I killed my Reader

I have nothing to read. This barrel has a bottom and I’m currently looking at it.

For the longest while I toured the internet and clicked on every RSS feed link associated with anything that even remotely piqued my interest. Movies and Music and crap about Twitter and Technology. Eventually my Google Reader was bogged down with so much junk that the reader’s primary function became relatively useless.

So on this day of digital cleansing I have removed every blog, news source, self-proclaimed online deity or anyone whose aim it was to, somehow, make my life better, make me smarter, do things better.

Any blog that had a post titled “How To. .” or mentioned “Six ways to help/better/get more/positive/interesting” anythings.

“Top Ten Ideas”

Any post which starts with an interrogative statement.

Anything title that gives me a command.

And, may Allah give me strength, if I have to read one more title about the importance of social media. . .

Gone, all of it, gone. Spring cleaned, tossed to the curb, out like a bad girlfriend.

What can I say? I guess I grew sick of reading the exact same shit over and over and over again. For a true “democratic platform” there seem to be a pretty slim margin of opinions expressed online. I’d dare say that it almost seems like the internet has turned into a massive instruction book.

Which is kind of scary to think about.

***

In the days when I was training to be an educator (at the high school level, it shouldn’t be any wonder as to why I dropped out of that) I would help run after school clinics for students who needed help with their writing. Everything from remedial classes of ESL students who couldnt’ comprehend that English wasn’t a Latin based language to the college-bound senior who was antsy about their admission essay.

Those high schools who still have time to teach writing (as in, the one’s who aren’t bending their curriculum around a standardized test) taught to one method of writing – MLA (Modern Language Association) which covered everything from personal essays to research papers – all of it defined by the kind of  citation used. And this made for some very terse writing, even when there shouldn’t have been.

Students were taught to form their papers around five and seven and nine paragraph formats. Too much structure. And while I’m sure this made it a breeze for the teacher to grade 60+ of them, it killed the chance of any potential writing style or voice that student might have been able to use to better convey their ideas.

Largely, I noticed this while helping seniors with their admissions essays. Essays that went to show the college or university what kind of style and personality that student had, something that went beyond the boxy application and the set of numbers that translated into academic competence.

College essays should prove one could write something relatively unstructured.

For some of these kids, it was the only chance they had at proving themselves. However, being educated in a strict, research-paper format killed a lot of the essays and made the writers extremely nervous when I told them to write it however they wanted to. Write from the gut, not the brain. There is no need to sugar coat what you actually want to say. This is a personal essay, so  make it personal.

Yet, a lot of these students just couldn’t bring themselves to do it. I wondered how they wrote things in their personal journal’s back at home.

Then again, assuming they had anything they wrote in during their free time was a stretch of my imagination.

****

It was about this time in my college careers when the more “risky” and “edgy” pedagogists were claiming that attending a college was a waste of money and one could get the same education with a library card. That way we don’t run the risk of having a stubborn professor’s biased opinion drilled into our head.

You know, Good Will Hunting style.

An education wasn’t the top thing I got out of college. Instead, I learned how to think. How to construct a thought, develop arguments, show others how I came to a particular conclusion. What so many people seem to forget is that sometimes it’s more important to get an answer that is yours rather than come up with the right answer. The ability to show creative thought is rather wondrous. The notion that one is able to come up with something that is new – no matter if it’s right or wrong – can strike a far deeper chord than showing you know where to find the right answers.

Professors, if they’re decent, will have their opinion and they will lecture it ad nauseum  – but they wont tell you what to think. Instead, they’ll give you guidance on how to think. Then you can come up with your own wildly-biased opinion.

The place to find the right answers has turned become the internet. The modern equivalent of the library card alternative to a college education. Thanks to Google we can have a thousand answers to any question we can possibly come up with. No point in having to memorize anything!

Also, no point in having to form your own opinion anymore. “What’s the best cup of coffee in Denver?” Will give you a handful of results. But instead of touring Denver and all of the fine little coffee nooks to come up with your own answer – you  have it without ever burning the roof of your mouth.

Just like that, we are past the age of research. We no longer feel the need, or want to experience the rush, that comes with getting to find out something new all on your own! The internet may be lush with information, but it is extremely lacking in knowledge.

Some analogize the capacity and inter-connectiveness of the internet to be equivalent of a thousand human brains. All those synapses sending signals back and forth! All of that new information being uploaded daily! However, unlike (most) human brains the brain of the internet is completely incapable of cognition – of taking the information and actually doing something with it.

And, sadly, most content developers – especially those I eradicated from my Reader – are incapable of making cognitive advances. Dispensing, and re-dispensing, and re-producing the same information and content over and over in different orders doesn’t count as something new and refreshing. A theory should at least come out at the end of it.  Or, god forbid, something with a bit of flair or style to it.

Aside – throwing out old information in a fancy bullet-point style blog and then asking your readers what they think about it doesn’t count as “something new” or a “way to engage readers”. The thoughts your readers come up with are their own, not yours.

So what? Who is to blame? What is to blame? What is to become of all this silly nonsense? Maybe it is the lessons of our old high school English teachers encroaching on our ability to create a bold thought outside of the structured papers. Maybe it is seeing the same format of article and blog over and over again that we eventually assume that’s all people want to read. Or there must be some kind of overwhelming desire to monetize our online presence so everything we produce is search engine and SEO friendly, and eventually abandons the very person the article was meant for – the reader.

Are there content producers out there that I’m missing who are able to complete a thought? A thought that they came up with on their very own?

Readers like me, who want to make something awesome out of the internet experience, but can’t find enough blogs or sites that are, shall I dare say, human enough?