Blog Analysis

Nutchey

January 15, 2020

Is Reading Fundamental?

In Jeff Atwood’s blog post “Because Reading is Fundamental”, the author introduces the piece by showing a screencap of a user profile with a post count. He argues that most users will try their best to increase the number next to their name. By including a post count in a user profile, he argues, developers are inadvertently encouraging users to post more. Atwood argues that most people would rather talk than listen. Therefore, he believes that the post count next to their name rewards them for this behaviour rather than incentivizing balanced discussions. His main argument is that listening (or in the case of the Internet, reading) leads to better, more nuanced conversations.

The website Coding Horror is written in a blog format addressed to an internal community of other programmers and people employed in the technology and science field. Therefore, the audience of this blog post are likely college-educated, working adults in this field.  This is indicated by the theme of the blog Coding Horror, other technology-related blog posts on the website and references to other websites that focus on technology and science such as Ars Technica. The audience is also indicated by the way the blog is written. Coding Horror seems to be targeted at website developers and moderators trying to improve readership and engage with their user-base more effectively.

Throughout the blog, Atwood uses research to support his point that people are talking rather than reading, such as the Ars Banana experiment and the Slate experiment. The Ars Banana experiment proves that many people do not read articles thoroughly before jumping to comment. This was demonstrated by readers missing the hidden message the author had put in the seventh paragraph of the article asking readers to mention “bananas” if they had seen it. It took until comment 93 for someone to do so. By people jumping to the comments section without fully reading the article, it proves the author’s point that most people would rather talk than listen. The Slate experiment shows analytics data demonstrating that many visitors to not scroll, and most visitors only read about 50% of a given article. Both experiments are convincing in demonstrating that people are not reading entire articles.

Atwood believes we should incentivize people to read more because this will lead to better conversations. His proposed solutions to do this include removing barriers and interruptions to reading such as pagination, measuring read times, rewarding people for reading long posts and to updating articles in real time. These suggestions would remove logistical barriers that discourage people from reading, gamify and incentivize reading, and improve the relevancy of an article.

Atwood’s argument focuses heavily on the fact that users are not reading enough to justify his position that reading will lead to better conversations. However, his evidence only shows that people are not reading, but does not show why we should read more or how reading will improve conversations. To improve his argument, Atwood should demonstrate statistics or evidence showing how listening and reading leads to better, more nuanced conversations. He also does not address the underlying reasons why people are not reading, instead only looking at logistical and gamification reasons. Other reasons could be that people are constantly bombarded with information on the internet, and select which information is most important. The articles could also be too long or uninteresting to the reader. Without solid evidence that reading and listening more improves conversation quality, Atwood’s article fails to prove that reading is fundamental.