Uh, just in general, people tend to react horrifically to long messages, ‘walls of text’.
… even on discussion boards, like here on lemmy, or as a first intro message to someone on some kind of dating app/site.
I’ve been using the internet since the mid 90s.
It did not used to be like this.
People thought of messages as letters, like emails.
Now, a lot of people will get viscerally angry or disgusted in basically nearly any digital context if you send a message that’s longer than roughly double the original Twitter character limit.
Hooray for normalizing slogans and soundbites in lieu of actual discourse, hooray for kicking off the trend of destroying our collective capacity to read multiple paragraphs at a time, great job Dorsey.
It’s very in line with Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death and the idea that the medium itself shapes communication and public discourse.
People seem not just unwilling, but at times unable to tolerate any sort of discussion that’s long enough to get into the real nuance of an issue. Postman blamed the news, especially TV news, and an over reliance on TV/Video as means to convey information (though he actually supported TV as entertainment). But he also cautioned against the risk centralizing what he referred to then as “computing” in a way that seem to almost prophesize what’s currently happening with social media and AI.
I guess ‘wall of text’ is something different for me than for you, or those you speak of here. For me, it’s when the long text has no newlines or paragraphs, making it inaccessible and hard to read or scan.
I mean, there’s always gonna be some variability as to how people understand terms, and I personally lean much more toward your understanding, where its a uh…
Its more reminiscent of an ancient slab of greek or roman text, just, all letters, no spaces, no punctuation, ie, terribly formatted by modern english standards.
But, what I’m trying to describe is more of … a visceral anger or mockery at the concept that someone would read more than about a single paragraph.
Its happening because people’s brains are ‘adapting’ to the short form, brainrot mode of modern social media.
Everything is a clipshow.
If its longer than a clip, its boring, and or excruciating to attempt to parse, for people conditioned by things like TikTok.
Its happening because people’s brains are ‘adapting’ to the short form, brainrot mode of modern social media.
This is what I feared way back when Twitter first gained popularity. I couldn’t get into it, because the short character limit made it impossible to explain pretty much anything.
Anyway, I’m with you on this. If you’ve got something important or novel to share, it’s probably going to take some explanation to convey it. Short-form social media leads to shallow conversations. I like depth, I like exploring others’ perspectives, and it takes more than 160 characters (or whatever the limits are now) to really reach some subjects.
I say this as someone with unmedicated ADHD - modern people’s attention spans are depressing. I still love watching documentaries that are 2+ hours long, even when YouTube tries to push for 30-second clips of garbage. Thank goodness for Lemmy and Mastodon, offering us the chance to really dive deep into conversations that most social media want to clip short.
Well, beyond creating an account when Elon basically accidentally bought it, to scream at him, untill in all likelihood, he personally banned me.
Twitter took off because celebrities and primarily Democrat politicians joined an used it as essentially a microblogging/messaging system.
Our first social steps into modern parasociality.
They were of course eventually more or less thoroughly routed and out-influenced by hordes of right wing 4 chan trolls, who were much, much more adept at understanding how information flow actually works on the internet.
… anyway, yeah, i more or less see lemmy and piefed and mastadon as the last sort of… strung together set of rafts, floating amidst a sea of corporate sponsored, literal insanity, at this point.
Well no, IM has generally always defaulted to a norm of much shorter messages.
But… fairly lengthy forum posts?
Yeah, that used to be pretty common.
And it used to be normal that if someone posted ‘I ain’t readin’ all that’, they would be mocked.
Now, its the reverse.
And also… yeah I am still baffled by people whose response to … an introduction message, on some kind of dating app/site… is to just laugh at how long it is.
… I’d used OKCupid in its early days.
Generally?
If you took the time to actually read someone’s profile, and… write something, based on shared interests… that was … a good thing to do.
Shows that you actually care.
Now? Try to do the same thing?
Apparently people can’t comprehend that an initial, long, introduction message, does not mean that all other messages will necessarily be as long, unless you explicitly tell people this.
I keep encountering this kind of behavior.
And I’m just doing the same thing I’ve been doing for … almost 2 decades?
Like… for the record, it has ‘worked’ to at least some extent, I’ve had multiple year+ relationships that started from doing that…
Just seems like more and more people are having a hostile response to a lengthy intro.
A high proportion of people on the Internet in the mid-90s were associated with tech or universities and were comparatively well-educated. It was not a representative slice of society.
Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.[1][2] Before this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.
