I'm an extreme version of this because it's my job to read several hundred articles every week and curate and summarize them, so my entire reading process has been optimized to rapidly grasping something, contextualizing it, and moving on. It's amazing how good you can get at this over time and I consider it to be a very positive thing in terms of my reading.
In other contexts, I think there have been a few slightly negative psychological side effects, such as struggling to watch full TV shows without fast forwarding through the "boring" bits, or choosing to watch other people playing computer games on YouTube rather than playing them myself because I get bored too easily. But in general I seem to thrive on having an impatient, jumpy brain.. for now!
> choosing to watch other people playing computer games on YouTube rather than playing them myself because I get bored too easily
Could you please elaborate a little bit on this? I'm intrigued - I assumed that actively playing a game would be less boring than passively watching someone else play. I'm not a gamer though so I really have no idea.
> Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.
Where's the evidence that we've developed "traditional deep reading circuitry" over several millennia? That's presented in the article without any justification.
Indeed. Given the availability of reading material and the skill of reading, any "circuitry" would have to be a relatively recent effect in the general population. Further, if "new circuits" are developing over a few tens of years, why would anyone expect the "traditional circuits" to have taken longer?
It seems to me unlikely that this is anything other than an individual behavioral difference.
I do this because I don't want to spend too much time reading crap or second-rate writing. Essentially stuff someone decided to blog because they're bloggers or had a "cool" idea. If something takes 30 minutes to write, I probably want to spend about 30 seconds reading it.
But on great works which an author has spent years thinking about before even committing it to writing; or have gone through several revisions of it, I will devote my time to slow-reading and understanding.
On a meta-level... I think this style of reporting is terrible for the topic. There are three main voices: the journalist, the scientists, and an everyday person. The only one I trust on this are the scientists and the others are just confusing the whole issue. On top of this, there are some humanities professors the journalist treats as scientific authority. All of this is woven together in a pseudo-science tale that's really not worth a careful read.
OK, so what? Is that good or bad -- not with regards to mere "evolution" (which might not even be applicable to such timespans and matters), but concerning the kind of society we want to build?
That's where the humanities professors come into to play (as does "the man on the street" -- we're all men on the street, after all).
Scanning and skimming is a problem caused by UI. The way we scroll text on computers and other devices destroys reading flow.
I built an extension / bookmarklet that allows you to scroll websites in a different way and goes a long way to solving this problem on desktop browsers. I hope no one minds me reposting it, it was very popular on hn a while ago.
Overall, I love the idea and see the value in it. Yes, post again when relevant.
Here are a few suggestions for the demo page: Several pages of sample text would make the idea easier to evaluate. The demo would benefit from some simple instructions (show/hide instructions). I stumbled upon the functionality accidentally by using the mouse scroll wheel out of habit. It took a while before I noticed the play buttons in the bottom right. The speed adjuster is tedious to adjust. I was out of sample text before I got it adjusted to a comfortable speed. The arrows on the sides of the page don't seem to fit with the idea. I am not sure what they are for besides going back. Maybe a clickable left to right progress bar would be better. Another idea would be a vertical thumbnail of the whole document highlighting my current position.
Thanks for posting/making this. Using the scroll technique to read the copy on your webpage did appear to feel a bit more "natural" than other webpages. Look forward to experimenting a bit more with it.
Colin, it wasn't my downvote, and I hardly ever downvote comments like that, but I hardly ever upvote them either, because it doesn't add to the DISCUSSION here, really, to tell people about an optional view of the Web content that is (usually) easily discoverable by every user. Even in a Hacker News discussion with the immediate context of this discussion, about readability, most such comments are at best a no-op.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that people don't seem to be as careful and deliberate in reading things like manuals and instructions as they used to. I have on countless occasions pointed someone to an important piece of information in some documentation, and been responded to with an "oh, I looked here but I didn't see that."
