Speculation at Best

Jeff Atwood’s blog post titled “Because Reading is Fundamental” is a call to 
action for consumers to read media more carefully before sharing their opinions 
online. In order to examine the post itself, we must first acknowledge Atwood’s 
general audience. Based on his website’s mature advertising, simple formatting, 
and meta content, we can assume that Atwood’s blog is geared towards an older, 
educated audience. Because Atwood works as a computer programmer, much of 
his content revolves around computer sciences and social media. Therefor, his 
audience likely consists of individuals 25-50 years old with post-secondary education 
who perhaps share an interest in computer sciences and/or digital communication.

Returning to the post at hand, “Because Reading is Fundamental” is an opinion 
piece which claims that social media propagates a culture of talking - instead of one 
of listening - which leads to poor communication between creators and consumers. 
Atwood places the responsibility on us as the readers to fully ‘listen’ to written media 
before commenting any opinions. The post’s introduction is arguably long-winded 
however, the inclusion of a profile picture to cement his point is grabbing. As 
research, Atwood referenced two studies to support the idea that the vast majority of 
consumers don’t fully read articles: the Ars Banana Experiment and the Slate 
Experiment. The former came to this conclusion through (a lack of) voluntary reader 
participation, and the latter by collecting user analytics. However, this data speaks 
nothing to how a well-read commenter would interact with an article. 

Atwood speaks as though ‘reading’ is synonymous with ‘understanding’ which, 
while idealistic, is speculation at best. Does the post have a strong message? 
Yes - listen before speaking. But does that message fall on the right ears? Unlikely, 
seeing as Atwood’s audience is arguably like-minded. As a side note, this is a prime 
example of audience fragmentation, since the post will likely only reach the consumers 
who “listen.”

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