I think one of us misunderstood the other. You said you liked reading because it's less mindless than TV, I said TV is not particularly mindless, you talk like I said reading was mindless.
Facebook is not mostly drivel, it's mostly a computerized manifestation of its users' lives. Boring people make boring posts, interesting people make interesting posts, and you keep track of party plans and weddings and deaths.
As for reading forcing you to mentally create audio and visual stimuli, that's never been my experience. I'm an avid reader, and I read the words on the page. Descriptive text is basically lost on me, because I'm simply not imagining what the characters look like. I may possibly be capable of turning a written description of someone's looks into a mental picture of them, but I can't think of a time when I have actually done so.
And no, bad Facebook memes aggravate me. But they're better than no writing at all. Reading and writing may be getting less classy on average, but that's because more people are doing it, and plebs gonna pleb.
I have a hard time believing you sincerely think reading is "basically identical" to TV in terms of the mindlessness of the activity, by any reasonable definition of the word "mindless".
Facebook is not mostly drivel, it's mostly a computerized manifestation of its users' lives.
I've no idea what sort of distinction you are making.
and you keep track of party plans and weddings and deaths.
Like a calendar?
...As for reading forcing you to mentally create audio and visual stimuli, that's never been my experience. I'm an avid reader, an
On HackerNews, this article was linked. The general idea is that companies are studying what people like to read, to help authors produce books that people like to read.
Now, for me, when I look at this idea, I see some down sides, but I certainly see some benefits as well.
Almost none of the commenters on NYTimes seemed to see any benefit whatsoever to studying reader behaviour. There were a few who saw the downsides as more mild than the other commenters. But most of the commenters basically saw this technology as some sort of 1984-esque idea that will turn all books into uninteresting, unimaginative pieces of paper that would better serve as a door stopper than as something for literary consumption. Out of 50 comments that I've read, only one person has said something along the lines of, 'This technology can possibly offer something to help authors improve their books'.
Is this just technophobia? Or am I missing something, and this really is a horrible, evil technology that should be avoided at all costs? [That's a rhetorical question -- I'd be surprised if even one LWian held that position]
I guess what I'm asking is, what are the psychological roots for the almost-unanimous aversion to this attempt at gathering and using information about what people want?