I think that might partly be due to the deluge of useless information in most documentation. I read through the instructions for a meat grinder we picked up the other week. It had about 10 pages. About half of one page somewhere in the middle was real content (how to attach it to the stand mixer, how to prepare the meat, etc.), and the rest of the packet was recipes and pages and pages of warnings and warranty information and other garbage.
It's easy to skip the important bits when they compose just 5% of the whole product.
Definitely find this to be true, trying to read a complex Umberto Eco novel after a steady diet of web scanning for the last 10 years is quite a task! But worthwhile. I have to force myself to read properly for the first time in a long time.
I'm pretty sure that I read more longer pieces than I used to, as so much is available for any topic of interest. In fact, I must decline to read some things simply due to time constraints. Contrast that with getting a magazine once per month, where I was much more willing to "curl up with a good article" even if it wasn't so good, where I was willing to wade through asides on the colorful characters of the main players.
These days, I want non-fiction articles to get to the damned point. I'm fine with long articles, but I don't want my time wasted. Not long ago I began reading popular coverage of an exciting scientific finding. The article began with something like this: "John grew up in a small Ohio town. His father was a clerk at a hardware store and his mother worked for an optometrist." Close tab. That might have been fine pre-internet, but it's not what I want now. Things have changed, but writers and editors are still operating in the old model. I don't mind humor, style, interesting biographical bits, et al, but I want them to occur in reasonably sized chunks inline with the actual subject matter. But mostly I want the information that was promised in the headline.
For fiction... I still buy books and read them on kindle. I buy and read more new books now than I used to.
I don't think I'm all that unusual among people who habitually read.
I don't think this is the same phenomena the article was talking about. It is not that online readers lack the ability/patience to read long pointless text-walls. It is that they seem unable to grok longer, come complex texts.
As a programmer, I have been reading online my whole adult life, and probably spend online much more than the average (but "civilians" seem to be catching up, fast). I do not feel I am particularly affected by this effects, but I (and I suspect you as well) have do deal on a daily basis with complex, artificial, information dense constructions allthetime. Contrast that with the mindless stream of tweets, likes and lolcats that fall on the typical user every day.
Also, I as well as you read fiction but online and in paper. It's hard to measure but I'd say at least a million words per year. This quantity is not typical at all. On the other hand, even amateur fanfiction is authored with an audience in mind and goes to at least an order of magnitude more composition and editing than whatever piece of crap we send/recv over the privacy of out SMS on a daily basis. So yes, I think you are pretty well protected from the debilitating symptoms of these new disease (if you allow me to call it that way).
For those interested in further reading (ha), I can't recommend Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains enough. Just a profound meditation on technology's effect on humanity, particularly pertaining to our Google/internet era. Frankly, he's more skeptical about technology than I am, but I find his perspective genuinely useful for raising interesting questions that have changed my thinking.
This is one reason I like to read anything significant on Kindle. Scanning and skimming is not really something Kindle tends to, having only small amount of content visible at time (I tend to have relatively large font size) and slow page turn speed.
I feel like the Kindle has too little text available, though. I read certain kinds of fiction far faster on actual books than on the Kindle. Perhaps the text size I find comfortable would be much better on a Kindle DX.
Also, the fact that Kindle 'pages' for a text file are not fixed is a bit of a problem. For instance, with a real book if it refers to a previous event and I wish to read it again (sometimes climaxes can be great to read again) I can usually remember a page range and a location on the page (top left, right side) that lead to me being able to identify it in seconds, but I've often gone backwards in a Project Gutenberg eBook to find that the location of the words has changed! A very disconcerting effect.
If you scan or skim then you miss stuff. You have no idea whether or not what you missed is important because you didn't see it. And so comments by people self-importantly declaring themselves to be more effective by scanning/skimming are in effect saying "I didn't read that bit because I knew it wasn't important and, despite not having read it, I know I was right not to read it". What you mean is you have an impaired attention span.
