sparklecat

 LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.In the interest of proving something to myself, I'm going to be going through and re-interpreting this paragraph. I got the idea from Project muse's study on the reading comprehension of English majors. 

( my interpretation )

Alright, onto some interesting articles! 
The dawn of the post literate society 
Is the Decline of Reading making politics...dumber?
I am of the digital native generation (Gen z) and being on my phone, and i would argue many of my friends feel the same way, is pretty much synonomous with being apart of the real world. I got my first phone, an iphone, at 12, and since that day, I had never gone anywhere or done anything without my phone until a few years ago. I was hanging out with my then-friend-now-girlfriend, and we were having so much fun we left to run errands before i realized i didn't have my phone. It felt so freeing, I didn't realize how much my phone felt like an extension of me until that moment. 

I left social media recently due to how horrid it makes me feel. I would spend hours upon hours sitting in bed staring at reels/tiktok/shorts (it didnt matter which app), feeling just plain bad. I didn't care about any of the stuff i was seeing, but it didn't matter, because all i had to do was scroll and i would see something new that i would inevitably also not care about. 

I also used to consider myself a voracious reader, someone obsessed with learning and debating and trying new things. I'm not going to pretend its all the phones fault, I think my generation has gotten enough shit about "always being on that damn phone" for a lifetime, but I do agree, the Apps, the Algorithm. it feels a bit like a psychic snake, worming its way into my brain and keeping me from doing what i really want. 

I dont want to fear monger, but its scary to me that there is a greater access for the common folk to information than any other time in human history, but it seems people are just...choosing not to. arguments I have heard often in my job (i work as a librarian) is that it all being accessible is the problem. noone worries about internalizing information, because they can always just look it up again. I personally all through highschool was of the opinion that all these tests and quizzes and essays were useless, because anything you could ever want to know you could just look up.

At least in my case, I have learned now that it is far more annoying in the long run to look the same thing up over and over again, not to mention the lack of confidence in your own intelligence that grows when you cannot even trust yourself to remember something important to you.