Faster than a speeding bullet?
No. I love to take my time and savor the words on the page as I read, digesting each word, the sentence, the paragraph. I read while on a couch, with my feet up, or in bed at night, soaking into my head the story as it goes through my eyes and into my brain.
Likewise, when I write, I like to type it out, think about the sentence, the paragraph, the page as I go along, taking my time to put the words onto the page, and absorb them back into my thought process as I am putting together the story. If I write a page a day that is a lot for me.
However, the world is now moving at lightening speed. Social Media, such as Tic Tok has contributed more to attention deficit. Audiobooks are more and more popular (is this done for convenience or multitasking, laziness?) but are you really absorbing the story, emotionally, as you used to when you read the old fashioned way? The National Endowment for the Arts in the USA (yes, losing its funding) reported that audiobooks made up 15% of the book market in 2024 and it’s been rising steadily each year. Digital books now make up about 21%.
AI can write a story in seconds (yeah, we know these stories are not good at all), but will some be tempted to have AI write their first drafts, then go in and edit it to add the layers, emotional content, voice and the like? Oh no. I’m done for it then. It takes me a year or two to write a first draft; although as a retiree, I get more distracted now because I have a dog to walk, I go swimming with sharks, gardening, more traveling and the like, more than I did when I was working.
In the past when I needed to research a topic, I went to the library and pulled reference books off the shelves, searched for what I was looking for, and photocopied a page or pages, or jotted down notes. But now, ask Google’s Gemini a question about the 100 years war, and it will spit out in three seconds the entire history of the conflict. Yikes!
Our grandparents would never belive the technology we have now. Of course their grandparents would never have believed what they had: Motor cars, movies and radio!
In any event, we are speeding up. How faster will we go?
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