The flood of new and generally inexperienced Internet users directed to Usenet by commercial ISPs in 1993 and subsequent years swamped the existing culture of those forums and their ability to self-moderate and enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users.[3] Hence, from the early Usenet community point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and learned to observe the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users.
The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year university students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their university campuses. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year.
And that’s just college freshmen.
Internet access today is more universally-available. I’d say that it’s just a product of seeing society as a whole writing.
A lot of what people read in, say, the 1980s was from mass media. That generally had a journalist — a professional dedicated to writing — and an editor checking their work. Those people probably had gone to college specifically to pick up writing skills, and likely spent a large portion of their professional lives writing. They had a high level of expertise relative to the population as a whole in that field. Now what you’re reading is often without that filter. It’s not that people in society changed. It’s that you’d never seen society’s writing; you’d just been reading what experts put out.
It’d be like most of what you’d seen your whole life was furniture created by professional carpenters, and then suddenly every Tom, Dick, and Harry was creating their own furniture.
I remember staring at YouTube comments when YouTube first came out and thinking “good God, these are terrible”. Randall Munroe, who clearly had the same reaction, did a whole cartoon about it:
The answer, of course, isn’t that YouTube users are unusual. It’s that the people who watch videos are more-representative of society than those who are writing and reading long-form text on Usenet or whatnot. That comes as a sudden and abrupt shock if you’re used to reading that Usenet stuff. That is, you’d been in a bubble, and that bubble went away.
Randall worked at NASA. If you work at NASA and are accustomed to conversation among a bubble of what people who work at NASA say about space and then abruptly get thrown into an environment where people who don’t work at NASA are talking about space, I expect that it’s pretty shocking.
I remember also reading about what happened when email entered into businesses. It kind of mirrored this. For a long time, it was kind of expected that executives would have a secretary, because doing things like typing wasn’t as widespread a skill and correcting errors on a typewriter was more time-consuming than it is today on a computer. A manager would likely at least get access to some sort of shared secretary, even if they didn’t merit a personal one. That secretary likely spent a lot of their professional life writing, and got to be pretty good at it. That secretary was probably a lot better at writing than the typical person out there. Then businesses generally decided that with email, a lot of this dedicated-secretary overhead wasn’t necessary, and arranged to have people just write their own memos. They promptly discovered that a lot of people high up in their org charts had very little ability to write understandably (probably in part because they’d been relying on secretaries to clean everything up for years), and for some years after email showing up in businesses, having training to remediate this was apparently something of a thing.
A secretarial pool or typing pool is a group of secretaries working at a company available to assist any executive without a permanently assigned secretary. These groups have been reduced or eliminated where executives have been assigned responsibility for writing their own letters and other secretarial work.
After the widespread adoption of the typewriter but before the photocopier and personal computer, pools of typists were needed by large companies to produce documents from handwritten manuscripts, re-type documents that had been edited, type documents from audio recordings, or to type copies of documents.
Is all this a bad thing?
Well…the Internet has democratized communication. It means that everyone has a voice. It’s got pros and cons. It’s changed how politicians communicate (Trump being a good example). It means that it’s easier to get material out there, but that the material doesn’t have a filter on it that might have been useful.
I think that it might well be the case that the average person today probably writes a lot more than they did in the past, because electronic communication enables written text to be so-readily and quickly transmitted. I’d wager that the average level of writing experience is higher today than in 1995. It’s just that you’re seeing a higher proportion of Average Joe’s writing than Jane the Journalist’s writing than you might have in 1995.
The internets had a couple of shifts, the biggest and most recent in the 2010s when internet started getting common on cellphones. A whole crap ton of people who’d never really interneted before were suddenly thrust into it.
I am the most ‘unsupervised internet access as a child’ person I know, lol.
I just really really like computers, hahaha!
… I also am arguably even worse than the ‘eternal september’, lol, as I hadn’t even gone through puberty when I first started talking to people online, via forums or AIM or mIRC or Ventrilo or what not.
But as far as writing experience goes… you’re correct for a small subset of hyperliterate people, but generally your conclusion at this end is wrong.
Americans, American adults read and write at an average of a 5th grade level.
Around 15% of adults read and write at a 2nd grade level, functional illiteracy.
Something like less than 5% of American adults can read multiple news articles about the same topic, and compare and contrast the way they’re differently presented, to determine bias and missing or emphasized details, differing framing, etc.
