I have to be honest with you: I am no longer able to read.
It’s not the kind of inability to read, or the kind of resistance that comes from boredom. It’s not about comprehension or emotion, but rather it’s as if it’s a physical disease, a part of myself that I can’t do anything about. I couldn’t even finish a single bar, couldn’t control my eyes to turn away, as if it was twisting and turning to find a pause or else it wouldn’t continue working. At the same time, after reading a paragraph, my mind would suddenly go blank, and then the words and meanings would suddenly disappear. Because of this, it is impossible to talk about comprehension, much less to form an overall impression. Moreover, what frightens me even more is that my attention cannot stay on a page for long. It is always moving around, like a snake made of mercury, burrowing in and out of the pages and countless ideas, trying to establish some kind of connection between two otherwise unrelated points. Most of the time, this effort is futile, but it is a waste of the mind, and one soon feels tired and exhausted.
I think this is the result of several years of Twitter training. Microblogging requires one to quickly jump from message to message and not to linger too long on any one message. It also requires one to consume a message as quickly as possible, bite into it quickly, suck the juice out of it, and then spit it out in one gulp. Finally, for those who create original content on Twitter, it requires you to be able to do a quick sift through a huge amount of information fragments, then make a connection between two otherwise unrelated fragments, and express that connection in a clever and beautiful way that will win the cheers and applause of your audience. You don’t need to know “why”, you just need to keep judging “what”, and then put together a series of “what”. So, even the simplest logic is abandoned. I’ve been on Twitter long enough to be heavily influenced by it.
Reading, by contrast, is a completely different paradigm. Deep reading requires you to be able to consistently focus on the page and concentrate all your energy because you have to think while you read. It takes a person who can consistently read tens of thousands of words and then pause a little to organize their thoughts, refine the structure of the book in their mind, and form an overall impression a little bit. Especially for people who read enough, the process of reading he will constantly extract the associated books in his mind to analyze and compare, reading a book is quite in the same time to go through a dozen books. This process is extremely demanding for the power of concentration, because once the thinking is interrupted, it is difficult to return to the previously established reading atmosphere, completely withdrawn from the original book’s mood.
The whole reading process is long and continuous, accompanied by silence and contemplation. This is completely different from Weibo, where the teacher says one thing and you immediately raise your hand and shout, “I know! I know!” I know!” in a rapid response. It’s not just a matter of habit, it’s a fundamental change in the mode of thinking. The form is the content, and the vehicle determines the content, which is very obvious on Weibo. Microblogging is a place where there is no need to think, where the most appropriate response in the shortest possible time is the most important thing, where the response is better than anything else and the statement is more important than anything else. Through the domestication of microblogging, a person’s cortical physiology may even have changed. This is evidenced by the fact that all segments do not offer fresh ideas, they are merely tautological, attempting each to restate or define the same thing, thus reinforcing and amplifying the thing itself again and again. So, it is salt given when thirsty.
With this in mind, I’m announcing today that I’m taking a break from updating Twitter, as well as from diving into it, and completely disconnecting from this general environment. Trying to do some restorative training, including reading and writing. I want to read some long texts to restore my old concentration and be able to think about the same thing continuously. In addition, using writing to articulate the thinking process in a complete and continuous manner restores a bit of the ability to think rather than react.
Stopping in this way, I realized that the world around me has changed a lot. The world is now basically a large display of information fragments, and complete information is very rare. All you can know is a moment of the matter here and now. People also seem content with this, listening to a singer for 60 seconds to decide whether he stays or goes, spending five seconds in the results column returned by a search engine to decide who to click on, and deciding whether to open read more …… Chaplin’s movie Modern Times by virtue of the first ten words in the information prompt that pops up on the iPhone screen. Industrial workers repeat the same one action on the assembly line for more than ten hours, while we are now facing pieces of information 24 hours a day, seven days a week, waiting to react. In this new world, time has no beginning and no end, only a transient present. There is no beginning and no end to events, only a brief message you are facing at this moment. I suddenly felt the utmost horror and despair, feeling no different from an automatic machine: reading a message fragment with my eyes, using a mechanical arm to make the three choices of forwarding, replying and skipping. The process goes on and on, endlessly. Even when you finally stop to take a break, it’s only a few minutes before you get bored and continue to pick up your phone, making processing pieces of information a pastime!
