Reading and really understanding a text is not cognitively easy. It should be a privilege for a text to be read by me.
I am a productive and I work a lot with my head. I in my free time I listen to a lot of Audiobooks (fiction and factual) and I view that as the best vessel for taking in information in a causal way. If I really need to study something then I read it. But how dare you to think your text is important enough that I study it - especially in the age of click-bait and low quality journalism. If it is an extremely good text then I will recognize it as such by myself and study it.
Well said. News articles/editorials/blogs are especially bloated these days. It often not worth spending the mental effort when not a lot of mental effort was put into the writing.
I agree there's a lot of crap out there, but the point of the article is that even for text that is worth the effort, your ability to supply said effort will have been diminished by a lifetime habit of skim-reading. The ability to read deeply has to be exercised constantly. It cannot be turned on and off. The other thing is, will you still be able to recognize every text that is worth your time? These seem like worthy points to me.
It's a good point. Trying to reread some classic texts that I missed in a STEM curriculum, I've definitely noticed my attention is not what it used to be.
But, like anything: exercise creates ability. And so I try to keep plowing my way through.
I chronically skim read articles and emails, because people are generally very bad at writing those things. They will usually contain a lot more information that I don’t care about than information that I do care about.
But I also read about 1 book a week, and I don’t struggle to devote my full attention to them. I don’t think switching between skimming and comprehensive reading is the problem, I think it’s that if you never do comprehensive reading that you’ll struggle to get back into it.
Yeah, and that's the other problem this article is pointing at--young children aren't developing deep reading skills like you have, because the girls are getting waylaid by social media and the boys by video games. They won't have the option of skimming the bad shit and deep reading the good stuff.
> Besides, how presumptuous is it to proclaim "how dare you to think your text is important enough that I study it"?
Not at all. I'm 30. I'm going to live to be 80 at best. I've only fifty years left. Fifty years of fifty weeks each. 2500 weeks of 7 days each. If I spend two hours reading every day, that's 35000 hours left. That's 70000 half-hour works.
Is this work in the top 70k that Man has ever written? That's the standard. I only have one life. And to me it is everything. What I read needs to be at the 99.999th percentile. Life's too short for anything else.
Because those need attention. If I'm waiting for my Lyft to take me to my book club meeting, like I am right now, I only have three minutes. I can't use that to make any progress on Conjectures and Refutations.
So these things have poor cost structure for what they provide. I like The Economist on my morning fifteen min BART for instance. And that's because that's dense.
But if I have half an hour, that's enough for me to read something worthwhile instead of this stuff.
Skimming through bs was normal in pre-screen era, iirc, it is amount of texts that increased. We simply have no time to dive into yet another attention seeking writer’s subjective today.
Otoh, there are still texts that slow you down since ‘objective meaning’ per line ratio is damn high. The pace of reading naturally correlates with the quality of text as a medium of conceptions. If you’re short of interests, then skimming everything is not a primary problem. If you develop a protection against drowning in bs, it’s actually good, since it is not going anywhere.
Go back a century, and your "objective meaning" per line ratio goes down a significant bunch. Language has never be this condensed, and the number of words to convey an idea never this small. One of the problems in this, though, might be one of the ever-increasing over-simplification, over-abstraction and superficial impositions of meaning, where certain phrasings make a thing true just because this is the way young people would express it™... It's complicated.
I'm fairly involved with creating or having created various materials for people who might be interested in buying our products. Even in the past 10 years or so, we've shifted to shorter pieces, survey results presented in the form of slides rather than words, short videos, etc. It's definitely more about things you can share on social media that people will glance through for a minute or two rather than carefully read on a plane.
Yes, but I'm not sure I see a direct correlation. Materials created 10 years ago were presumably appropriate for the marketing at the time. I think a lot of what companies create today would be viewed as too short and fluffy if you go back in time. (And doubtless for some audiences today, they are.)
Styles and preferences change. Look at the information density of ads as you go back in time.
I don’t know much about century old articles, but if you’re about classic books, then these were never concise. Good written, yes. But the usual writer’s syndrome is also there. What could be said in few sentences and links went as a book instead.