When I went to college, this was referred to as having a collegiate level of literacy, post 12th grade literacy.
Well, how many American adults have a bachelors degree or better, and have an accompanying collegiate level of literacy?
Roughly 38% have a 4 year degree or better.
Yet only about 5% of them can actually do critical analysis.
So, roughly 87% of college degrees were given to people who did not actually learn how to think.
You don’t seem to understand how seriously the entire education system has already collapsed, how many college degrees are half comprised of what older, educated folks would just call remedial high school classes.
Our literacy numbers are comparable to those of what Trump refers to as ‘shithole countries’.
This is even bleeding over into professional email. I’ve noticed that if I send more than a few paragraphs, the recipient won’t actually read any of it.
I’ve taken to highlighting the important things, so they’ll at least feel like they can reliably skim.
Work emails need to be short and to the point. I know, it sucks when you have something complex, but people prefer to talk. So email needs to be more if a record if high points of conversation, or a quick verification of something.
I learned early on that I should only ask one question per text or email. Every boss and project manager I’ve had has been seemingly unable to answer more than one question at a time.
I think I’ll start using your method when explaining things.
I have had multiple VPs ask me complex, technical questions, and then I write them a complex, explanatory answer…
And the reply that I get back includes them literally just saying ‘I didn’t read anything that would have required me to scroll.’
These were boomers.
Fuck, man, ok, at that point, you’re just asking a question to waste my time, apparently?
I’m not gonna dumb down concepts that can’t be dumbed down and still meaningfully answer the question.
I was hired here because I have specialized skills, if you’re too stupid to understand them, maybe realize that good leadership is more about knowing when to defer to your trusted experts, than it is about feeling like you are in total control and understanding of everything, all the time.
It really is no wonder why the entire economy is collapsing, the elites really are just pantomiming a caricature of having a job, doing a job, being an important person.
We’ve 'boys club’d and nepotism’d our way into mass executive incompetence.
I’ve noticed that if I send more than a few paragraphs, the recipient won’t actually read any of it.
I was reading an article about how some people were using LLMs to generate longer emails with more fluff to make it look like they were putting more work into their emails, and how other people were having LLMs summarize emails that had been sent to them to cut out excessive fluff because it was wasting their time.
One can but imagine what the end game of all this is.
Many people are only semi literate. This cuts two ways- many people struggle with reading longer text, but they also struggle with composing longer text.
I’ve generally worked in tech with rather educated people, but even there the lower portion of their writing skills can be disappointing. Like, a low grade for English Composition 101. Now, remember that most people don’t have even that much training, and don’t practice on their own in ways that encourage (what’s traditionally considered) good writing.
I think this is part of why some people love chatgpt. They’re poor at writing, and now there’s a tool that purports to fix that problem without all the pesky work of practicing and learning.
I’ve generally worked in tech with rather educated people, but even there the lower portion of their writing skills can be disappointing.
I’m pretty sure that education helps. I used to hang out on /r/Europe, which had a lot of non-native English speakers…but who were generally very well educated (probably because of the sort of people who are going to be hanging out on an international forum and writing in some language that often isn’t their native tongue). The quality of the writing was pretty darn good. I’d say that the Dutch users there in particular wrote exceptionally clean English.
That said, it was an interesting experience, because I discovered that there are completely different categories of errors that native and non-native speakers make. For example, I’ve seen plenty of native speakers here in the US confuse “their”, “they’re”, and “there”, probably because they learned to speak the terms long before they wrote them and then kind of mentally linked them in the interim. I virtually never saw that error on /r/Europe, probably because a lot of Europeans learned to write English relatively-early compared to learning to speak it. But I did see a higher proportion of people having problems with some errors that aren’t common among native speakers:
Words where English has one word that passed through different languages and then entered English as two different words (e.g. bloc and block).
Headlines. Until spending time on that forum, I was basically oblivious to the fact that headlines in English use very different grammar, a different set of conventions, than standard English. I’d grown up reading them, internalized them, never thought about it. Then I wound up on a ton of posts with people in /r/Europe complaining that the submitted headline for an article was completely nonsensical or unreadable. To me, the headlines seemed completely reasonable; at first I thought that users were just joking. Took me a while to realize what was going on. I couldn’t even find any websites that provided a full summary of all of the headline-specific grammatical conventions, just some that had some common examples.
