Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments

Jeremy Dickinson, “Football League Wall Map of England and Wales”

NYT recently did a story about people addicted to keeping up with the news. One of the interviewees reported bringing her Kindle to bed with her to keep up with blogs — and many of us can relate. So often I have fallen asleep with my iPhone in my hands, catching up on RSS feeds. This probably sounds unhealthy but I really have gone though Instapaper while fixing dinner — skillet in one hand, iPhone in the other.

I could wait to fire up my laptop, but even in opportunities when it seems more appropriate, I sometimes favor my iPhone. The tactile experience of scrolling through text makes me focus on the article I’m reading at the moment, curbing the urge to open multiple tabs (mostly because I can’t do so inside a significant time delay.) Plus, I don’t think of my iPhone as the key piece of my “workstation.” What this means is I’m emailing less and commenting less, but reading much more.

Yehudit Sasportas, “Black Circle I”

Every writer should aim to read at least as much as he writes — to feel, at the very least, you are in someway advancing the pursuit of ideas rather than offering something redundant to the hundreds of thousands of books published every year. And that’s true for anyone on the Internet.

But discussion on blog posts usually disintegrates into repetitive or inflammatory remarks when a thread gets lengthy. Arguably no one, at comment 1,000, read everything before he pressed submit. Marginal Revolution once posed the question, “Does the quality of blog comments deteriorate?”

1. The truly smart people only like to make smart points on “fresh” posts. For instance more people read the comments on fresh posts (but why?), so the benefit of a quality comment is lower as the post becomes older.

2. As time passes, the chance that a warring twosome find each other, and take over the thread, increases.

3. There is a tendency to attack or respond to the stupidest or most controversial thing said, and the longer the comments thread runs for, the stupider this will get.

4. As the number of comments multiplies, so does the number of independent discussion threads and the optimal number of threads is exceeded.

5. (Addended) As one (early) commentator notes below, the simple fact of diminishing marginal utility.

If more and more people start reading online media on mobile phones and Kindle, the incentive to leave a comment will go down dramatically. Do you really want to save this post for later and comment in a couple hours? Or do you want to struggle with writing something on the inadequate keyboard?

Olaf Breuning, “Smoke Bombs”

We might also see growth in devices that divorce writing from reading. Jerry Brito got AlphaSmart Neo last winter explaining, “If I go to a coffee shop to get some work done, the only thing I can do with my Neo is write. There are no distractions. There isn’t even bold or italics (something I get around with Markdown). When writing is the only thing you can do, you get it done, and it remains an enjoyable activity because it’s not the thing that’s keeping you from Twitter.”

A computer is designed to do both things at once so you no longer even think of reading while writing as multitasking. Often times the experience of writing an email is consuming and processing at once: as the message you are writing and the message you are responding to are in the same frame. I’m not old enough to remember the conventions of handwritten letters, but I doubt my grandmother sat at her desk composing a letter to her friend with her friend’s prior letter folded above it, going line by line, making sure she’s responded to every question in sequence.

The keyboard is closer to you than the screen. Many of us scroll the screen with the same keys we compose letters. It’s wonderful in that it has made us a more literary culture, but it also means a lot of great stuff gets lost in the abundance of online text.

If Kindle becomes more popular, and more laptops start including tablets, I think users will grow accustomed to reading without having to add their .02 once they get to the end. Which means those who do, might have something really interesting to say.

Images from ArtInfo’s Frieze preview

Previously:

Handmade Looking Writing

Really Freehand: Comics Going Digital

New Media in Fiction: Will There Ever Be an “iPhone Novel”?

Will Kindle Save “Hypertext” Fiction?

Posted by Joanne on Oct. 15, 2008