Up to now, my reading has been partly spoiled by those emerging new-born social media. The chances for slow reading accompanied by reflection and mediation become less and less in my daily life. The superfluous convenience brought by those micro blogs and news reader such as Zaker and Flipboard inevitably distract me by letting me read in a jumping mode: like scrolling up and down to look for the laughing and significant points, or switching between different browser tabs to devour those fragmental information pieces from different fields at the same time. I can hardly say that I’m now still harvesting the most enjoyment and fun from the above reading activities. I’ve found out they have already been essentially transformed into a superficial process, which just keeps the form of reading. During this process, even although I read a lot, then what? Is this useful for others or can it enlighten my mind? Or just show off in front of others that how profound I am? Neither! I think it’s time to make some change, which is not to fight with the world by keeping myself conservative but to do something right for me, and then may be useful for others.

Until recently, I’ve begun to recover the traditional reading again. Just take a book with myself anytime and anywhere, then make most of the 5 minutes before bus arrival or some other time slots. It is interesting to see that although these time patches are fragmental, but this situation is not equivalent to that for the information fragments because it is distraction free. During such reading, I feel my sensations are activated and my mind is digesting and introspecting again. Notes can be taken down on a pocket notebook and will further be collected into computer for archive, which is easy to be categorized and searched.

Besides this, I still keep a habit of reading via RSS reader, because it can potentially reduce the reading speed compared to the new tools. In order to further slow down my pace, after a first scanning of the RSS item, I’ll copy them into a document in LibreOffice Writer so that I can read it more carefully again. In this way, I can feel that I harvest more fun, enjoyment, enlightenment and inner peace. I think this is quite similar to the newspaper clippings which I often did when I was in elementary and middle school. It can be seen that the old ways still work today! And they work even better than the advanced tools!