Words that have irregular prefixes. For example, someone might write “uncompatible” or “noncompatible” instead of “incompatible”. English has many different prefixes that can mean approximately “not”, (“a-”, “un-”, “anti-”, “non-”, “in-”, “im-”, “ir-”, “ex-”). Just have to memorize them, kind of like grammatical gender in some other languages. I’ve rarely seen native speakers not know the right irregular prefix, but that was an extremely-common error to see on /r/Europe.
Specifically for Slavic language users, I saw some users having trouble with definite/indefinite articles (something that doesn’t exist in Slavic languages and is actually fairly uncommon in languages globally) or using gendered pronouns where one wouldn’t in English (modern English has only the tiniest remaining vestiges of grammatical gender).
Also, it was interesting to see where errors did crop up — my impression was that it tended to be with French or maybe Spanish speakers. My guess is that that’s because those languages are the other European languages that are also (relatively) widely-spoken around the world, and so by using English, you expand the pool of people you can talk to the least; I’d guess that people who speak these other languages use English less. For Spanish, it’s maybe a factor of 3. For French, maybe a factor of 5. Compare to something like Icelandic, where it’s something like a factor of 4,000.
So you then just… never develop any actual reading or writing skills.
Its turning people into something akin to zombies, more or less. Either that or maybe just trying to think of it as some new kind of addiction or mental disability would be a more apt comparison?
I… its baffling, I can barely comprehend how significant and widespread this problem is… when I was in elementary school, I finished assignments and such so fast, with such frequency, that I would get assigned to go out into the hallway and help other kids who were struggling with reading skills, I’d help them read through books, sound out words, explain what they mean.
Thats my point of reference here, I’m back in 2nd grade, helping (probably dyslexic) 4th graders learn how to read.
So you then just… never develop any actual reading or writing skills.
This is one of the scary parts, yes. Reading and writing are fundamental skills that will atrophy if not practiced. Combined with anti-intellectualism, where people fundamentally do not value reading and writing skills, it’s pretty nasty.
I don’t know how to fix it. It’s a gap in values. I often find myself wondering about the people around me, “Why don’t you care?” I don’t know why they don’t care about things.
… The reliance on machines to do their thinking has more or less made them into actual NPCs.
First it was the combined effect of all of the media machines of capitalism, providing so many distractions and distortions.
Now… its much more direct, formidable, capable… total.
Just go look into the number of people who’ve killed themselves or others after more or less being goaded or gaslit into by… their only friend, ChatGPT.
Its realworld cyberpsychosis, from Cyberpunk 2077.
to the best of my memory, at least in my experience, i think it originated on, or perhaps was popularized on early reddit, like, pre 2010, perhaps earlier in other forums?
i guess i would not be surprised if it actually originated on tumblr and then made its way to reddit, but yeah, i think i remember it basically ‘becoming a thing’ roughly around 2008ish? On reddit?
Ah fuck, apparently its first recorded usage was on usenet in 2002.
I may have been using the internet since the 90s, but I also was under the age of 10 for most of the 90s, so… yeah I did not exactly know as much about usenet, as say… gamefaqs, and neopets lol.
I blame the early stages of texting when the dawn of cellphones began, when they became more easily accessible.
Then, I blame Twitter and Facebook for character limits. So, it forced people to dumb down everything they try to talk about.
Then, I blame TikTok/Vine/YouTube Shorts for even worsening the attention span of people.
So now it’s like, if you attempt to explain things in great detail, you’ll get one or both reactions. One being, people being snarkily towards you about how the post is at length and it is one thing for your post to be a giant blob of text with no structure. Nobody likes reading that, even I don’t like reading that and I can get wordy.
The other reaction are people who just complain, bitch, moan and cry about how long the post is.
The possibly optimistic way of looking at this is that certified morons will let you know they are such, so, writing something of moderate length effectively serves as a kind of shit-test.
Also, people seem to be mostly unaware that different formatting standards exist and make more sense for different viewing contexts.
I write the vast majority of my lemmy posts on mobile, because I engage with lemmy via mobile.
Every once in a while I get someone screeching at me about horrible formatting… it looks fine on mobile.
Sometimes I get much more polite critiques or suggestions, and then I just usually explain ‘oh I use lemmy on mobile’ and that is generally an amicable conversation…
But a good chunk of people are seemingly baffled and offended by the idea that anyone could be doing anything in a manner different from how they, personally, do it.
I don’t know about that. I’ve been involved in a lot of long form debate/arguments on forums back in the day and every time you saw a wall of text you had to roll your eyes.
