words mean things

Somewhere in my saved-to-listen list of podcasts was a Nov 22, 2022 episode of the Ezra Klein Show (NYT Opinion) about The Reading Mind. He and researcher/scholar/author Maryanne Wolf discuss the ideas around reading, listening, consuming information from many different angles and I could have listened for another hour longer!

This is precisely what has led me to revive this languishing account and start using it for something very different from its original intent. I felt like I was oversaturated with information, which I love to learn about, but had no way to dig deeper and reflect on connections I was actually making while I was reading or learning.

Telling my 19 yr old son about what I was hearing as we were making dinner led to a further discussion about the intersection of ADHD and the way information is presented to us, how that manner of constant and increasing instant gratification and skim reading contributed to existing ADHD and in some cases could even be the cause. That is absolutely not to take away from the reality of ADHD and in no way feeds into the simplistic and unrealistic "solution" of "less screen time." It exists, executive (dis)function is a problem, there are solutions both behavioral and medicinal. But we need to recognize the contribution of how our world is built. Listen to this portion of the interview regarding the popular children's television show, Cocomelon:

...which kids love and adults hate but they talk about in this feature how they've set up a room in the the place makes Cocomelon where they will have a kid watching the show and set up next to it is another screen that shows an adult just doing normal household tasks, just sort of wandering around doing whatever you do in house and if the child becomes distracted from Cocomelon by what the adult is doing, they go back to the edit and they amp up the interestingness that cuts the whatever makes a Cocomelon episode interesting and it was so dystopic right that the level of engineering I mean the hyper saturation of the colors the constant cuts and so I mean a little bit like a hyper sugary cereal or whatever what his system is learning to find worth paying attention to... right, like how hard it is for the world to measure up to that...as it is for me - I'm going to bring this to me in a second, I'm not just putting this on little kids - but I know every time I put him there, it is training, right, it is training what is interesting and what is not

The entire interview is worth a listen, that particular part was just so horrifying. They do not, in their discussion, "blame" parents and the interview is actually about the act of reading and consumption of information, not just about kids. But good god. It's like the methods used by designers of gambling establishments to keep gamblers in the room, losing money.

Note: the transcript I found is riddled with errors, clearly an AI transcript with little to no human intervention, and annoyingly the audio connected to each paragraph actually starts 2 paragraphs before the play button for it, but it is a way to, no irony intended, skim the podcast and listen to particular parts of it either again or to see if you want to commit to listening to the entire thing.