TL;DR and short attention spans

[zsdersw]

It's a sad state of affairs when people complain about having to read *gasp* a page of text in an online forum. I don't care what your excuse is, because there isn't a good one. If you have any interest in learning you should read everything you can and focus on it while doing so. If it's important enough to you to read the cliffnotes, it's important enough to read the entire thing.

It is perhaps a manifestation of a larger problem that began, I suspect, with the dawn of the Information Age: shortening attention spans. More information is available to us in more forms more of the time. We're bombarded with it, and have to separate the wheat from the chaff. So, we get choosey.. fine. We should at least, then, be able to focus on what we've chosen and absorb it in it's entirety.

Laziness and lack of time may be explanations, but they're not excuses.. and shouldn't be regarded as such.

 

[nageov3t]

ok?

I had this one class in college where the professor would only let us write 1-page papers. they had to have a clear thesis and argument and had to be physically readable (we could screw with margins and font sizes and spacing as much as we wanted to as long as the prof could read it). those were the hardest papers I ever had to write.

as much as some people should suck it up and read, other people should learn to edit themselves. just because you can make a wall of text post doesn't mean you should or have to.

 

[woolfe9999]

ok?

tldr

 

[Genx87]

Didnt realize this forum has become a personal blog for some posters.

 

[zsdersw]

Didnt realize this forum has become a personal blog for some posters.

It is apparently such for PJABBER.

 

[heyheybooboo]

tldr

Yes.

If you can't summarize the salient points in a few paragraphs with a link to the main article, fuggetaboudit.

Cut-n-paste walls of text are for trolls and losers, depict poor 'netiquitte' and most likely violate the rights of the original author.





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[zsdersw]

If you can't summarize the salient points in a few paragraphs with a link to the main article, fuggetaboudit.

That's the problem. No one wants to read anymore. They should.

Cut-n-paste walls of text are for trolls and losers, depict poor 'netiquitte' and most likely violate the rights of the original author.

"Netiquette" is for losers. Reading is for winners.

 

[Moonbeam]

A donkey laden with books remains a donkey.

You hate yourself. You have just read it. You can read it again, and then again, but no matter how many times you read it and ponder it, well you won't really ponder it because you can't, but no matter how many times you read it, you will never understand.

You don't know that you hate yourself and that you don't want to know that you do, so, like the person who believes only what he sees, or actually can only see what he already believes, you will simply dismiss this idea as impossible and useless to entertain.

You are completely immune to any understanding that you hate yourself because not only do you not want to know that you hate yourself, you do not want to know that you do not want to know.

Your defenses are perfect because if you really knew you would die. At least you would feel like you are. The price of heaven is that you have to go through hell and at the door to hell there's this big scary three headed dog you are not about to mess with and you will need a magic mirror because there's another head there with lots of snakes and looking at it directly will turn you to stone.

Count now backwards from 10 and you will completely forget, no matter how many times or how carefully you read this.

 

[zsdersw]

I don't think you got the medication cocktail quite right today, Moonbeam.

 

[yh125d]

thread so boring I can't even be arsed to finish typing thi......

 

[PJABBER]

Laziness and lack of time may be explanations, but they're not excuses.. and shouldn't be regarded as such.

And then you go and make a personal attack on my predilection for threads which actually do go into some detail on an issue or an idea!

Perhaps the dumbing down of many here stems from the low expectations they have grown accustomed to in the now almost fully postmodern education systems they were so recently nurtured in?

The older posters do seem to have the ability to grasp an argument and work to rebut or to agree, while the hipsters are limited to mocking and to facile regurgitation of talking points.

Is the difference simply that academics were challenging way back when?

 

[werepossum]

tldr

LOL!

If I don't have time to read something, I certainly have no desire to share that piece of information with the rest of you.

 

[nonlnear]

Attention spans will spawn the next significant class divide. Ironically, the short attention spans of the dullard class will keep them from realizing the game has changed, and they will continue to be indoctrinated with the propaganda of the old socioeconomic class warfare paradigm, making them easily manipulated by the literati. Come to think of it, didn't that start forty years ago? Or maybe a couple thousand?...

 

[Moonbeam]

Attention spans will spawn the next significant class divide. Ironically, the short attention spans of the dullard class will keep them from realizing the game has changed, and they will continue to be indoctrinated with the propaganda of the old socioeconomic class warfare paradigm, making them easily manipulated by the literati. Come to think of it, didn't that start forty years ago? Or maybe a couple thousand?...