The only difference is we all used to read it all back then. Maybe we just tolerated it better when we were younger.
Uh, just in general, people tend to react horrifically to long messages, ‘walls of text’.
… even on discussion boards, like here on lemmy, or as a first intro message to someone on some kind of dating app/site.
I’ve been using the internet since the mid 90s.
It did not used to be like this.
People thought of messages as letters, like emails.
Now, a lot of people will get viscerally angry or disgusted in basically nearly any digital context if you send a message that’s longer than roughly double the original Twitter character limit.
Hooray for normalizing slogans and soundbites in lieu of actual discourse, hooray for kicking off the trend of destroying our collective capacity to read multiple paragraphs at a time, great job Dorsey.
It’s very in line with Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death and the idea that the medium itself shapes communication and public discourse.
People seem not just unwilling, but at times unable to tolerate any sort of discussion that’s long enough to get into the real nuance of an issue. Postman blamed the news, especially TV news, and an over reliance on TV/Video as means to convey information (though he actually supported TV as entertainment). But he also cautioned against the risk centralizing what he referred to then as “computing” in a way that seem to almost prophesize what’s currently happening with social media and AI.
I guess ‘wall of text’ is something different for me than for you, or those you speak of here. For me, it’s when the long text has no newlines or paragraphs, making it inaccessible and hard to read or scan.
I mean, there’s always gonna be some variability as to how people understand terms, and I personally lean much more toward your understanding, where its a uh…
Its more reminiscent of an ancient slab of greek or roman text, just, all letters, no spaces, no punctuation, ie, terribly formatted by modern english standards.
But, what I’m trying to describe is more of … a visceral anger or mockery at the concept that someone would read more than about a single paragraph.
Its happening because people’s brains are ‘adapting’ to the short form, brainrot mode of modern social media.
Everything is a clipshow.
If its longer than a clip, its boring, and or excruciating to attempt to parse, for people conditioned by things like TikTok.
This is what I feared way back when Twitter first gained popularity. I couldn’t get into it, because the short character limit made it impossible to explain pretty much anything.
Anyway, I’m with you on this. If you’ve got something important or novel to share, it’s probably going to take some explanation to convey it. Short-form social media leads to shallow conversations. I like depth, I like exploring others’ perspectives, and it takes more than 160 characters (or whatever the limits are now) to really reach some subjects.
I say this as someone with unmedicated ADHD - modern people’s attention spans are depressing. I still love watching documentaries that are 2+ hours long, even when YouTube tries to push for 30-second clips of garbage. Thank goodness for Lemmy and Mastodon, offering us the chance to really dive deep into conversations that most social media want to clip short.
Yep.
Its why I never used Twitter.
Well, beyond creating an account when Elon basically accidentally bought it, to scream at him, untill in all likelihood, he personally banned me.
Twitter took off because celebrities and primarily Democrat politicians joined an used it as essentially a microblogging/messaging system.
Our first social steps into modern parasociality.
They were of course eventually more or less thoroughly routed and out-influenced by hordes of right wing 4 chan trolls, who were much, much more adept at understanding how information flow actually works on the internet.
… anyway, yeah, i more or less see lemmy and piefed and mastadon as the last sort of… strung together set of rafts, floating amidst a sea of corporate sponsored, literal insanity, at this point.
On IRC and ICQ and AIM? No, lowercase phrases without punctuation was the norm for short messages.
Text messages are closer to those old short messages (hence the name “short message service”) than to email.
Well no, IM has generally always defaulted to a norm of much shorter messages.
But… fairly lengthy forum posts?
Yeah, that used to be pretty common.
And it used to be normal that if someone posted ‘I ain’t readin’ all that’, they would be mocked.
Now, its the reverse.
And also… yeah I am still baffled by people whose response to … an introduction message, on some kind of dating app/site… is to just laugh at how long it is.
… I’d used OKCupid in its early days.
Generally?
If you took the time to actually read someone’s profile, and… write something, based on shared interests… that was … a good thing to do.
Shows that you actually care.
Now? Try to do the same thing?
Apparently people can’t comprehend that an initial, long, introduction message, does not mean that all other messages will necessarily be as long, unless you explicitly tell people this.
I keep encountering this kind of behavior.
And I’m just doing the same thing I’ve been doing for … almost 2 decades?
Like… for the record, it has ‘worked’ to at least some extent, I’ve had multiple year+ relationships that started from doing that…
Just seems like more and more people are having a hostile response to a lengthy intro.
