So what if Woody Allen prefers young Asian women who were once his adopted daughter?  It doesn’t mean he’s wrong about everything.

OUR favorite Woody Allen joke is the one about taking a speed-reading course. “I read ‘War and Peace’ in 20 minutes,” he says. “It’s about Russia.”

Mark my words, hot fudge sundaes will eventually be conclusively determined to be health food. But I digress.  Years ago, Evelyn Wood offered a program to teach us to speed read.

The promise of speed reading — to absorb text several times faster than normal, without any significant loss of comprehension — can indeed seem too good to be true.

And it’s back, this time in apps.

The first popular speed-reading course, introduced in 1959 by Evelyn Wood, was predicated on the idea that reading was slow because it was inefficient. The course focused on teaching people to make fewer back-and-forth eye movements across the page, taking in more information with each glance. Today, apps like SpeedRead With Spritz aim to minimize eye movement even further by having a digital device present you with a stream of single words one after the other at a rapid rate.

There is a name for this. It’s called skimming. It saves tons of time, but it comes at a high price.

A deeper problem, however — and the one that also threatens the new speed-reading apps — is that the big bottleneck in reading isn’t perception (seeing the words) but language processing (assembling strings of words into meanings).

Skimming has its place. It’s perfect if you need to find a nugget of information in a morass of squiggly lines. But if your purpose is to appreciate literature, it’s a terrible way to read.  More to the point here, if the purpose is to convey depth of ideas, then it fails miserably.

But new speed reading apps are hardly the worst offender when it comes to thought. This was driven home during a Twitter shitstorm that began with this twit.

@ScottGreenfield Don’t you think it’s possible to respect 1st A *and* protect people from having their bodies used as weapons against them?

— Laura Holloway (@CreatrixAnima) April 15, 2016

I have no clue who Laura Holloway is. One of the curious hallmarks of twitter is that random people decide that other people not only owe them engagement, but engagement on their terms. Since people tend to see themselves as the center of the universe, they fail to perceive any problem with doing this. If anything, they get terribly antagonistic when their entitlement isn’t fulfilled.  As if they’re doing you a favor.

It wasn’t that I refused to engage with Holloway, but that the terms of engagement weren’t suitable.  I don’t engage in these sorts of discussions on twitter.  Twitter, like skimming, is perfect for some things: putting a link out there, or a quip. It takes some discipline to make a viable joke on Twitter.

But anything requiring actual depth of thought is ill-suited for Twitter. The problem is compounded when the random twitterer’s approach is loaded with their assumptions, and compounded again when they lack the capacity to appreciate that they begin with loaded assumptions.  No “genuine” discussion begins with question begging.

Yet, to the extent that this discussion, thrust upon me by this random twitterer, was worth the effort, it could not be accomplished on Twitter. Had Holloway posed her question, loaded or otherwise, in a comment on SJ that presented a fully conceived thought, I would have replied with a fully conceived response.* I’ve written tons on the issue, and she could have read it rather than twitted her question, but then, reading requires effort, and perhaps she didn’t feel it worth her effort to read what I’ve written.

But then, why ask in a twit if it’s not worth the effort?

And therein lies the collateral problem to speed reading, and it’s a far larger, far more nefarious problem than whether someone has created an app that saves you excess eye movements.  People demand complex ideas reduced to 140 characters, and that’s as much effort as they’re willing to expend.  They won’t move their eyes?  They won’t read more than a twit.

H/T Nigel Declan for finding the original Peanuts comic

Some ideas fit well within a twit.  Does a particular dress make Kim Kardashian’s butt look small, for example.  Others, not so much.  Yet wars break out over these snippets of puny thought, usually combined with some violation of the requisite tone, that every random idiot is entitled to thrust themselves into the stream of someone who has no clue who they are (though because they know them, it’s as if they are second cousins and therefore entitled to their time and attention) and police their tone. After all, is there no entitlement to be treated respectfully and civilly? Are they not deserving of dignity for their mindless engagement involving minimal effort and even less thought?

I persist in responding to people on the twitters that I don’t discuss my SJ posts there, and if they have something to say, leave a comment. Sometimes they do. Most times, they don’t, and some inform me that I am an asshole for telling them what they have to do. Of course, I don’t tell them what they have to do, but rather what I won’t do. This nuance makes a whooshing sound.

If you want to speed read, knock yourself out. You won’t grasp much, but then, you probably won’t care for Sir Joshua Reynolds’ admonition either.

There is no expedient to which man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

And now, there are apps for that.  This is progress.

*Some others “explained” my tone after I dropped out of the shitstorm as being “angry.” I wish people wouldn’t impute feelings to me, as they’re rarely accurate. I wasn’t angry, but mildly annoyed at having wasted my time. To be angry would have required that I gave a damn. I didn’t.

Random twitterers lack the capacity to evoke strong feelings in me either way. It’s mostly a matter of my having shown the courtesy of a response being met with the usual shallowness of some random person on Twitter. I really should know better than to bother acknowledging their existence. It rarely serves any useful purpose.