The randomness of interesting tidbits in a social media scroll help to put us in a state of flow. We get small hits of dopamine from finding interesting posts to fill in the gaps of the boring bits in between and suddenly find we've lost the day. As a result an endless scroll of varying quality might have the effect of making one feel productive when in fact a reasonably large proportion of your time is spent on useless and uninteresting content.

This effect may be put even further out when it's done algorithmically and the dopamine hits become more frequent. Potentially worse than this, the depth of the insight found in most social feeds is very shallow and rarely ever deep. One is almost never invited to delve further to find new insights.

How might a social media stream of content be leveraged to help people read more interesting and complex content? Could putting Jacques Derrida's texts into a social media-like framing create this? Then one could reply to the text by sentence or paragraph with their own notes. This is similar to the user interface of Hypothes.is, but Hypothes.is has a more traditional reading interface compared to the social media space. What if one interspersed multiple authors in short threads? What other methods might work to "trick" the human mind into having more fun and finding flow in their deeper and more engaged reading states?

Link this to the idea of fun in Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes.

People have evolved as social animals and this extends to thinking and interacting. We think better when we think socially (in groups) as opposed to thinking alone.

This in part may be why solo reading and annotating improves one's thinking because it is a form of social annotation between the lone annotator and the author. Actual social annotation amongst groups may add additonal power to this method.

I personally annotate alone, though I typically do so in a publicly discoverable fashion within Hypothes.is. While the audience of my annotations may be exceedingly low, there is at least a perceived public for my output. Thus my thinking, though done alone, is accelerated and improved by the potential social context in which it's done. (Hello, dear reader! 🥰) I can artificially take advantage of the social learning effects even if the social circle may mathematically approach the limit of an audience of one (me).

Even when taught that some methods of learning don't work, students will still actively use and focus on them.

Are those using social annotation purposely helping students to steer clear of these methods? is there evidence that the social part of some of these related annotation or conversational practices with both the text and one's colleagues helpful? Do they need to be taken out of the text and done in a more explicit manner in a lecture/discussion section or in a book club like setting similar to that of Dan Allossso's or even within a shared space like the Obsidian book club to have more value?

Writing to understand what I read is critical to my practice. Doing so socially is particularly helpful when I don't understand something or am lacking the motivation to keep reading.

Digital Social Reading · Works in Progress by [[Federico Pianzola]] (2021)

Federico mentioned this in the group chat at I Annotate 2021.

Requested an invite.

This book includes a few sections about defunct Readmill.

Readers, he says, are the real -hidden- value of books.

Close reading is basically standardized in Common Core--it's referenced in the first ELA anchor standard for reading. Hypothesis is a means to assess competency in that standard by recording, measuring, and allowing feedback on

A big part of social reading: listening to the text and to other readers.

Because social and interactive, collaborative annotation can make reading more engaging.

Pretty good definition of social reading in fact!

Social reading makes reading a team sport!

Fascinating distinction!

Great questions!

This emphasis on collaboration is particularly important in social reading. Through replies, each annotation is actually the beginning of a potential conversation.

It's interesting to think about this idea of "slow reading" in relation to collaborative online annotation. So many traditional humanists complain of the cursory of the digital--hashtags on Twitter replacing sentences, Wikipedia summaries are replacing "actual" research. But web annotation requires readers to pause and consider in the very ways we have always taught our students to do in English classes.