In the past, I have made many decisions. Many of them seemed too impulsive in hindsight, and I didn’t do any careful thinking at the time. But once the idea of suspending Twitter rose, it was hard to banish it from my mind. When I wrote the announcement and closed the page, I suddenly felt a sense of relief in my heart. At this moment, I still can’t read a book coherently, but I seem to have regained the ability to write more than 1,500 words. Thank goodness I still have the ability to engage in this ancient form of self-expression. In a world of fragments, trying to form little “chunks”. I hope they can become “faces” or even “bodies” so that I can find a place to breathe after being bombarded and chased by all kinds of fragmented information.
I am a fragmented information hypochondriac, which is a serious disease like dyslexia and dense object phobia. But my disorder doesn’t get enough attention from the world, and that makes me feel very unfair. All someone has to do is say “I have a fear of dense objects” at the table, and the host immediately removes the sunflower with enough apologies. At the same time, you can show full understanding of the gulp of caviar. Who can understand a fragmented information imbecile like me?
When I was playing on Sina Weibo swipe, I could swipe up to a hundred articles in a single day. Based on 10 replies and 5 retweets per article, I would be browsing 1500 messages per day. Adding the people I follow, their statements and followers, the total number of messages may rise to more than 3000. I think this is far from my limit. I follow tens of thousands of people in Difu and thousands in Tencent Weibo, and according to past statistics, my daily limit of processing fragmented information is around 8,000 messages. This number makes me feel very frustrated, because with the messages on Twitter, Facebook, Douban, WeChat and QQ, my ability to handle fragmented information is less than half of the information I receive daily.
Fortunately, I stayed on the Internet long enough to be able to invent various information filters on my own. The filtering criteria were my own: the number of sources should be limited so that they could be viewed in less than two hours, without making me miss important daily events in my field of interest. With this filtering and compression, I still have to view nearly a thousand messages a day, and only 24 hours a day. Considering that much of the information may have to be followed up after viewing, searching for relevant information and background, I don’t see how a limit of only 24 hours a day can be considered reasonable. However, I can’t change the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, and the conclusion would have to be that I am imbecile.
Years ago, when Zhang Chunru, a Chinese-American writer on the Nanjing Massacre, died suddenly, I helped a newspaper edit two full-page memorial features as an online friend. For 48 hours I stayed up almost non-stop, browsing every webpage I could find related to Ms. Zhang, and I even searched the internal newsletters of her high school reunion. I read all the book reviews about her, as well as the academic controversies that arose stateside because of her book. In the end, I completed the topic based on my own understanding. I believe that the feature was somewhat useful in that it was probably the first comprehensive coverage of Zhang Chunru in the domestic media, so much so that a “foreign correspondent” for one of China’s official media outlets sent my article back to China “compiled from foreign media reports” almost intact. This is a very good thing.
This is almost impossible today, because if I look for information about her in the search engines of social networks, I believe that all I get is a whole screen of reprints with the same content. At the same time, I don’t have that much time to think about who she is and what she did or anything like that. I don’t have 48 hours, I have about 5 minutes to make up the first text about her memory, light a candle and write “Turn if you are Chinese”. Then I have another 10 minutes to make up the second entry, which must have a picture of her and her child, standing happily in the sun, and then find an emotional point like the love between mother and child and write a heartfelt sentence. If all that didn’t turn my message into a hot topic of the day, then I could find a malicious and slanderous message in the subsequent tribute climax, just write the words “sunbathing idiot” and hit the retweet button, and a predictable retweet climax would happen in a few minutes.