It was like this in the early 00s, you may just have rose coloured glasses.
A high proportion of people on the Internet in the mid-90s were associated with tech or universities and were comparatively well-educated. It was not a representative slice of society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
And that’s just college freshmen.
Internet access today is more universally-available. I’d say that it’s just a product of seeing society as a whole writing.
A lot of what people read in, say, the 1980s was from mass media. That generally had a journalist — a professional dedicated to writing — and an editor checking their work. Those people probably had gone to college specifically to pick up writing skills, and likely spent a large portion of their professional lives writing. They had a high level of expertise relative to the population as a whole in that field. Now what you’re reading is often without that filter. It’s not that people in society changed. It’s that you’d never seen society’s writing; you’d just been reading what experts put out.
It’d be like most of what you’d seen your whole life was furniture created by professional carpenters, and then suddenly every Tom, Dick, and Harry was creating their own furniture.
I remember staring at YouTube comments when YouTube first came out and thinking “good God, these are terrible”. Randall Munroe, who clearly had the same reaction, did a whole cartoon about it:
https://xkcd.com/202/
https://lemmy.today/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimgs.xkcd.com%2Fcomics%2Fyoutube.png
The answer, of course, isn’t that YouTube users are unusual. It’s that the people who watch videos are more-representative of society than those who are writing and reading long-form text on Usenet or whatnot. That comes as a sudden and abrupt shock if you’re used to reading that Usenet stuff. That is, you’d been in a bubble, and that bubble went away.
Randall worked at NASA. If you work at NASA and are accustomed to conversation among a bubble of what people who work at NASA say about space and then abruptly get thrown into an environment where people who don’t work at NASA are talking about space, I expect that it’s pretty shocking.
I remember also reading about what happened when email entered into businesses. It kind of mirrored this. For a long time, it was kind of expected that executives would have a secretary, because doing things like typing wasn’t as widespread a skill and correcting errors on a typewriter was more time-consuming than it is today on a computer. A manager would likely at least get access to some sort of shared secretary, even if they didn’t merit a personal one. That secretary likely spent a lot of their professional life writing, and got to be pretty good at it. That secretary was probably a lot better at writing than the typical person out there. Then businesses generally decided that with email, a lot of this dedicated-secretary overhead wasn’t necessary, and arranged to have people just write their own memos. They promptly discovered that a lot of people high up in their org charts had very little ability to write understandably (probably in part because they’d been relying on secretaries to clean everything up for years), and for some years after email showing up in businesses, having training to remediate this was apparently something of a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretarial_pool
Is all this a bad thing?
Well…the Internet has democratized communication. It means that everyone has a voice. It’s got pros and cons. It’s changed how politicians communicate (Trump being a good example). It means that it’s easier to get material out there, but that the material doesn’t have a filter on it that might have been useful.
I think that it might well be the case that the average person today probably writes a lot more than they did in the past, because electronic communication enables written text to be so-readily and quickly transmitted. I’d wager that the average level of writing experience is higher today than in 1995. It’s just that you’re seeing a higher proportion of Average Joe’s writing than Jane the Journalist’s writing than you might have in 1995.
The internets had a couple of shifts, the biggest and most recent in the 2010s when internet started getting common on cellphones. A whole crap ton of people who’d never really interneted before were suddenly thrust into it.
I was under the age of 10, for most of the 90s.
I am the most ‘unsupervised internet access as a child’ person I know, lol.
I just really really like computers, hahaha!
… I also am arguably even worse than the ‘eternal september’, lol, as I hadn’t even gone through puberty when I first started talking to people online, via forums or AIM or mIRC or Ventrilo or what not.
But as far as writing experience goes… you’re correct for a small subset of hyperliterate people, but generally your conclusion at this end is wrong.
Americans, American adults read and write at an average of a 5th grade level.
Around 15% of adults read and write at a 2nd grade level, functional illiteracy.
Something like less than 5% of American adults can read multiple news articles about the same topic, and compare and contrast the way they’re differently presented, to determine bias and missing or emphasized details, differing framing, etc.
When I went to college, this was referred to as having a collegiate level of literacy, post 12th grade literacy.
Well, how many American adults have a bachelors degree or better, and have an accompanying collegiate level of literacy?
Roughly 38% have a 4 year degree or better.
Yet only about 5% of them can actually do critical analysis.
