Reading

I like to think of it it with the question: what is to reading what a text-editor is to typing? Social features for sure. We could also experiment with crazy stuff like SYNTACTIC SPACING. Here's an illustration on a paragraph from Doug Englebart's Augmenting Human Intellect:

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

— Gustave Flaubert

the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such excuse is needed. It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure—mysterious,... See more