Listening over Speaking

In the blog post “Because Reading is Fundamental” by Jeff Attwood, it is outlined why reading is more important than commenting on online articles. Attwood’s audience is likely people in the tech industry aged from mid twenties to mid forties with some post secondary education. This is because it seams like he is speaking to people who run websites or write articles rather than the users of these sites. The suggestions to encourage reading are geared to people who run and design sites. I would assume many of these people have some post secondary education and are mostly in this age range, while I am sure there are outliers.

The article begins by discussing the idea that when there is a number count beside someone’s name, such as number of posts, it creates a drive for people to make that number go up. This creates the idea that the higher the number the better things are. Attwood goes on to disprove this idea by stating that reading is far more important than posting a large quantity of discussion posts. The opening pulls you in by implying that there are implications to this method of displaying user details. You have to keep reading to find out what they are.

Attwood’s main point in this article is that listening or reading is more important than posting or talking. He is proving the point that better conversations occur when people are listening or reading more. He is saying that many internet users comment before even reading the whole article and that it would be better if more comments were posted after reading thoroughly.

The point is proved in this article by two different experiments. The first experiment is from Ars Technica, where they asked users to add the word banana in their post if they read the article to that point. It was found that the first commenter to do so was the 93^rd post. This supports the idea that users are not reading the whole article and commenting before they even have all the information. I find this to be a very interesting and useful experiment. I would guess the conclusion that they found is true among many online articles. The second experiment is the Slate experiment where analytics were collected on the percent of the article readers that actually scrolled through to the end of the post. The data showed that many users were not reading the whole page; this supports his argument that people are not reading entire articles. This is a great source; it shows the actual data of the behavior of readers. Attwood argues that this shows that reading needs to be encouraged.

Attwood suggests a few ways in which reading can be encouraged. He suggests removing interruptions to reading, primarily pagination. If the pages load automatically and shorten the time spent waiting for pages to load, readers will be more likely to continue. He also suggests to measure and display read times, this would encourage people to read more of the article so that other posters know how much they read. The third suggestion Attwood makes is to give rewards for reading whole articles. He also suggests that conversations should update in real time, while not interrupting users reading positions. Using these solutions, Attwood believes online conversations will improve.