Look at this article. It tries to be narrative of an airport, kids and older people doing something in their seats. Is this relevant? Is it a cool story worth a ‘classics’ badge? It is just bs that is mimicking an observation report. This imaginary airport arguably was not even a source of author’s initial thought on topic.
Centuries — maybe. But I think that on the scale of decades the trend is still being more wordy and attention/seo seeking.
At least for journalism, this is a hot and increasingly pesky trend. It's the Ira Glass style:
"63 year old Barb Waterhouse puts the kettle on" ... sound of boiling water ... "and as I settle into a plush easy chair, i can see that the color of the leaves is changing" ... sounds of birds chirping ...
In what should be an article about urban planning. It's SO annoying and I can't be blamed for "skimming."
In all likelihood the author was asked to write 1200 words to promote her book.
Maryanne Wolf is the author of Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
So I guess the article is supposed to pique your interest sufficiently to then go buy the book. I'm going to side with you here though, the majority of the book could probably be condensed to <2000 words. And anyway, the contract to publish the book probably came with a word count requirement: give me 50,000 words and we'll publish it.
I'm reminded of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) which I tried to read recently and couldn't get through due to the writing. Here is one of the most highly "liked" quotes from GoodReads:
>> Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came,—the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon,—that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure,—he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow.
A century ago newspapers were under incredibly tight constraints. Printing and typesetting was an expensive and non-trivial process so article length was severely constrained. And because printing took so long it required articles to be written and edited on a very demanding schedule. As to magazines and books, that's an entirely different matter.
Written 1668, it's written in a style that put a lot of long words after each other in a way that makes it hard to decipher to day. I had to follow a few obscure rules to understand things, one being not to start to try make sense of a sentence before reading up to the period. Towards the end, the wording was often upended completely by whatever additional constructs with which the author closed sentences. It isn't really because the individual words have become much different, but our use of language really shifted.
> Otoh, there are still texts that slow you down since ‘objective meaning’ per line ratio is damn high. The pace of reading naturally correlates with the quality of text as a medium of conceptions.
I remember this from about 2000 with respect to newspapers.
I was flying to Canada and bought a newspaper as is my wont when flying.
Of course, I had the newspaper pretty much finished within about a half hour to and hour after takeoff.
And then I bought a Canadian newspaper, and noticed that it took me almost 3 hours to finish it off.
It was quite amazing how much more sophisticated just the vocabulary was in the Canadian newspaper.
As far as I remember eye tracking usability studies skimming was always the norm on the web. Since people have to process a lot of information to get anything done. And deep reading was always special kind of activity for rare things.
I think the main point made by the author is that we should _be able to_ read properly and consciously make the decision to do so for some texts. I don't think anyone would argue that we should carefully read every single shallow, poorly written blog post out there.
"We need to cultivate a new kind of brain: a “bi-literate” reading brain capable of the deepest forms of thought in either digital or traditional mediums. A great deal hangs on it: the ability of citizens in a vibrant democracy to try on other perspectives and discern truth; the capacity of our children and grandchildren to appreciate and create beauty; and the ability in ourselves to go beyond our present glut of information to reach the knowledge and wisdom necessary to sustain a good society."
The reality is long-form articles are probably not the future of conveying complex ideas to a mass audience. Skimming is the only way to sift through the insane amount of content produced daily. Of course, if you skim an article and find it interesting, switching over to slow comprehensive reading is the next step.
As the article suggests, this behavior, taken to a pathological extreme, leads to a sort of sloppy thinking where readers are simply unable to engage with or evaluate complex ideas, even when necessary. But you might have missed that if you didn't read it too closely.
I think one of the problem is we try to know too many things but nothing well enough.
We have access to infinite amount of "snippet" information. We want an "answer", now, and not the reason of how and why we arrived at those answer in the first place. Lots of people searching for just an "answers" and not thinking, and we end up in a world where we have far easier access of information than any other period in human history and our time to think and learn has been taken up by social media and other easy access entertainment.
Another problem of long reading is the quality of writing has degraded over the years. Or may be we have far too many information so the average or median quality are lowered.
