Don’t Read This With Spritz

This article was optimized for reading at a rate of 80wpm

At a pace of over ten words a second, Spritz invented a way to consume content at a rate that is faster than we could ever speak. This has been big news, and it’s totally understandable. Humans can now read more than six hundred words per minute, a number that is nothing short of remarkable. Spritz is being touted as “Reading reimagined™,” arming us with the ability to read threefold-or-more of what’s been possible using more traditional methods.

With sincere apologies to Medium’s engineers, this article might now take significantly less time than advertised to read.

What’s troubling is how reading is being reduced to pure consumption. The only thing that matters is collecting data, taking in all the news that’s fit to flick [through], and filling our increasingly overcrowded brains with as many words as possible, as quickly as we can.

While speed reading may be valuable for select activities, what will happen as Spritz becomes the only way we read?

When will we have time to reflect upon the words we’ve ingested?

Will the ability to intake massive amounts of information be cancelled out by our natural inclination to forget?

What will our experience of a novel or article amount to without the visual organization of text blocks?

Will we feel lacking when the paragraph goes extinct?

If content is all that we’re after, have we then lost meaning?