You can achieve faster reading rates with this sort of stuff by only reading one sentence from the middle of each paragraph, or reading the second and last sentence in the rare case that the middle sentence wasn't enough. The content is of such low density that it takes little more than that to decode the meaning and intent of the article.
I subscribe to the Economist and listen to it during my commute. Many of their articles are verbose, but it's still better, IMO, than many alternatives.
Oh, no... Not that thing again.I don't want to go too much off topic but to quote xkcd "More harm has come from people decrying societal decline, than societal decline ever has."
I like how Carr's own sentiment mirror the sentiment of people who thought books will stop people from remembering things. And he wants us to return to books?
Ugh, no. I suppose you've extrapolated quite a bit from the title. Carr thinks the benefits of the internet are massive, undeniable, and (probably) inevitable.
He's simply pointing out evidence that our tools change the way we think. He makes the same point about clocks, maps, books, etc.
The book has zilch to do with societal decline in the sense you mean it.
Hey, you're exactly right. Most articles have really terrible information density and this is one of them.
For example Paul Graham's essays are often very insightful, but they are frustratingly long. The core idea, which is the only reason why I am reading the essay, can be summarized into 1 - 3 sentences. The rest is just a boring extrapolation and repetition of that.
I stopped reading newspapers years ago when I realized they used a full page article to verbosely repeat the article title. Sadly, 140 characters seems to be the correct length for headline news in a society with no attention span.
- god this is long. Isn't it ironic that a superstar programmer would have been bored by now and stopped reading.
- momentarily after that, I guess I just admitted that I'm not s superstar programmer.
- momentarily after that, I wonder if there are writers who can transmit ten times as much information using one tenth of the words.
- just now, I imagine magazines don't want superstar writers. That would diminish the amount of ad space they could sell.