I Have Not Read the Article, and Here Is What I Think About It
A column about reading, by someone who has strong feelings about not doing it.
MY LIVING ROOM, I am writing to you today completely unburdened by facts or context. A headline crossed my screen fourteen seconds ago. I immediately knew everything there is to know about the subject. To actually click the link and consume the sequence of words carefully arranged by another human being would be an insult to my own immense capacity for jumping to conclusions. I have all the information I require right here in my imagination.
The piece apparently involves a local mayor and a rogue flock of urban seagulls. I assume this is the case. The thumbnail showed a man looking angry near a bird. The title contained the word saxophone. That’s enough data for a calibrated mind. Reading the actual text would only muddy my uninformed rage with nuance.
People who read articles are weak. They rely on journalists to feed them information line by line. I prefer to digest my news whole. I base it entirely on the web address and the vague sense of indignation I woke up with this morning. It saves time. And it allows me to maintain a state of permanent, furious certainty about things that probably have not even happened.
“The point is whatever I decide it is in the three seconds it takes to scroll past it.”
A friend asked if I worry about missing the point of a story. The point is whatever I decide it is in the three seconds it takes to scroll past. If the author wanted me to know the details, they should have compressed their five thousand words of investigative journalism into a pixelated image of a frustrated cat. Anything longer is just showing off.
Consider the arrogance of the writer. They spent weeks researching and verifying sources just to demand ten minutes of my attention. I’ve got better things to do. I need to draft this column telling everyone exactly how wrong the writer is about the seagull situation. The birds clearly stole the saxophones to form a ska band. Which is obvious. No amount of verified reporting will convince me otherwise.
The comment section below the article is already providing competing hallucinations. That’s far more entertaining than the truth. One user claims the mayor is actually three seagulls hiding inside a trench coat. I have absolutely no idea if this is accurate. But I am drafting a passionate defence of the trench coat theory to post on community message boards.
So I will continue to not read the article. I will certainly not reconsider my deeply held beliefs based on new evidence. I stand firm in my ignorance. It is a pure reaction in a world obsessed with reading things before forming an opinion. Now I must go argue with a stranger about the economy based on a typo.