I feel that the term 'pay attention' is used because their is a coin of that realm one has to have before one can spend it and that coin, I would say, is a capacity for intentional suffering.

I remember long ago staring at a light while deep in reverie that took me to an unpleasant place. Suddenly the light jumped and I found myself well along in a completely different story. I believe that I switched my presence from one brain hemisphere to another which accounted for the light jumping, as my view switched from my dominant eye to the other, the wonderful I I believe myself to be is at least two different people. In order to follow my other self into the pain I began to feel I would have had to pay. I would have had to suffer.

In short, I feel that the reason we can't pay attention is that we imagine we don't have the coin, that if we begin to suffer we will suffer endlessly.

We don't know and therefore can't credit, that if we suffer we will not suffer.

 

[Fear No Evil]

I didn't get past 'It's a'

 

[nonlnear]

Moonbeam, I think you got the mix right this time. That was reasonably lucid, and entertaining as well. You seem to parse words like Zechariah Sitchin. You fixate on the word that will make the point you want to (in this case "pay") and go off on a tangent that seems coherent enough to follow, although not quite coherent enough to warrant any confidence...

At the end it was somewhat thought provoking, but I can't help but wish you had tied the two posts of yours in this thread together. The coin of attention and the payment due Charon could make for an entertaining acid meditation when juxtaposed with some good Zeppelin... Of course you've never heard of any of this, just like that Hegel guy, right?

 

[sandorski]

tl:dr doesn't always mean- Too Long Didn't Read
Sometimes it means- I'm Tired of Reading Your Wordy Stupid Ass Shit!

 

[dank69]

cliffs?

 

[Moonbeam]

Moonbeam, I think you got the mix right this time. That was reasonably lucid, and entertaining as well. You seem to parse words like Zechariah Sitchin. You fixate on the word that will make the point you want to (in this case "pay") and go off on a tangent that seems coherent enough to follow, although not quite coherent enough to warrant any confidence...

At the end it was somewhat thought provoking, but I can't help but wish you had tied the two posts of yours in this thread together. The coin of attention and the payment due Charon could make for an entertaining acid meditation when juxtaposed with some good Zeppelin... Of course you've never heard of any of this, just like that Hegel guy, right?

Charon was just a flea bitten way of getting to the notion of suffering so, yes, these two thoughts are of the same coin and are actually tied together.

I know Zeppelin, an interesting example of what happens to folk who hate themselves and find success without having sufficiently to pay.

I know what acid is but I have no idea of what acid meditation is though it sounds like it could be a trip, but while I know that Hagel was some poor bastard who thought truth could be gotten to via his head, I don't actually know what he had to say.

Stupid of me to judge him, I know, but I destroyed everything by way of philosophy I ever did read and figure he would have had the same fate. There was just nothing in western thinking I could find that I could believe in. I lost it all in the fires of great suffering.

And, of course, the price of any confidence in what I say is the loss of your doubt. You may value it more than you imagine. Just saying.

PS: Who the hell is Zechariah Sitchin. I know, I know, I can look him up. I have, to be honest, heard the name.

 

[Lemon law]

I don't think you got the medication cocktail quite right today, Moonbeam.

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Hey it works for Moonbeam, and he usually makes better sense than most posters on P&N.
Moonbeams seems to have the inner peace most lack.

 

[Moonbeam]

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Hey it works for Moonbeam, and he usually makes better sense than most posters on P&N.
Moonbeams seems to have the inner peace most lack.

Nope, I am nothing special at all, but I think it's possible and worth more the most else we can have, so I focus there in case my disease is catching. It would be nice if somebody somewhere has real peace.

Of course, I should add that it's probably within grasp if I wanted to pay for it at the price of my abandoning my misery and all those wonderful stories of personal misfortune I create to make believe I'm real.

 

[Moonbeam]

nonlnear: You seem to parse words like Zechariah Sitchin.

M: Ouch, I looked him up. I would suggest this if I may:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

 

[nonlnear]

nonlnear: You seem to parse words like Zechariah Sitchin.

M: Ouch, I looked him up. I would suggest this if I may:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

My apologies. It was low, I know. Your "pay" tangent was definitely much more legitimate than anything Sitchin has ever vomited onto the page. It was something stylistic though: fixating on one word, only using context when convenient, and spinning it out in such exquisite detail that the original thought seemed almost irrelevant at the end... except at the end of your blurb, your conclusion was still germane.

But hey, now you have a new insult to use.