some comments on Medium - part 2

soon after the internet began to be popular - before blogs and the word blog existed — i thought of something similar as being an ideal use of the web — i thought it would be great if writers and non-writers could get ideas onto the web — to inform people on what they were doing - planning on doing - writing - planning on writing etc and so on —
but this was thinking the impossible — most people who ‘do’ things don’t have much interest in doing something like a blog — most people want to stay private — most don’t want to publish unfinished thoughts - musings etc —
for me it would have been a good way of writing but i became disillusioned when i saw what blogs became

(aside — i hate the word ‘blog’ - i find it rather nauseating to write it — but it has become so entrenched that i find that i can’t avoid it) —

my early ideas for the internet & reading were not practical — there was instantly too much material most of it not interesting to me — too much of everything — too many things

(in a way - like me — too much too many too confusing too confused)

now i find myself rethinking - again

(i am constantly rethinking - questioning what i think - contradicting myself - hesitating - living with a constant uncertainty)

rethinking blogs and hoping the state of internet writing might develop some interesting variations

what is the potential of Medium [in general]

as a medium for writing [in general]
as a medium for reading [in general]

shifting paradigms

the amount of available information has always been overwhelming but grows exponentially over time to be overwhelmingly overwhelming — it seems obvious that there will be paradigm changes brought about by the internet — i think a long attention span will {possibly / probably} be a liability and not a useful trait — it will be advantageous to read and see in short bursts rather than to sit and leisurely read a book —

books have too many words
magazines have too many writers
grammar is inefficient
multitasking is a stupid idea

(designed by corporate bureaucrats
to squeeze more work out of people)

but one can switch rapidly among things — from one thing to other things — from one thought to other thoughts

(using art as an example because it interests me and because i’ve found Medium has a lot of good writing on it)

i’m thinking that it’s probably better to read about art in short pieces by many writers than to read through a ‘book’

at one time (from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s) i subscribed to many (mostly art) magazines — but i realized that i was not interested in most of the material — at first i tried to read nearly all of a magazine because there was usually something interesting in all the articles but i realized that what was interesting in most of the articles was only a fragment of the article — i gradually reduced my reading to the articles i found more generally interesting then came to realize that the number of articles i found interesting was only a small portion of the the material in the magazine — i dropped all of the subscriptions because they simply weren’t worth the cost
i bought more art books but found that most of them were not as interesting as i thought they would be or that there wasn’t much in them that was interesting

one problem i see with Medium is the ratio of readers to writers — in book / magazine centered culture there are thousands of readers per writer — on blogging platforms it seems that there are mostly writers —
if writers are just reading other writers so that other writers will read what they write or just ‘clap’ for other writers so the other writer feels obliged to clap for them — then the system can’t last for long —

(i don’t like Medium’s metaphor of clapping — especially the idea of multiple claps —
i don’t have any suggestions for a better system)

Medium could be like a magazine where a lot of people who are using it just to read —