Four Stars. Farhad Manjoo's article is a great recreation of what goes on in the minds of people as they surf the web in search of information. He is trying to show how disconnected we are in our connected world and wrote the story the way he did to show readers the scatter brain way we, as connected human beings, go about reading articles online.
Manjoo is attempting to show us how easily news and information are being swept aside for the next new thing (i.e. viral video, American Idol winners, a new "Arrested Development" episode, etc.). He does a great job of this by writing in a way expecting people to stop reading and telling them that they will not read the article, giving them statistics every step of the way so they will continue to read.
I'd say valid enough. It's nothing new that people aren't reading articles in full or even at all. You can tell that by the decline in newspaper sales and readership across America and the world. But in showing the graphs from Chartbeat and quoting Josh Shwartz, he shows that the problem now is that people are reading to an extent, thinking they have all the information, and passing it on to the next person that will do the same. The most amazing fact is the spike at 0% for Slate.com and Chartbeat.com.
Manjoo's article would still have been strong without the graphs, if anything that would have made it easier to read. But without the facts inside of the article, especially the number of people that still hadn't "bounced" yet, I don't believe it would be powerful enough for Manjoo to get people to stick around and keep reading his article.
It seems like a great website with quality journalists writing quality stories, but the format is one that I personally would subscribe to. I do not like, and I am probably one of the only ones, that the articles are categorized by most read, most popular, most commented, etc. That is not necessarily the way I like to choose the article I read, even more so after reading this article after hearing that the majority of people will share or like an article without really reading it. How do I know that they are reliable articles that really touch on the subjects? I would prefer all the articles be displayed on one page for the reader to pick and choose what he/she reads based on their preference, not the preference of his/her peers.
I feel that instead of reading the entire article we choose to read the first paragraph and after we evaluate the interest level of the article, then we choose to either read further on or discontinue reading.
ReplyDeleteWhen we become interested or uninterested in the subject matter we will either immediately pass it on via social media or we will stop reading and never come back. The publisher of this article explains the process that readers go through when they decide whether or not to continue reading or to just stop.
The writers points are completely valid because I personally have done everything that he talks about in the article. I have partially read or just scanned over articles to get the main point or to see if the article was interesting or not. If the writers points were not based on facts I would still understand where he is coming from due to my personal experiences reading articles.