Scanning or skimming can only be optimal with carefully structured texts where you know what to expect, e.g. textbooks where the beginning and end of chapters contain synopses.
What I mean is that time is finite and a piece only has so long to convince me that it's worth reading in depth. While it's possible that a mostly skipped paragraph contained something worthwhile, if I've read a decent number of other paragraphs from that source and they didn't, that's not the way to bet.
Scanning and skimming is good, most of the time. It means you are taking an active role in deciding what parts of a document are relevant to your purpose.
In the bad old days, you had fewer alternatives and higher switching costs, so you just read what was in front I you. With the internet, the next best alternative is so available and so good that you might as well spend some time browsing and quickly discarding the fluff so you can find the really good stuff.
Whenever I start reading an internet article in depth, I get a nagging feeling that I'm putting more effort into reading the article than was put into writing it.
This happens to me a lot. I have to take a pause and consciously focus on reading the text that is in front of me. Otherwise, I simply skim it. Sure, I get enough information to understand the article and talk about it, but I hate how I can't read a whole text as easily as I once did.
It's been said before[1] and I'll say it again: some things aren't worth your full reading attention. Heck, even if they were, you don't have enough time to read everything[2].
That being said, I am a little worried that people (at least myself) aren't getting as "deep" into topics as they might have used to. I try to solve this by (very carefully!) picking books that I can slowly digest, over multiple readings. If nothing else, just reading them at the inspectional and superficial levels can help me decide whether I need to go back for more.
That moment when you're skimming through an article which is about skimming and scanning. Yet you keep speeding and scrolling through the content which in turn is revealing what you're experiencing as you're just reading about it.
[+] [-] petercooper|12 years ago|reply
In other contexts, I think there have been a few slightly negative psychological side effects, such as struggling to watch full TV shows without fast forwarding through the "boring" bits, or choosing to watch other people playing computer games on YouTube rather than playing them myself because I get bored too easily. But in general I seem to thrive on having an impatient, jumpy brain.. for now!
[+] [-] mironathetin|12 years ago|reply
How do you check, how good you are? Do you have other persons reading the texts carefully and compare to your summaries?
[+] [-] DonaldH|12 years ago|reply
Could you please elaborate a little bit on this? I'm intrigued - I assumed that actively playing a game would be less boring than passively watching someone else play. I'm not a gamer though so I really have no idea.
[+] [-] kisielk|12 years ago|reply
Where's the evidence that we've developed "traditional deep reading circuitry" over several millennia? That's presented in the article without any justification.
[+] [-] mcguire|12 years ago|reply
It seems to me unlikely that this is anything other than an individual behavioral difference.
[+] [-] fluidcruft|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laichzeit0|12 years ago|reply
But on great works which an author has spent years thinking about before even committing it to writing; or have gone through several revisions of it, I will devote my time to slow-reading and understanding.
[+] [-] logn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
Well, they are. Their field is how humanity understands itself, and what traditions (historical, literary, etc) and values we have.
The results of the "real" scientists are useless when not valued and judged under a humanist interpretation.
E.g, scientific measurable fact: "We're reading less".
OK, so what? Is that good or bad -- not with regards to mere "evolution" (which might not even be applicable to such timespans and matters), but concerning the kind of society we want to build?
That's where the humanities professors come into to play (as does "the man on the street" -- we're all men on the street, after all).
[+] [-] rdwallis|12 years ago|reply
I built an extension / bookmarklet that allows you to scroll websites in a different way and goes a long way to solving this problem on desktop browsers. I hope no one minds me reposting it, it was very popular on hn a while ago.
http://www.magicscroll.net/ScrollTheWeb.html
[+] [-] jmulho|12 years ago|reply
Here are a few suggestions for the demo page: Several pages of sample text would make the idea easier to evaluate. The demo would benefit from some simple instructions (show/hide instructions). I stumbled upon the functionality accidentally by using the mouse scroll wheel out of habit. It took a while before I noticed the play buttons in the bottom right. The speed adjuster is tedious to adjust. I was out of sample text before I got it adjusted to a comfortable speed. The arrows on the sides of the page don't seem to fit with the idea. I am not sure what they are for besides going back. Maybe a clickable left to right progress bar would be better. Another idea would be a vertical thumbnail of the whole document highlighting my current position.