The last great pieces of long Tech article i enjoyed were written by Anand lal shimpi, founder of Anandtech, but he left the site and went to work for Apple.
I don't think it's the quality of writing that has degraded, but rather the democratization of writing. Now everyone can write and make their thoughts known and it's not unreasonable to conclude that much of it will be chaff. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but it does place a heavier burden on the reader to be more critical of the avenues through which they consume information & content. Curation is, I've found, a difficult process.
I’ve been reading a lot more poetry lately. One thing I like about it is that it directs focus very intensely but the works are small. You only need to bring one page worth of focus at a time.
Did anyone else click through to the article and think: “okay, try not to skim the article about how bad skim-reading is!”?
I really like this article. It is aligning with very formless thoughts I have been having over the past year about the varying qualities of information and how it can affect your minds health. Much like a food diet, I have been thinking that it is wise to cultivate a healthy “information diet” in order to preserve good mental health.
Amid frustration with my degrading attention span last year, I swore off a lot of the social media things (Twitter, most of all) to see if I could regain the ability to actually get through some books. The results were quite astonishing in my case, I was able to crack through a few books and actually focus on side projects.
Unfortunately, I am not as optimistic as the writer here that we will be able to pull out of it. Much like modern society battles overweightness, diabetes and all kinds of ailments that stem from poor diet, I think we will suffer a similar fate when it comes to moderating our information intake.
Why do you think your attention span is degrading? Think about it this way: if you are able to concentrate enough to watch a movie, there is nothing wrong with you and nothing is stopping you from deep reading, but maybe just too boring and uncompetitive text (uncompetitive with other content and other forms of content).
Most people find salad very boring and "uncompetitive" compared to ice cream or potato chips... but that's not the point. We need to keep our diets diverse and healthy, otherwise our lives degrade or end prematurely.
Hedonism is unsustainable... sometimes we simply need to do the healthy boring stuff. Do taxes, eat vegetables, exercise the mind and body. Ya know, adult 101.
There is some empirical research that our attention spans are degrading on average. I don't have any of it handy, but there's a great book I had to read back in high school called "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr that goes into it.
When you dumb things down, and shorten them you reach a larger audience.
Another factor to consider is that journalism is no longer attracting the quality of authors it used to, and that clickbait is the easiest way for online newspapers to make money.
Funny, while i can concentrate on reading, I don't have the patience to watch a Hollywood blockbuster without fast forwarding or multitasking any more. I'm guessing because they're so similar in mechanics (with different skins, which may distract you) that they're really not worth the time.
I saw that after posting. Left it as is to see if people will skim it or not.
Also, I am not a native English speaker. So most times as I formulate something in my mind, the speed difference between mind and hand causes me to miss words.
I think it is not about your attention span degrading. It is a matter of adaptation to too many things competing for our attention, and the desire to consume all this information. (It is an interesting question as such as to actually why one has to consume all this)
There are advertorials, advertisements, tweets, news entries, status updates, articles, books, mailing lists, and everything in between.
Since there are too many things, one needs to prioritize. But to prioritize one has to understand the value: Is there anything new for me? Will it be entertaining? Will it be factual? Will it support my point of views? Will it challenge my point of views? Is it trustworthy? Is it plausible? Is there a hidden agenda? Is it propaganda? Whose points does it support? And so on.
And how to find out at least some of these without reading the entire text? Skim it!
Now, skimming usually gives enough information about the value. But when done deliberately, one can not only assess the value, but often get the main point(s) quickly too. (Call it "speed reading")
I've had (and still have) this same "problem", but I don't consider it a problem anymore. Skimming is good, but one has to be able to turn it off.
This is what I do: skim, for quick screening and early out to avoid wasting time. Then, if there's not much time available, speed read, do a 2nd and maybe 3rd pass of skimming.
If there's plenty of time and information seems worthwhile, then sit down and start reading as if there's nothing else you can do. Like you were stuck on a cottage without your phone/tablet and it rains outside -- reading is the only thing you can do without getting bored or going to sleep. (I don't know if you can relate to this idea, you can find your own memory with a similar idea)
Since I already know there is some value, it motivates me to go on.
