The world is moving faster than ever. Digital technologies have allowed, encouraged, and even required quicker processing of information. The net effect isn’t necessarily a good thing—all that speed has left people struggling to consume information in fragments, and is ultimately eroding art. Mark C. Taylor explains over at The Chronicle of Higher Education:
All too often, online reading resembles rapid information processing rather than slow, careful, deliberate reflection. Researchers have discovered what they describe as an “F-shaped pattern” for reading web content, in which as people read down a page, they scan fewer and fewer words in a line. When speed is essential, the shorter, the better; complexity gives way to simplicity, and depth of meaning is dissipated in surfaces over which fickle eyes surf. Fragmentary emails, flashy websites, tweets in 140 characters or less, unedited blogs filled with mistakes. Obscurity, ambiguity, and uncertainty, which are the lifeblood of art, literature, and philosophy, become decoding problems to be resolved by the reductive either/or of digital logic.