~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.
So, I was reading tomasino's recent phlog[0] on the subject
of attention and reading on gopher vs. the web. And you
know what? I've never actually had the problem mentioned.
I find myself far less tired when reading text files than
reading on the web. In fact, reading a constant stream of
small chunks has left me exhausted on many occasions. It's
part of why I rarely look at any form of social media these
days.
Long-form blogs aren't all that bad, but I do find myself
tiring out far more quickly than when I'm just dealing with
something like `less`, or piping things through to BBEdit.
That said, this wasn't always the case. In fact, the web
during the 1990s and early 2000s was much simpler, and it
didn't drain me to go through pages upon pages of
information at a time, much like I can on gopher, or while
digging through FTP servers and places like Textfiles[1].
During the days of Geocities, and when Google didn't treat
the entire web like its personal slave, I was happy just
soaking in things that I liked to read.
When the web became a commercial hellhole, things really
took a nosedive. But it wasn't until web developers began
treating the web as if users have infinite system resources
and bandwidth that shite really hit the fan. Taking 5MB of
code and 120K+ of memory to display simple text, or...you
know... Weigh down an entire modern system to try and make
a silo'd IRC rip-off that's worse than Windows ME[2].
(Yeah, I have no respect for Discord. It's a massive pile.)
The modern web is tiring in general, in my experience. It's
a test of patience and stress tolerance, and in all the
wrong ways. It's why I appreciate gopher even more.
~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.
[0]:
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20181014-reading-plain-text
[1]:
http://textfiles.com/
[2]:
https://discordapp.com/