Now, when it comes to fact books, I try not to read from cover to cover, but chapter to chapter and then re-evaluate. Fiction books are different, since it's usually for entertainment (and of course sometimes for interesting ideas).
So, I am optimistic that people will learn new strategies and not all hope is lost.
I actually noticed (and then embraced) a recalcitrant inclination in myself, to explicitly skim-read the article to see whether it was worth it. So now that I did, here's a tl;dr: we've changed the way we read to more often do skim-reading, and the effect might be that we less fully understand the text we're reading and are hence less able to be critical of it.
I repeat with my kids about this very concept like a broken record hundred times.
'Mental obesity' is as real as 'physical obesity'
> Much like modern society battles overweightness, diabetes and all kinds of ailments that stem from poor diet, I think we will suffer a similar fate when it comes to moderating our information intake.
My hypothesis is that the measurable difference between skim reading and deep reading is small if even statistically significant. The difference between reading at all vs not reading is large.
If I have to be ready for deep reading before I read anything, then I'll never read anything.
A barometer of this in the UK is Radio 4 - the BBC's 'speech only' service. Nowadays there are plenty of listeners but they are stuck in their cars on some silly commute and needing to pass the time as they shuffle through fumes, therefore this new audience is only getting the government's version of 'news', not the full Radio 4 experience.
This audience doesn't tend to tune in to Radio 4 at other times to listen to stories, documentaries, 'Woman's Hour' and the other delights of Radio 4, when back at the ranch there is TV and the world of digital delights for ambient entertainment.
You can do stuff whilst listening to Radio 4 style speech radio (not to be confused with 'talk radio'), however I don't think many people do that these days or have the skills to patiently do so. I wonder how low the critical mass of listeners has to get before 'Radio 4' loses relevance and is no longer something that can be discussed in 'the shires'.
But there is perhaps a growing number of people who listen to podcasts instead. I listen to podcasts in my car either via the car's own system (Tesla S) or using my mobile via Bluetooth.
I question the article's use of the word digital which covers both e-ink and LCD devices. The Mangen study it mentions was e-ink vs paper, but it was only 50 people and her own later work appears to call it into question. In the other studies mentioned it's not clear from the article if they were LCD or e-ink, and I suspect they were LCD.
The "technology of recurrence" is interesting. I do use e-ink and I'm considerably less likely to go back a few pages to check something out than if I was reading a paper book.
Maybe it's just because I read a lot of books and have been doing so for many years (I'm 45, so I've been reading a long time), but I don't feel like I've lost the ability to focus on reading. I still frequently pick up an interesting novel and read it in one or two sittings. A new novel by one of my favorite authors (say, Daniel Silva or David Baldacci) I'm quite likely to sit down and read in one single 8 hour session.
OTOH, what I do absolutely struggle with is watching video content. I think it's largely to do with the fact that I consume most of my video content on my laptop, so the lure of another browser tab (with, say, Hacker News or Reddit) is always there. I'll start watching a ~30 minute episode of "The IT Crowd" and it'll take me 90 minutes to watch it because I'm obsessively hitting "pause" every couple of minutes to check my email, check HN, etc. :-(
> English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts.
Nothing new here, surely? I'd hazard a guess a huge majority of people, throughout eternity, will never read 19th and 20th century literature, myself included. Unless we come up with some way of uploading books directly to our conscious awareness or whatever.
Project Gutenberg was founded in 1971, and as of June 23rd 2018 contains over 57,000 books. If we ignore for a minute all of the online book stores where one can go to buy books, and how well some of those stores are doing, then Project Gutenberg alone has probably done more for reading than we may have lost due to swipe-and-skim reading. How many of us have bought and pirated more eBooks than we've read paper books.
I work with tradesmen. I've asked so many of them "read any good books lately?" and they typically reply with something like "books? fuck off, I'm not gay". Seriously. But even the majority of these people, especially those under about 35 years old, are, in their spare time, reading constantly. Okay, so they're skim reading non-sense on Pinstabookwittertube, or whatever the kids are into this five-minute-period. I can't keep up, must be getting old, get off my lawn, etc. etc. I'd say that's still a huge improvement over the nothing similar cohorts were reading a decade a go. I'm still convinced some of the older guys can barely read well enough to get through their every day lives.
