Reading Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. In chapter two he describes the power of stories to connect people, makes the argument that our capacity for stories is what makes humans the most powerful species on earth. Stories give us a shared identity and help us to work together well beyond the limits of other creatures.
It feels very timely. Stories don't have to be true to bring people together. People just have to believe in the same thing. It has me reexamining all the little stories we tell ourselves, finding the joins and the fissures between me and other people. Politically, spiritually, morally, socially-- I can see the bridges and chasms between myself and others based off the stories we believe.
Are film production and network broadcasting companies serious in their work?
Production and broadcasting companies work to bring populations of society information. Fact. This is what they do. They network information into the collective consciousness of people living in society. This information tends towards topics on politic, social conflict, war. Their involvements work continuously to bring the attention of societies to criminal aspects in society; murder, abduction, prostitution, exploitation, both human and drug trafficking, and many other assortments of more wholesome economic human endeavour. Romance and love are of course thematical inclusions and are widely advertised via their company schedules and planning. Religion, travel, the arts, and a whole host of scientifically analytical and quantifiable statistics on the present state of earth, its surroundings, and its inhabitants, are routinely covered in their work.
I suppose it is up to you whether you choose to agree or disagree with the content their work feeds into your perception. It is entirely up to you if you see the work they do as having importance or unimportance within the networks of human understanding. This present era of evolution either needs the encouragement or it doesn't.
Are they serious or not?
Do they require our gratitude?
Has internal perception grown accustomed to the interference?
The truth to these questions and more lies entirely within you.
Paul Olet, 1910s. Paul Otlet’s conceptual model of how human knowledge is recorded. The universal catalogue transcends the limitations of individual books and other physical “carriers” of information.
In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness,…
It’s true that studies have found that readers given text on a screen do worse on recall and comprehension tests than readers given the same text on paper. But a 2011 study by the cognitive scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith suggests that this may be a function less of the intrinsic nature of digital devices than of the expectations that readers bring to them. Ackerman and Goldsmith note that readers perceive paper as being better suited for “effortful learning,” whereas the screen is perceived as being suited for “fast and shallow reading of short texts such as news, e-mails, and forum notes.” They tested the hypothesis that our reading habits follow from this perception, and found it to be correct: Students asked to read a text on-screen thought they could do it faster than students asked to read the same text in print, and did a worse job of pacing themselves in a timed study period. Not surprisingly, the on-screen readers then scored worse on a reading comprehension test.
If those same students expected on-screen reading to be as slow (and as effortful) as paper reading, would their comprehension of digital text improve? A 2015 study by the German educator Johannes Naumann suggests as much. Naumann gave a group of high-school students the job of tracking down certain pieces of information on websites; he found that the students who regularly did research online—in other words, the ones who expected Web pages to yield up useful facts—were better at this task (and at ignoring irrelevant information) than students who used the Internet mostly to send email, chat, and blog.
It also has this great story about the change in human consciousness that came with the advent of reading in silent for the first time (featuring my favorite saint, Augustine of Hippo.)
Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity, the normal thing was to read aloud. When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D., he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. With the advent of silent reading, Manguel writes,
... the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal.
