Reading in Public
— May 2012
Excerpted from a guest post I wrote for the Readmill blog. Thanks to Nicole Jones and Charlie Loyd for reading an early draft.
Living in a hyper-connected world means we need to pay attention to how the pieces are connected. And I see only the barest of connections between the way we read and the way we respond: comments set in small type are buried at the bottom of articles, back-and-forths happen across Twitter with a single shortened link back to the topic at hand, forums like Reddit and Hacker News contain entire ecosystems of posters camped under links with reworded titles. It’s easy to make sweeping generalizations, to misinterpret and misconstrue, to jump to the sides of people you know, and to get caught in spiraling discussions when what you’re talking about is kept all the way in the distance.