And, generally speaking, I'm skeptical of most 'The Sky Is Falling: Younger People Are Worse at X (And Y and Z and A and B ...' positions, for all the obvious reasons.
I've been studying Spanish to a medium-to-high intermediate level, and I find skimming something in Spanish to be very difficult. This is probably because my reading speed can average 1/10th of it would be in English (depending on the difficulty).
I think we take for granted the ability to skim an article in our native language. When we skim, our brain is probably taking advantage of so many fast "pattern recognizers" and models to make sense of the whole, sampled in parts.
Perhaps skimming effectively like "being able to go to a comedy show in that language and actually laugh" is a true test of language proficiency.
My Spanish teacher who is pretty competent with English agrees that skimming is something that she cannot just do either.
English is not my mother tongue, but I can skim it easily, maybe not easily than my native German.
A lot might also be about writing style: English has developed a very anecdote/story- heavy style. Try to find an article by an author with English as mother tongue - they breast universally use this approach. E.g. article about tax law starts with one story, article about politics goes in depth on some specific scene or encounter, etc etc. There is often much mention of 'unimportant' detail that fill the mental picture, and English language media often repeat and stretch out information (rather than strive for information density). In comparison of DE-EN-FR I even find this in more in-depth documents like textbooks, not universally but much more than in the other languages.
Of course fluency plays a major role. But i can skim a french-language fluff piece or story or recounting of an event, even if that's not exactly a strong language for me. At the same time I can't skim an in-depth description of this or that political conflict or technical report in EN or DE if I want to understand the course of events or details. So it's at least to some degree (at least for me) a matter of the writing style - stories read easily, and non- English media is much less story-heavy. For an English native you might be able to compare yourself skimming an Economist article or something academic vs e.g. guardian or independent and see if it feels different.
In a twist, I find it sometimes harder to read a FR language fluff piece closely/carefully - they tend to use words that are more slang/informal and which i won't know as well how to interpret them in the context. But getting the gist of easy. This might be particular to foreign language reading though.
It's a fine line to draw... On the one hand, I feel like I have some form of "new information addiction". Even my dad, who is 70, has pretty aggressive surfing habits.
On the other hand, I skimmed books back in the 90's, before I surfed the web daily. (There was much less "new" high quality information online then.)
I would check out 5 books at a time from the library, and read the best one, and skim the rest.
I also studied for my AP History test in exactly one day by skimming, and got a great score. IIRC, I read the first and last sentence of every chapter in a 200 page book in one night. It's not a bad way to read if you're looking for the high level structure of stories and arguments.
Many authors are in love with their own prose, and it is too long.
My blog looks dense but I've gotten good feedback on it, mostly because I use skimmable headings, and delete words from sentences, so it's short and dense:
I don't buy that this has anything to do with the rise of the 'digital world'. The unfortunate reality is that adult literacy statistics are scary. A huge number of adults just aren't capable of understanding more than the most basic writing. See NAAL (https://nces.ed.gov/naal/) and PIAAC (https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/) data.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadReading and really understanding a text is not cognitively easy. It should be a privilege for a text to be read by me.
I am a productive and I work a lot with my head. I in my free time I listen to a lot of Audiobooks (fiction and factual) and I view that as the best vessel for taking in information in a causal way. If I really need to study something then I read it. But how dare you to think your text is important enough that I study it - especially in the age of click-bait and low quality journalism. If it is an extremely good text then I will recognize it as such by myself and study it.
But, like anything: exercise creates ability. And so I try to keep plowing my way through.
But I also read about 1 book a week, and I don’t struggle to devote my full attention to them. I don’t think switching between skimming and comprehensive reading is the problem, I think it’s that if you never do comprehensive reading that you’ll struggle to get back into it.
Besides, how presumptuous is it to proclaim "how dare you to think your text is important enough that I study it"?
Not at all. I'm 30. I'm going to live to be 80 at best. I've only fifty years left. Fifty years of fifty weeks each. 2500 weeks of 7 days each. If I spend two hours reading every day, that's 35000 hours left. That's 70000 half-hour works.