[+] [-] hhm|12 years ago|reply
There is actually another reason against scrolling, which is judder. Check for example the judder section on http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-virtual-isnt-real-...
[+] [-] cliveowen|12 years ago|reply
I don't know what the solution might be, but this is not it.
[+] [-] lexandstuff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ColinWright|12 years ago|reply
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/serious-reading-takes-a-...
Edit: Interesting - a down-vote.
[+] [-] tokenadult|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldpie|12 years ago|reply
It's easy to skip the important bits when they compose just 5% of the whole product.
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwc|12 years ago|reply
These days, I want non-fiction articles to get to the damned point. I'm fine with long articles, but I don't want my time wasted. Not long ago I began reading popular coverage of an exciting scientific finding. The article began with something like this: "John grew up in a small Ohio town. His father was a clerk at a hardware store and his mother worked for an optometrist." Close tab. That might have been fine pre-internet, but it's not what I want now. Things have changed, but writers and editors are still operating in the old model. I don't mind humor, style, interesting biographical bits, et al, but I want them to occur in reasonably sized chunks inline with the actual subject matter. But mostly I want the information that was promised in the headline.
For fiction... I still buy books and read them on kindle. I buy and read more new books now than I used to.
I don't think I'm all that unusual among people who habitually read.
[+] [-] crpatino|12 years ago|reply
As a programmer, I have been reading online my whole adult life, and probably spend online much more than the average (but "civilians" seem to be catching up, fast). I do not feel I am particularly affected by this effects, but I (and I suspect you as well) have do deal on a daily basis with complex, artificial, information dense constructions all the time. Contrast that with the mindless stream of tweets, likes and lolcats that fall on the typical user every day.
Also, I as well as you read fiction but online and in paper. It's hard to measure but I'd say at least a million words per year. This quantity is not typical at all. On the other hand, even amateur fanfiction is authored with an audience in mind and goes to at least an order of magnitude more composition and editing than whatever piece of crap we send/recv over the privacy of out SMS on a daily basis. So yes, I think you are pretty well protected from the debilitating symptoms of these new disease (if you allow me to call it that way).
[+] [-] saturdaysaint|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arjie|12 years ago|reply
Also, the fact that Kindle 'pages' for a text file are not fixed is a bit of a problem. For instance, with a real book if it refers to a previous event and I wish to read it again (sometimes climaxes can be great to read again) I can usually remember a page range and a location on the page (top left, right side) that lead to me being able to identify it in seconds, but I've often gone backwards in a Project Gutenberg eBook to find that the location of the words has changed! A very disconcerting effect.
[+] [-] dwc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epo|12 years ago|reply
Scanning or skimming can only be optimal with carefully structured texts where you know what to expect, e.g. textbooks where the beginning and end of chapters contain synopses.
[+] [-] 6d0debc071|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwmerrill|12 years ago|reply
In the bad old days, you had fewer alternatives and higher switching costs, so you just read what was in front I you. With the internet, the next best alternative is so available and so good that you might as well spend some time browsing and quickly discarding the fluff so you can find the really good stuff.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_learning
[+] [-] whoopdedo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Raphmedia|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] npsimons|12 years ago|reply
That being said, I am a little worried that people (at least myself) aren't getting as "deep" into topics as they might have used to. I try to solve this by (very carefully!) picking books that I can slowly digest, over multiple readings. If nothing else, just reading them at the inspectional and superficial levels can help me decide whether I need to go back for more.
[1] - See "How to Read a Book"
[2] - https://what-if.xkcd.com/76/
[+] [-] askar_yu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] terranstyler|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixologic|12 years ago|reply