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THE INTERNET AND BOOK LARNIN'.
I don't really feel like I read more books before blogging. I mean, maybe I did in the sense that I had more time, and time spent blogging is possibly not time spent reading books, but I certainly don't feel like it's any harder to read a book. Rather, blogging and the internet have made me much pickier about which books I read.
Think about it like this. If 20 years ago, you wanted to learn something about health care, but weren't sure you wanted to learn a whole lot about health care, what would you do. Well, you could read the newspaper, and wait for them to write things about health care, and hope that knowledge piled up over time. Or you could subscribe to magazines that would have some health care articles. Again, though, you'd have to wait till they published a health care article. Let's say you wanted to know about health care right then. Well, it was off to the library or the bookstore for you: Books were really the only way to access information-on-demand.
The internet, however, has created a whole lot more information-on-demand. I can go to a health care blog. I can search out a web site devoted to health care. I can download think tank documents or Nexis my way through newspaper archives. I used to make their way through some bad books because they didn't know a better way to access information. That may have enabled some useful, associative learning, but it was also pretty inefficient. Now, however, I'm much better at finding information, and so I choose my books with more care, because there's more of an opportunity cost to reading a bad book that spends a whole lot of pages padding out the word count.
All that said, I've actually been reading a lot of books lately. One thing that's helped me is Facebook's Visual Bookshelf, which lets you list what you're reading. One of my problems is getting halfway through a book then getting distracted by another book. With VB, I'm embarrassed to take unread tomes off the list, and have begun working harder to finish what I start. So in that way, the internet is actually making me a better book reader.
COMMENTS (6)
Do you find that finishing books that aren't engaging you provides any other benefit besides avoiding embarrassment?
Posted by: Lauren | June 13, 2008 5:12 PM
I would agree that spending time on the Internet has made me a better reader of printed material, especially with the point you've raised about learning to weed out ineffective information, or even things that are blatantly BS.
Sometimes it's hard to say that you disagree with something in a book because books are there, they're real, tangible objects that carry a certain prestige, so who are we as readers to criticize? Simple - thanks to the peer-to-peer communication of blogs and discussion boards, we can, as individuals, hone our own perspectives and learn to say, "No thanks, this information doesn't help me learn what I've set out to learn."
And that Visual Bookshelf thing is probably my new favorite corner of the Internet. Now, I actually remember what I wanted when I go to the library.
Posted by: Gillian | June 13, 2008 5:49 PM
Do you ever find yourself adding books to Visual Bookshelf just to be impressive despite maybe reading a chapter or two? Guilty as charged here ("Rise of the Creative Class" being the biggest culprit.)
Posted by: Tina | June 13, 2008 11:22 PM
Can you recommend any blogs (or books, I suppose) that are a particularly good introduction to the issues around healthcare? I read here, I try to follow other things, but I find that I have the same problems as when I just read newspaper articles: my lack of knowledge means that my understanding of something can get derailed by a single term.
Any suggestions for good intros other than wikipedia? Thanks.
Posted by: Tim | June 14, 2008 5:00 AM
I used to make their way through some bad books because they didn't know a better way to access information.
Sounds like someone didn't finish putting this from the third person to the first person.
Posted by: Lauren | June 13, 2008 5:12 PM:Do you find that finishing books that aren't engaging you provides any other benefit besides avoiding embarrassment?
There's a big difference here between books being read for pleasure/amusement and books being read to master substantial content. In working through a book for substantial content, "not engaging you" should by no means by the primary thing deciding whether it should be finished.
Indeed, sometimes its the lighter weight, less substantial books that are easier to read straight through, and the ones that require more thought and mental work need setting aside for a short time to let things sink in. When that happens, a spur to pick it up again is handy.
Posted by: BruceMcF | June 14, 2008 7:25 AM
Thaaaanks
Posted by: دردشة | July 29, 2009 6:58 AM