Is this work in the top 70k that Man has ever written? That's the standard. I only have one life. And to me it is everything. What I read needs to be at the 99.999th percentile. Life's too short for anything else.
So these things have poor cost structure for what they provide. I like The Economist on my morning fifteen min BART for instance. And that's because that's dense.
But if I have half an hour, that's enough for me to read something worthwhile instead of this stuff.
Otoh, there are still texts that slow you down since ‘objective meaning’ per line ratio is damn high. The pace of reading naturally correlates with the quality of text as a medium of conceptions. If you’re short of interests, then skimming everything is not a primary problem. If you develop a protection against drowning in bs, it’s actually good, since it is not going anywhere.
Styles and preferences change. Look at the information density of ads as you go back in time.
Look at this article. It tries to be narrative of an airport, kids and older people doing something in their seats. Is this relevant? Is it a cool story worth a ‘classics’ badge? It is just bs that is mimicking an observation report. This imaginary airport arguably was not even a source of author’s initial thought on topic.
Centuries — maybe. But I think that on the scale of decades the trend is still being more wordy and attention/seo seeking.
"63 year old Barb Waterhouse puts the kettle on" ... sound of boiling water ... "and as I settle into a plush easy chair, i can see that the color of the leaves is changing" ... sounds of birds chirping ...
In what should be an article about urban planning. It's SO annoying and I can't be blamed for "skimming."
Maryanne Wolf is the author of Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
So I guess the article is supposed to pique your interest sufficiently to then go buy the book. I'm going to side with you here though, the majority of the book could probably be condensed to <2000 words. And anyway, the contract to publish the book probably came with a word count requirement: give me 50,000 words and we'll publish it.
Joke?
I'm reminded of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) which I tried to read recently and couldn't get through due to the writing. Here is one of the most highly "liked" quotes from GoodReads:
>> Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came,—the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon,—that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure,—he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow.
A century ago newspapers were under incredibly tight constraints. Printing and typesetting was an expensive and non-trivial process so article length was severely constrained. And because printing took so long it required articles to be written and edited on a very demanding schedule. As to magazines and books, that's an entirely different matter.
The most telling example I once started to read in German and sooner or later gave up on was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicius_Simplicissimus
Written 1668, it's written in a style that put a lot of long words after each other in a way that makes it hard to decipher to day. I had to follow a few obscure rules to understand things, one being not to start to try make sense of a sentence before reading up to the period. Towards the end, the wording was often upended completely by whatever additional constructs with which the author closed sentences. It isn't really because the individual words have become much different, but our use of language really shifted.
I remember this from about 2000 with respect to newspapers.
I was flying to Canada and bought a newspaper as is my wont when flying.
Of course, I had the newspaper pretty much finished within about a half hour to and hour after takeoff.
And then I bought a Canadian newspaper, and noticed that it took me almost 3 hours to finish it off.
It was quite amazing how much more sophisticated just the vocabulary was in the Canadian newspaper.
Don't let them guilt you into it.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
― Oscar Wilde
My wife occasionally reasds BBC news stories to me and it's remarkable how much 'blah blah hang on a moment til I find the story' even those contain.
"We need to cultivate a new kind of brain: a “bi-literate” reading brain capable of the deepest forms of thought in either digital or traditional mediums. A great deal hangs on it: the ability of citizens in a vibrant democracy to try on other perspectives and discern truth; the capacity of our children and grandchildren to appreciate and create beauty; and the ability in ourselves to go beyond our present glut of information to reach the knowledge and wisdom necessary to sustain a good society."
We have access to infinite amount of "snippet" information. We want an "answer", now, and not the reason of how and why we arrived at those answer in the first place. Lots of people searching for just an "answers" and not thinking, and we end up in a world where we have far easier access of information than any other period in human history and our time to think and learn has been taken up by social media and other easy access entertainment.
Another problem of long reading is the quality of writing has degraded over the years. Or may be we have far too many information so the average or median quality are lowered.
The last great pieces of long Tech article i enjoyed were written by Anand lal shimpi, founder of Anandtech, but he left the site and went to work for Apple.
