Yewluze wrote:
I can sit on wiki and read page after page but I can't take some leisurely time to go read a book in quiet.
I guess if I want information there's google, but, if I want novel or sci-fi there's movies.
I dislike like Ray Bradbury personally or agree with a lot of his over-romaticized, disgruntled nonsense, but the basic observation that books offer something Wikis and PDFs don't is sound.
A major problem with Wikis is the very appeal you identify: their ease of access makes them overly appealing. Internalizing complex ideas and learning to think effectively necessarily involves learning patience and delayed gratification, being willing to read through long passages that are not immediately appealing, but establish detail and context.
Reading what you want, when you want, from a Wiki, ultimately has the effect of reinforcing narrow-minded ignorance. You may feel "stuffed" with knowledge and information, but the most important things to know are things that one does not want to know nor does knowledge of those things come easily. And even I struggle with that quite a bit more than I think anyone realizes.
PDFs have some major strengths, first amongst them space efficiency and the ability to search and correlate more efficiently, but books have other strengths that should not be underestimated. Bradbury overstates his case but the basic fact that a book is more "organic" than a reader and therefore allows a human to interface with the material and set the pace more efficiently is sound. More practical is the fact that dime paperbacks from used book sales are far less expensive than a reader and thus represent less of a liability and can be carried and read in more situations. Mussing up a dime book by getting food on it or dropping it etc is a lot less serious than the same damage inflicted on a reader.
I often bitterly criticize my parents, but they did some things well, and one of the first things they taught me was that overuse of highlighting/underline/italics/punctuation is the mark of a poor writer. A good writer knows how to establish emphasis entirely by modulating his tone, through word choice, sentence/paragraph breaks, use of the passive and subjunctive, etc. By the same token, a skilled reader can pick up on those cues, and an even more skilled reader can pick up on them even against the will of the author.
My point is not to merely criticize your style but to point out that as someone who is wholly reliant on highlighting to make anything you write appear worth reading, perhaps you should consider that you are, after all, missing something - skills and discipline perhaps even more useful than ever with the transition from voice to text.
Gahhh I knew I'd forget a few people though I tried to list everyone.