So, roughly 87% of college degrees were given to people who did not actually learn how to think.
You don’t seem to understand how seriously the entire education system has already collapsed, how many college degrees are half comprised of what older, educated folks would just call remedial high school classes.
Our literacy numbers are comparable to those of what Trump refers to as ‘shithole countries’.
Thank you for the history lesson :D
This is even bleeding over into professional email. I’ve noticed that if I send more than a few paragraphs, the recipient won’t actually read any of it.
I’ve taken to highlighting the important things, so they’ll at least feel like they can reliably skim.
This is nothing new.
Work emails need to be short and to the point. I know, it sucks when you have something complex, but people prefer to talk. So email needs to be more if a record if high points of conversation, or a quick verification of something.
I learned early on that I should only ask one question per text or email. Every boss and project manager I’ve had has been seemingly unable to answer more than one question at a time.
I think I’ll start using your method when explaining things.
I have had multiple VPs ask me complex, technical questions, and then I write them a complex, explanatory answer…
And the reply that I get back includes them literally just saying ‘I didn’t read anything that would have required me to scroll.’
These were boomers.
Fuck, man, ok, at that point, you’re just asking a question to waste my time, apparently?
I’m not gonna dumb down concepts that can’t be dumbed down and still meaningfully answer the question.
I was hired here because I have specialized skills, if you’re too stupid to understand them, maybe realize that good leadership is more about knowing when to defer to your trusted experts, than it is about feeling like you are in total control and understanding of everything, all the time.
It really is no wonder why the entire economy is collapsing, the elites really are just pantomiming a caricature of having a job, doing a job, being an important person.
We’ve 'boys club’d and nepotism’d our way into mass executive incompetence.
When you write three questions, and only the first gets answered in the reply😒
That’s where I like to knock back with “Did you read the whole message? As I wrote before” and quote back the parts they missed. It’s a real hit.
I was reading an article about how some people were using LLMs to generate longer emails with more fluff to make it look like they were putting more work into their emails, and how other people were having LLMs summarize emails that had been sent to them to cut out excessive fluff because it was wasting their time.
One can but imagine what the end game of all this is.
Many people are only semi literate. This cuts two ways- many people struggle with reading longer text, but they also struggle with composing longer text.
I’ve generally worked in tech with rather educated people, but even there the lower portion of their writing skills can be disappointing. Like, a low grade for English Composition 101. Now, remember that most people don’t have even that much training, and don’t practice on their own in ways that encourage (what’s traditionally considered) good writing.
I think this is part of why some people love chatgpt. They’re poor at writing, and now there’s a tool that purports to fix that problem without all the pesky work of practicing and learning.
I’m pretty sure that education helps. I used to hang out on /r/Europe, which had a lot of non-native English speakers…but who were generally very well educated (probably because of the sort of people who are going to be hanging out on an international forum and writing in some language that often isn’t their native tongue). The quality of the writing was pretty darn good. I’d say that the Dutch users there in particular wrote exceptionally clean English.
That said, it was an interesting experience, because I discovered that there are completely different categories of errors that native and non-native speakers make. For example, I’ve seen plenty of native speakers here in the US confuse “their”, “they’re”, and “there”, probably because they learned to speak the terms long before they wrote them and then kind of mentally linked them in the interim. I virtually never saw that error on /r/Europe, probably because a lot of Europeans learned to write English relatively-early compared to learning to speak it. But I did see a higher proportion of people having problems with some errors that aren’t common among native speakers:
Words where English has one word that passed through different languages and then entered English as two different words (e.g. bloc and block).
Headlines. Until spending time on that forum, I was basically oblivious to the fact that headlines in English use very different grammar, a different set of conventions, than standard English. I’d grown up reading them, internalized them, never thought about it. Then I wound up on a ton of posts with people in /r/Europe complaining that the submitted headline for an article was completely nonsensical or unreadable. To me, the headlines seemed completely reasonable; at first I thought that users were just joking. Took me a while to realize what was going on. I couldn’t even find any websites that provided a full summary of all of the headline-specific grammatical conventions, just some that had some common examples.
Words that have irregular prefixes. For example, someone might write “uncompatible” or “noncompatible” instead of “incompatible”. English has many different prefixes that can mean approximately “not”, (“a-”, “un-”, “anti-”, “non-”, “in-”, “im-”, “ir-”, “ex-”). Just have to memorize them, kind of like grammatical gender in some other languages. I’ve rarely seen native speakers not know the right irregular prefix, but that was an extremely-common error to see on /r/Europe.