I really like this article. It is aligning with very formless thoughts I have been having over the past year about the varying qualities of information and how it can affect your minds health. Much like a food diet, I have been thinking that it is wise to cultivate a healthy “information diet” in order to preserve good mental health.
Amid frustration with my degrading attention span last year, I swore off a lot of the social media things (Twitter, most of all) to see if I could regain the ability to actually get through some books. The results were quite astonishing in my case, I was able to crack through a few books and actually focus on side projects.
Unfortunately, I am not as optimistic as the writer here that we will be able to pull out of it. Much like modern society battles overweightness, diabetes and all kinds of ailments that stem from poor diet, I think we will suffer a similar fate when it comes to moderating our information intake.
Hedonism is unsustainable... sometimes we simply need to do the healthy boring stuff. Do taxes, eat vegetables, exercise the mind and body. Ya know, adult 101.
Another factor to consider is that journalism is no longer attracting the quality of authors it used to, and that clickbait is the easiest way for online newspapers to make money.
Also, I am not a native English speaker. So most times as I formulate something in my mind, the speed difference between mind and hand causes me to miss words.
I think much is to do with the format - reading on a small screen I feel I skim more than on a desktop monitor.
On my desktop I'm very prone to skimming and eagerly multitasking, but any text on my phone has my full undivided attention.
Incidentally I've spent a lot of time reading books on my phone, while I do most of my web browsing at a desk.
There are advertorials, advertisements, tweets, news entries, status updates, articles, books, mailing lists, and everything in between.
Since there are too many things, one needs to prioritize. But to prioritize one has to understand the value: Is there anything new for me? Will it be entertaining? Will it be factual? Will it support my point of views? Will it challenge my point of views? Is it trustworthy? Is it plausible? Is there a hidden agenda? Is it propaganda? Whose points does it support? And so on.
And how to find out at least some of these without reading the entire text? Skim it!
Now, skimming usually gives enough information about the value. But when done deliberately, one can not only assess the value, but often get the main point(s) quickly too. (Call it "speed reading")
I've had (and still have) this same "problem", but I don't consider it a problem anymore. Skimming is good, but one has to be able to turn it off.
This is what I do: skim, for quick screening and early out to avoid wasting time. Then, if there's not much time available, speed read, do a 2nd and maybe 3rd pass of skimming.
If there's plenty of time and information seems worthwhile, then sit down and start reading as if there's nothing else you can do. Like you were stuck on a cottage without your phone/tablet and it rains outside -- reading is the only thing you can do without getting bored or going to sleep. (I don't know if you can relate to this idea, you can find your own memory with a similar idea)
Since I already know there is some value, it motivates me to go on.
Now, when it comes to fact books, I try not to read from cover to cover, but chapter to chapter and then re-evaluate. Fiction books are different, since it's usually for entertainment (and of course sometimes for interesting ideas).
So, I am optimistic that people will learn new strategies and not all hope is lost.
So, is my tl;dr somewhat accurate?
'Mental obesity' is as real as 'physical obesity'
> Much like modern society battles overweightness, diabetes and all kinds of ailments that stem from poor diet, I think we will suffer a similar fate when it comes to moderating our information intake.
Somehow I have to read every word on its own.
If I have to be ready for deep reading before I read anything, then I'll never read anything.
A barometer of this in the UK is Radio 4 - the BBC's 'speech only' service. Nowadays there are plenty of listeners but they are stuck in their cars on some silly commute and needing to pass the time as they shuffle through fumes, therefore this new audience is only getting the government's version of 'news', not the full Radio 4 experience.
This audience doesn't tend to tune in to Radio 4 at other times to listen to stories, documentaries, 'Woman's Hour' and the other delights of Radio 4, when back at the ranch there is TV and the world of digital delights for ambient entertainment.
You can do stuff whilst listening to Radio 4 style speech radio (not to be confused with 'talk radio'), however I don't think many people do that these days or have the skills to patiently do so. I wonder how low the critical mass of listeners has to get before 'Radio 4' loses relevance and is no longer something that can be discussed in 'the shires'.
The "technology of recurrence" is interesting. I do use e-ink and I'm considerably less likely to go back a few pages to check something out than if I was reading a paper book.
