concentration is too much you're getting to a point where you physically can't actually engage with anything in long form any more.
[1]https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8XPnys...
These days I don't read many books anymore, but I still spend 3 hours or more a week reading the latest chapter of Wildbow's Pale, or ErraticErrata's Practice Guide to Evil.
The fact that these works have an audience suggests that there's still, in fact, a demand for massive amounts of written prose. Also, the fact that "binging" is a thing suggests that the "attention span" explanation doesn't hold weight either.
Yes, those traders still do exist. Same is true of the 40% of Americans that still read a book a year. But that number is falling quickly, and both my personal experience (older Gen Z) and scientific literature regarding the collapse of attention spans seems very real to me.
I don’t think we had more ‘capacity’ for long reading, unless by capacity you mean ‘time on our hands’.
Deleted Comment
Or the roadblocks were created to address a narrow problem set, while ignoring the broader benefits of doing so. So everyone gets punished in the interests of a few who don't like to read.
That is a rather shallow dismissal of your opponents. Surely they could have had more nuanced reasons than that?
And University libraries have had search engines since before the web existed and a part of scholarly learning was supposed to be understanding how to use them, so you could find whatever article you were looking for in the library.
I'd be happy if the kids today would get even better at using search engines.
http://outofthejungle.blogspot.com/2007/11/socrates-objectio...