Form Becomes Function

The other day while I was driving around I heard an interesting story on NPC. It's about how Newspapers and other print media can avoid dying off (Too which I responded “You mean they haven't already?”) through a study about how people read content differently depending on the format. What I took from the story was that even though people online tend to scan through articles more than they do in print, they still manage to read more than they do with the physical object in their hands. Something like three quarters of online stories as compared with two thirds of a newspaper article.

Now, this subject is of interest to me because I am, myself, a voracious reader. Like the main character in my favorite novel, Accelerando, the sheer amount of information I have to wade through on a daily basis to keep abreast of all my various interests is staggering. If anything, I've slowed down somewhat in recent years. Back when I was frantically trying to cling to the rudder of the Guru, there wasn't a thread that was posted that I didn't at least skim over. Along with keeping up with the competition and performing research to write my own articles and posts, I chewed through masses of information, and still found time to digest things not related to Guild Wars on a daily basis. But, still, I read websites, trawl through forums, and still manage to read at least two newspapers cover to cover.

What this tells me, other than the fact that my job is incredibly boring and I have way to much free time, is that I'm not the only one who's learned how to streamline my intake of information. I read a lot, true, but the only way I can read everything I want to in order to add more fuel to my mental fire is, indeed, by scanning through them and ignoring the bits that don't interest me. As you can see here, the human mind absorbs information in ways no one really understands just yet (Interesting thing about that link. When I slow down and try to decipher each individual word, my pace slows to a crawl. But if I just gloss over the jumbled words in scan mode, then it becomes much easier, and faster, to read.). And perhaps the ability to rapidly sort and assemble various bits of information is a survival trait for this particular 21st century digital boy.

Perhaps that's one reason why the standard advice when blogging is to keep things short and sweet. Admittedly, if this is true, my rambling and verbose style is ill-suited to this format. But that doesn't discourage me so much as interest me in the possible functions inherent in the form itself.