OTOH, what I do absolutely struggle with is watching video content. I think it's largely to do with the fact that I consume most of my video content on my laptop, so the lure of another browser tab (with, say, Hacker News or Reddit) is always there. I'll start watching a ~30 minute episode of "The IT Crowd" and it'll take me 90 minutes to watch it because I'm obsessively hitting "pause" every couple of minutes to check my email, check HN, etc. :-(
> English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts.
Nothing new here, surely? I'd hazard a guess a huge majority of people, throughout eternity, will never read 19th and 20th century literature, myself included. Unless we come up with some way of uploading books directly to our conscious awareness or whatever.
Project Gutenberg was founded in 1971, and as of June 23rd 2018 contains over 57,000 books. If we ignore for a minute all of the online book stores where one can go to buy books, and how well some of those stores are doing, then Project Gutenberg alone has probably done more for reading than we may have lost due to swipe-and-skim reading. How many of us have bought and pirated more eBooks than we've read paper books.
I work with tradesmen. I've asked so many of them "read any good books lately?" and they typically reply with something like "books? fuck off, I'm not gay". Seriously. But even the majority of these people, especially those under about 35 years old, are, in their spare time, reading constantly. Okay, so they're skim reading non-sense on Pinstabookwittertube, or whatever the kids are into this five-minute-period. I can't keep up, must be getting old, get off my lawn, etc. etc. I'd say that's still a huge improvement over the nothing similar cohorts were reading a decade a go. I'm still convinced some of the older guys can barely read well enough to get through their every day lives.
And, generally speaking, I'm skeptical of most 'The Sky Is Falling: Younger People Are Worse at X (And Y and Z and A and B ...' positions, for all the obvious reasons.
“Young people are so pampered nowadays that they have forgotten that there was such a thing as Rhetoric"
Aristotle, 4th Century BC
I think we take for granted the ability to skim an article in our native language. When we skim, our brain is probably taking advantage of so many fast "pattern recognizers" and models to make sense of the whole, sampled in parts.
Perhaps skimming effectively like "being able to go to a comedy show in that language and actually laugh" is a true test of language proficiency.
My Spanish teacher who is pretty competent with English agrees that skimming is something that she cannot just do either.
A lot might also be about writing style: English has developed a very anecdote/story- heavy style. Try to find an article by an author with English as mother tongue - they breast universally use this approach. E.g. article about tax law starts with one story, article about politics goes in depth on some specific scene or encounter, etc etc. There is often much mention of 'unimportant' detail that fill the mental picture, and English language media often repeat and stretch out information (rather than strive for information density). In comparison of DE-EN-FR I even find this in more in-depth documents like textbooks, not universally but much more than in the other languages.
Of course fluency plays a major role. But i can skim a french-language fluff piece or story or recounting of an event, even if that's not exactly a strong language for me. At the same time I can't skim an in-depth description of this or that political conflict or technical report in EN or DE if I want to understand the course of events or details. So it's at least to some degree (at least for me) a matter of the writing style - stories read easily, and non- English media is much less story-heavy. For an English native you might be able to compare yourself skimming an Economist article or something academic vs e.g. guardian or independent and see if it feels different.
In a twist, I find it sometimes harder to read a FR language fluff piece closely/carefully - they tend to use words that are more slang/informal and which i won't know as well how to interpret them in the context. But getting the gist of easy. This might be particular to foreign language reading though.
I tend to read only what I need to move forward either in thought or on a project.
I learn faster this way. And I can do this now because of the power of search.
On the other hand, I skimmed books back in the 90's, before I surfed the web daily. (There was much less "new" high quality information online then.)
I would check out 5 books at a time from the library, and read the best one, and skim the rest.
I also studied for my AP History test in exactly one day by skimming, and got a great score. IIRC, I read the first and last sentence of every chapter in a 200 page book in one night. It's not a bad way to read if you're looking for the high level structure of stories and arguments.
Many authors are in love with their own prose, and it is too long.
My blog looks dense but I've gotten good feedback on it, mostly because I use skimmable headings, and delete words from sentences, so it's short and dense:
http://www.oilshell.org/blog/