On Mon 2 Aug 2010, Doug Henwood wrote:
> So I'm wondering - what is it about the screen vs. the page? Is it just
> that I'm from a generation raised on print, habituated to the idea that
> serious writing is ink on paper and stuff on the screen is basically
> just news or gossip, totally in-the-moment stuff? Or is it something
> about the media themselves? Anyone else have this experience?
I don't have this experience at all. I get aha experiences from both screen and page. But that's because I read them both slowly, with very the aggravating consequence that my electronic correspondence (which includes articles I've sent myself for later) is always on the verge of overwhelming me. I feel like I should declare email bankruptcy once a month.
I have always been awe of the speed and efficiency -- and wit -- with which you summarily handle your enormous electronic correspondence. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if you had a different ingrained response -- that you have a speed-read, pithy response mode with which you approach email. Which wasn't suited to Bloom.
On the other hand, you read lots of long complicated papers in pdf and generally get more out of them than the rest of us, so I assume you're reading them more thoroughly than most of us do. Do you print them out? Or does pdf inspire a third response?
If you're printing them out, you could of course do the same with an email like the Bloom one.
Lastly, it could of course have nothing to do with any of this and just be a question of mood. No matter how thorough an intellectual you are, sometimes deep stuff lights your fire, and sometimes it bounces off your eyeballs.
Michael