The Great Seduction: 40 minutes of reading
September 1, 2009
So we had to print out Andrew Keen’s chapter “The Great Seduction” from “The Cult of the Amateur”, set a timer for 40 minutes, and spend that 40 minutes reading, undistracted, without multitasking or stopping to do something else. Just nonstop reading, for 40 minutes. My experience with this can be summed up as follows: meh.
See, this is how I study: uninterrupted, no multitasking, no Tweeting or checking Facebook or whatever. I usually curl up in bed with my textbooks and read/take notes, for hours, uninterrupted. I don’t take phone calls, I don’t get up to update my Facebook status, I just…read. This is how I’ve always done it, and so this experiment was peanuts to me. 40 minutes? I’ll take your forty minutes and raise you the four hours I spent, uninterrupted, reading an actual book last week (before school started and I had to interrupt my book time for studying).
I am majoring in Emerging Media on the advice of an acquaintance, a respected professor at SMU who advised me not to go into my chosen profession (journalism), as jobs in the field were drying up faster than bean plants in a drought. He told me to go to UTD and look into Emerging Media, as print media is going online, and this would probably be the only way I could be a writer and maybe make a meager living at it. I’m not a techie, and I have a hard time Tweeting (my life is not that interesting! and neither is yours!) Until about a year ago, I didn’t have the Internet, and I didn’t have a cell phone (I had a phone that attached to the wall by a curlicue cord, as cordless was too technologically advanced for my taste – my voicemail said, “You have reached the Luddite Laura Land Line.”) I’m still scared of my cell phone (my voicemail now says “You have reached the devil box.”) The limitations imposed by expressing my ideas in 140 characters or less terrify me, but I once heard someone say that if you’re not terrified you’re not aiming high enough, so I figure that majoring in the very scary field of Emerging Media means I’m headed in the right direction.
So, you see, it was really not difficult for someone like me, a notebook soul in a Facebook world, to read for 40 minutes uninterrupted. I actually haven’t Tweeted or checked my Facebook (or my voicemail) in several days now – I need to, thanks for reminding me. Had I not had the time limit, I may have skimmed over some parts of the article that I carefully perused with the timer running – it is late, after all. All in all, though, this really wasn’t the challenge for me that it may have been for some.