Specifically for Slavic language users, I saw some users having trouble with definite/indefinite articles (something that doesn’t exist in Slavic languages and is actually fairly uncommon in languages globally) or using gendered pronouns where one wouldn’t in English (modern English has only the tiniest remaining vestiges of grammatical gender).
Also, it was interesting to see where errors did crop up — my impression was that it tended to be with French or maybe Spanish speakers. My guess is that that’s because those languages are the other European languages that are also (relatively) widely-spoken around the world, and so by using English, you expand the pool of people you can talk to the least; I’d guess that people who speak these other languages use English less. For Spanish, it’s maybe a factor of 3. For French, maybe a factor of 5. Compare to something like Icelandic, where it’s something like a factor of 4,000.
ChatGPT also dramatically worsens the problem.
It just does the writing and reading for you.
So you then just… never develop any actual reading or writing skills.
Its turning people into something akin to zombies, more or less. Either that or maybe just trying to think of it as some new kind of addiction or mental disability would be a more apt comparison?
I… its baffling, I can barely comprehend how significant and widespread this problem is… when I was in elementary school, I finished assignments and such so fast, with such frequency, that I would get assigned to go out into the hallway and help other kids who were struggling with reading skills, I’d help them read through books, sound out words, explain what they mean.
Thats my point of reference here, I’m back in 2nd grade, helping (probably dyslexic) 4th graders learn how to read.
This is one of the scary parts, yes. Reading and writing are fundamental skills that will atrophy if not practiced. Combined with anti-intellectualism, where people fundamentally do not value reading and writing skills, it’s pretty nasty.
I don’t know how to fix it. It’s a gap in values. I often find myself wondering about the people around me, “Why don’t you care?” I don’t know why they don’t care about things.
Why don’t they care?
… The reliance on machines to do their thinking has more or less made them into actual NPCs.
First it was the combined effect of all of the media machines of capitalism, providing so many distractions and distortions.
Now… its much more direct, formidable, capable… total.
Just go look into the number of people who’ve killed themselves or others after more or less being goaded or gaslit into by… their only friend, ChatGPT.
Its realworld cyberpsychosis, from Cyberpunk 2077.
Now you’ve got me wondering when tldr became a thing on the internet
to the best of my memory, at least in my experience, i think it originated on, or perhaps was popularized on early reddit, like, pre 2010, perhaps earlier in other forums?
i guess i would not be surprised if it actually originated on tumblr and then made its way to reddit, but yeah, i think i remember it basically ‘becoming a thing’ roughly around 2008ish? On reddit?
Ah fuck, apparently its first recorded usage was on usenet in 2002.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TL%3BDR
I may have been using the internet since the 90s, but I also was under the age of 10 for most of the 90s, so… yeah I did not exactly know as much about usenet, as say… gamefaqs, and neopets lol.
I blame the early stages of texting when the dawn of cellphones began, when they became more easily accessible.
Then, I blame Twitter and Facebook for character limits. So, it forced people to dumb down everything they try to talk about.
Then, I blame TikTok/Vine/YouTube Shorts for even worsening the attention span of people.
So now it’s like, if you attempt to explain things in great detail, you’ll get one or both reactions. One being, people being snarkily towards you about how the post is at length and it is one thing for your post to be a giant blob of text with no structure. Nobody likes reading that, even I don’t like reading that and I can get wordy.
The other reaction are people who just complain, bitch, moan and cry about how long the post is.
The possibly optimistic way of looking at this is that certified morons will let you know they are such, so, writing something of moderate length effectively serves as a kind of shit-test.
Also, people seem to be mostly unaware that different formatting standards exist and make more sense for different viewing contexts.
I write the vast majority of my lemmy posts on mobile, because I engage with lemmy via mobile.
Every once in a while I get someone screeching at me about horrible formatting… it looks fine on mobile.
Sometimes I get much more polite critiques or suggestions, and then I just usually explain ‘oh I use lemmy on mobile’ and that is generally an amicable conversation…
But a good chunk of people are seemingly baffled and offended by the idea that anyone could be doing anything in a manner different from how they, personally, do it.
I don’t know about that. I’ve been involved in a lot of long form debate/arguments on forums back in the day and every time you saw a wall of text you had to roll your eyes.
The only difference is we all used to read it all back then. Maybe we just tolerated it better when we were younger.