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I Wonder: Will Medium Continue to Promote the Age of Average?

Eric Scheske
2 min readMay 17, 2023
Photo by Daria Kraplak on Unsplash

I guess this piece by Alex Murrell has been making its rounds. The collages are remarkable.

Everything, Murrell observes, looks the same these days. It’s nice stuff, but that’s all it is: nice. Things aren’t unique.

The essay prompted the Ghost blog team to send a newsletter last week, speculating that the Age of Average is going to accelerate with AI, leading more people to crave the genuinely original and the unique. The Ghost team says the age of average writing and sloppy Internet prose might be over: readers are going to start insisting that writers can, you know, write.

I like to hear such things, but I have my doubts. Speed reading, after all, has been around for 50 years, and the speed reader doesn’t care about style. He just wants to gorge.

Years ago, a friend took a speed-reading course. He was explaining it to me (rough quote):

“The course is teaching me to ignore stuff that isn’t relevant. There’s a ton of stuff on each page that doesn’t matter. No one, for

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Eric Scheske
Eric Scheske

Written by Eric Scheske

Former editor of Gilbert Mag and columnist for NC Register and Busted Halo. Freelance for many print pubs. Publishes here every Monday+. Paid Medium Member.

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