Lurking is Listening (SCHOOL)

Jeff Atwood introduces his piece with an open ended statement that draws in the reader. The title “Because 

Reading is Fundamental,” serves the content of the article by compelling the reader to continue.

 Atwood argues that more conversation does not correlate with “good” conversation, people are not reading the content they are 

commenting on. Commenters are more concerned with number of posts than quality of posts, and this has 

serious negative effect in online communication culture.

The Ars Banana Experiment demonstrates that most 

people commenting on articles don’t actually read the full text before making their comments. It supports 

Atwoods thesis as the finding of this experiment proved it took approx. ninety commenters before finding one 

that read to the keyword “banana,” suggesting that most of the people were more concerned with “talking” 

without fully being informed on the topic they were commenting on. The Slate Experiment collected analytics of 

the percentages of article content viewed on the website slate.com. The data shows that many people do not even 

scroll down the page and about half of readers view only 50% of the articles.

 Atwoods concludes “online, 

listening = reading” and listening or reading more important than talking as there is plenty of it going on, 

especially misinformed talking online. He says we need to incentivize “listening.” Atwood has four main points 

providing solutions. 

1) Remove interruptions to reading. Specifically let the reader continue their reading flow by loading the next 

page of the article automatically.

 2)  Measure read times and display them. Atwood wants the main “number” next to a commenters name the 

amount of time they spent reading the content.

 3) Give rewards for reading. Reward for the right reasons.

 4) Update in real time. Preserving the “organic” type of discourse that happens in face-to-face conversations and

 apply that framework to online discussion in some type of algorithm.

 Atwood says reading is fundamental. 

Discourse helps people learn continuously and then in turn become better readers/listeners. In theory his 

argument and supportive evidence hold ground. In reality, those who comment will continue to comment, and 

those who read and “lurk” will continue to do so. Internet comments are not an accurate representation of an 

article or blogs audience. Providing information on this issue is important, but words do not have the power to 

change the personalities of the internet user.