I recently discussed how my Kindle has increased the amount of books I have been reading. But this additional reading is still a great deal lower than in my peak, where I could consume a book in a day. What happened to that consumption of literature?
It didn’t go away. Instead, it got redirected, repurposed for a new function. The time I used to spend tearing through fantasy novels is now used to consume a huge variety of internet based content.
According to Google Reader, I am subscribed to over 150 feeds, which collectively gave produced 17,963 items in the last 30 days. That’s nearly 600 items per day. I have no statics on my average item length is. But taking a conservative estimate of 100 words per update, that is 60,000 words a day. Using a standard of 250 words per page, I consume the equivalent of a 260-page novel every day.
Of course, one must take this all with a grain of salt. Many of these numbers are estimates. And not every single post gets read with its entirety. But even taking that into account, I still consume a huge amount of written content every single day.
Reading books has played second fiddle to this deluge of online information. I have traded the intensity of long exposure to a single topic for smaller tidbits of a huge range of subjects. I go from reading about penguin fossils to an article about playing Monkey Island inside a browser. Every day has a whole new collection of information to absorb.
Even more important is the diversity of the authors I am reading. While I am forced (by lack of any real foreign language skill) to consume primarily English content, this content still comes from all across the world. I listen to a British game critic complain about games from Australia. I read about bees from a writer in Sweden. One of my favorite bloggers lives in South Africa. Even my American content is from all across the continent. From San Francisco gamers to an Alabama musician, I get to connect with a whole host of people whose experiences are wonderfully unlike my own. And that’s worth giving up reading a novel or two for.
-That is all.
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