John Miedema

Tracy Seeley is a writer and English professor at the University of San Francisco, a front-line advocate of slow reading. She understands the real spirit of slow reading, ignoring the hype around reading gadgetry, preferring to meander and browse through the big pages and pictures of a book with her little friend, Lucas. In this picture, the pages of the book in Tracy’s hands shine on Lucas’ face, eager with anticipation.

Dan Bloom, a reporter in Taiwan, read The Art of Slow Reading article in The Guardian today. He sent me these two YouTube videos he created. The first is his whimsical musical obit for newspapers: “I just can’t live without my daily snailpaper.” The second describes his strategy for staying unplugged, and makes his case for reading on paper rather than reading on screens. He calls the latter “screening” and calls for studies to compare brain responses while using both methods. The term might catch. Thanks Dan.

I recently spoke with Patrick Kingsley of The Guardian about Slow Reading. His article, The Art of Slow Reading, is online today. Kingsley surveys the new and old sources that make up the emerging slow reading movement. He points to analysis by Jakob Nielsen: “many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion”. Nicholas Carr argues that “our online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information.” I was pleased to see the connection with Lancelot R …

Organized information is better than disorganized information, so it goes. Fast, relevant, digital, centralized. Google’s express mission is to “to organize the world’s information”. Information has been defined as the reduction of uncertainty. Certain, consistent, simple. All good things, I suppose. I am certain, though, that the reverse qualities of information are important too. Information that is …
Slow. It runs deeper.
Late, even, rather than timely and false.
Local, subjective, personalized, something my neighbour wrote, never found on a top-ten list.
Irrelevant, because it is selfless. This is the opposite of local, but …

How much thought do you put into selecting a setting for reading? Recently I have been thinking about the extended mind thesis. It states that our minds do not end with our brains but extend into the environment. A thought is partly a product of the setting. It makes sense then that where we reading makes a big difference in a reading experience.
Maybe you already do this. Many people read cookbooks in the kitchen, magazines in the bathroom, computer books while programming, or a bible or psalter in a …

You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s just the way it is. The statement may sound too obvious, but it plays out in so many ways. You’ve heard the old joke about the drunk looking for his keys by a lamp post, not because he lost them there, but because that’s where the light is. Psychologists try to interpret the unconscious. Critical theorists try to reveal subtext. Physicists have uncertainty principles and mathematicians have incompleteness theorems. They are all limits to knowledge.
Economists have their own horizon, externalities. Given …

Just watched a video featuring Jaron Lanier, author of You are Not a Gadget. He pitches against Web 2.0 freebie culture, envisioning instead humans creatively reinventing themselves rather than remixing the products of others. He also rejects AI singularity zealots who predict a merger of human and machine intelligence, preferring to see humans as supernatural, distinct from computers and nature. Hmmm. I agree that I am not a gadget, but I see things a little differently. I think Web 2.0 hype got carried away (thank goodness that’s over) but creativity …

The digital world has substance in its own right, but we invented digital technology to enhance our physical world. It’s funny how we forget that sometimes.
Take ereaders. Ereaders like the Kindle, Nook, and Kobo are popular right now. They are nifty. You can download books, you can click from one page to the next using buttons instead of fingers. They are lightweight if you’re the sort to carry a library with you. But is that it? I found the Kindle’s note-taking functions disappointing, especially when I wanted to transfer …

You’ve played Tetris. It’s that fun video game in which players rotate falling shapes to fit a neat fit in slots at the bottom of the screen. Clark and Chalmers (1998) wrote a paper, The Extended Mind, in which they used Tetris to make a fascinating point about the nature of mind. The article begins with a question, “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Enter Tetris. When we play the game, we rotate the shapes before deciding the best fit in the slots. Part …

I used to name my employer in my biography on my blog’s About page. It seemed to me that I was simply stating a fact like any other. I am the author of Slow Reading published by Litwin Books, I built the OpenBook plugin for WordPress, I am a graduate of the MLIS program at the University of Western Ontario, I live in Ottawa, and I work at … company XYZ, only I inserted my company name. I never claim to speak on behalf of XYZ. Just to be really …