In comparison, I prefer the former approach. Strictly speaking, I would have preferred a reporter to interview Zhang Chunru’s family, classmates, colleagues, and publishers when the incident occurred, and to find both sides of the debate for and against her, and write a two-page in-depth report with first-hand information. In the core story, the best journalists were asked to write about her life as she went through it, revealing how her endless digging into history and human nature destroyed her. Prove that even in the depths of time, the atrocities of history’s past still have the power to consume the heart and soul, enough to send a woman into depression and despair. I think that might have been a better story, far better than the article I made out of the engine. Information processing is not omnipotent, and even with all the web pages in hand, they cannot automatically combine to restore the body temperature of a flesh and blood body.
In this sense, I think I am a fragmented imbecile. 140 characters can do the same thing, but I prefer to use the power of 8,000 characters plus 5 pictures.
Finally, the amount of energy I spend on information fragments in terms of information structure and technical architecture can also prove my imbecility. I have spent hundreds of working days analyzing Twitter, Weibo, Facebook, Instagram, online, Buzz, google Plus, and other Internet products that process fragmented information based on interpersonal relationships. It represents the “direction of advanced culture”. Its concept is exciting to human nature and its effectiveness is mind-boggling to the world. Although it is said that all great victories are first based on the victory of ideas, but SNS products similar to the trappings of utopia faded, I gradually doubt those ideas. I suspect that there is no such thing as a triumph of ideas, in this day and age, all triumphs are just triumphs of marketing.
There is no such thing as a clamoring crowd, only a tautology of voices. There is no such thing as an ego. Basically, one’s ego is nothing at all. This is the time when everyone tells but no one listens, this is the time when everyone shows himself but no one applauds. The most ambitious and intelligent minds in human history are working feverishly to design clever products that create more pieces of information, to delight egos that no one really appreciates, and to encourage them to show and share more pieces of information about themselves. This is an era of hundreds of workdays spent by dozens of engineers, giving virtual promises in hundreds of thousands of lines of code to help people get laid, something that could have been solved by hand with an easy process.
I don’t think I can embrace the so-called direction of change of the times like information fragmentation with open arms, and at the same time, I don’t think it’s Cool to compare my brain made of proteins to a CPU with bus parallel processing. If human evolution was so rapid and evolution was so steep on the time scale, then our appendix should have disappeared thousands of years ago instead of still bothering us with inflammation to this day. I’ll give my blessing to those who claim their brains can operate in parallel, but even if they can flexibly switch brain working modes and jump between fragment processing and deep computing what does it matter to me? I’m nothing but an imbecile.
On this matter, let me end today’s discussion with a story: For countless centuries, there have been countless dark shadows scattered in every corner of this world. Wherever daylight shines, there must be shadows cast. A lot of words could be written about the color, size, light and darkness of these shadows. If the ancestors had had a microblog, the number of narrative texts about the shadows would probably have been a frightening number. In the third century B.C., on the day of the summer solstice in the ancient Egyptian town of Aswa, the sun was shining straight down the well at midday. Eratosthenes, the librarian of Alexandria, noted this event and recorded the shadow of the well at the summer solstice a few years later, at the same moment in Alexandria, directly north of Asva – with the sun 7 degrees off from the vertical. Thus, he got the circumference of the earth within 5% error of today’s measurement.
To be honest, I don’t remember the name Eratosthenes, nor Asva. But I always remember the grace of this argument, and a search engine could help me fill in the names of these people and places on the whole puzzle of the story, but it would not bring this grace. Even if I carried all the pieces about this actual test would not work, just as Eratosthenes did when, in the shadow of the sun, he suddenly had an epiphany about the potential connection between these pieces. It is one thing to know that there are shadows in every corner of the world, it is another thing to know how to make a connection between two of them.
For this reason, I’m willing to be a little moronic, for fear of missing out on the beauty of something that still speaks directly to the heart two thousand years later.
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