I've read over 500 fiction books and 2000+ non-fiction. I've read many of the big thick classics like Moby Dick, War & Peace, Infinite Jest. I've kept a spreadsheet of all the books I've read somewhat like Art Garfunkel[1] (of Simon & Garfunkel music duo).
I've also read Nick Carr's "The Shallows"[2] and other authors about about the web's effect on attention span, distractions, etc.
With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana.
I also enjoy getting lost in Wikipedia articles and jumping around hyperlinks without fully finishing the wiki article I was reading. (Wiki articles are not ever "finished" anyway so there's no guilt trip in leaving the page to head down another rabbit hole.)
15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? I think so. I don't hold my traditional reading method for C++ to be superior; it's simply what I did before the internet was available in 1995. I certainly did not learn Golang by reading a book cover-to-cover.
Books certainly have benefits but I think they are overstated in relation to non-book forms of consuming words.
> 15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos?
Not saying it's better or worse, but I'm willing to say that the understanding you'll get from blogs is going to be be different than from a long-form book.
Books get the benefit of knowing where they left off one chapter, and picking it up on the next. Unless you're reading a long series of posts on the same blog (which, in the limit, approaches reading a book), reading blog posts will lack that continuity, and I find them inferior for building up a basic understanding of a topic. What blogs do really well, IMO, is for teaching you well-isolated techniques, or other such limited-scope ideas.
Your experience with C++ And Golang are in no way, shape or form comparable. If you've been doing C++ for 15 years, Golang is a comparatively small learning curve. You just need to pick up on a few syntactic differences and you'll be at that basic level of competence that books will give you, and you're ready for the single-topic, specialized learning that you'll get from blogs.
>Appendix: Listing every word used in the book in alphabetical order and on which pages each was mentioned.
That's the Index. The Appendix is where they list FTP and web sites that are long defunct, sample code for interfacing with a discontinued piece of hardware, and of course an ASCII table.
In general, once you know a few different languages and want to learn a new one, read the language spec or a good book on the language.
Good blog posts are an option, too, but those are hard to discriminate from bad ones, and run a greater risk of being incomplete (hm: here's and idea for a new product: a service that ranks blogs for accuracy, completeness and timeliness (K&R C is accurate and complete, but if you want to learn C now, it shouldn't be the only thing you read, and possibly not even a thing you read))
I'm with you 100% on this. To me blog posts and internet articles are really good for getting insight into a particular issue you're currently having, or a to be exposed to a bit of interesting trivia. I find books to be far superior if you want to maximize your knowledge ingestion for a given set of time.
I once tried to give somebody my C# 4.0 In a Nutshell book when I upgrade to the 5.0 book. "Why do I need that, I can just look at MSDN?". Hrmm.
MSDN has all of it, everything that should be documented. It is easy to get lost, not knowing what and how much should be taken first. The value of a book in such case is to have its author as your guide (as in a tutorial, if you will, but a little bit more than that).
"15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos?"
That's a real problem. You can't write and sell a book for a fast-changing language. (Go may have stabilized enough for a printed book. A useful Rust book is impossible right now.) A writer and publisher can't invest the time and effort to produce a book that will be obsolete when it ships.
This is why it would be neat to have the book in an online format that can be updated from time to time. Something more than a blog, manual or wikipedia. That's in case one wants a book NOW and wouldn't want to wait until the language stabilizes.
Whenever I real long-form books, my mind will occasionally wander into other areas, while my eyes keep reading on. I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read. This isn't just an internet-fueled lack of attention, it's how I've always read, and how I image most people read most of the time.
The difference is with a website, you can go investigate your immediate thoughts rather than committing to the re-read. It is lazier, maybe. It's probably not great if you want to learn something in depth and stay focused on it for long periods of time.
Wouldn't say it's about being 'normal' or a 'freak.'
If you haven't cultivated the habit of reading, it's not effortless (like most things). When things aren't effortless (or close thereto), its easy for an undisciplined mind to wander.
If it's something that you value, you will do it enough that it becomes effortless. Perhaps the author missed that point?
Though your point about cultivating the discipline is applicable, not all brains process data the same way, and its possible the posters habit is a factor of biology not effort.
"I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read."
This is me.
"and how I image most people read most of the time."
I wish I knew if this were true. I've always felt that I have some sort of "disorder" or some form of ADHD or something that causes my mind to wander anytime I try to read a book. I'm a terribly slow reader for this reason (at least when it comes to books -- internet articles, for some reason, don't seem to have this same effect on me), and as a result, I've not read too many books at all. I mostly get my information in smaller bursts.
Come to think of it, whenever I see what I consider super long articles posted on HN, and a ton of discussion about how great the article was, I feel terribly inadequate that I can't read said article in less than an hour (or more). Short articles I'm fine with, it's the longer ones -- and books -- that I struggle with.
And it's certainly not the result of any "conditioning" from reading short internet articles all the time -- I've been like this since long before the era of blogs and HN.
Would love it if someone could shed some light on this.
Not for me, when I read I get lost in the book and it gets dark outside, the cats come and sleep on me, the street lights go on and I look up at 10pm and I've read half a novel.
It's a sense of peace I get from few other things in life.
Funny you should say that I watched terminator the other day in prep for the new one, forgotten how slow relatively action films used to be, I kinda miss that sometimes.
As I've gotten older and have less free time and there's so much more content out there, one practice I've come to accept is reading the wikipedia page and plot synopsis for a book/movie before starting watching something. In the same way I read HN comments before deciding whether to read the original article often times. Before wikipedia I would read the last chapters of books first.
I'm more worried about my time being spoiled than the plot being spoiled, and after all a good movie/book is even better the 2nd time around. This has allowed me to commit to watching or reading things I never would have before as I'd get bored (read: worried this is a waste of my time) 10 minutes into a slow moving movie.
But how does just reading the synopsis indicate if something is any good? Wouldn't you be better just looking at the IMDB score? Or are you looking out to avoid things with 'dumb' endings?
There's something awesome about the way you really get "into the universe" when you spend hours reading a book or binge watching a tv show. All of the events and characters are fresh in your brain and you see the connections you may have missed if there was a night's sleep and a day's work in between.
> > "and how I image most people read most of the time."
> I wish I knew if this were true.
I think it really depends on the book (or part of the book) you are reading. Often the start of a book will be designed to grab your attention, but its possible to lose interest part way through the book, or have to concentrate harder to finish chapters.
Its common - my high school English teacher told us about it way back many years ago.
The traditional three act structure means books and movies often start with plenty of action, pause the pace in the middle, where characters mostly talk or walk or think or remember rather than doing action stuff, and build up to a big climax with faster pacing at the end.
It's a very popular structure. But now that everyone seems to have ADHD, it's being replaced by episodic structures which end each chapter with a cliff hanger.
Episodic structure isn't new, but quite a few savvy writers have discovered it's a better fit for ebook publishing than traditional long form.
You have summarized most of my experiences and observations of my reading habits.
I have tried reading long novels and I have rarely been able to read them efficiently with concentration the whole way, at first I would well up with a lot of self hatred when my friends could read the same books in lesser amounts of time, remembering a lot of interesting details and hold very insightful discussions about it later. I blamed myself for not having better concentration, for feigning interest in books and hundred other accusation that were only partly true.
But, I persevered and found that I could read short texts, remember them pretty well, think about them for some days and largely absorb the idea. I changed my reading habits. I started reading short stories, essays, academic papers and smaller technical books, but providing a lot of to time to reflect upon the material just read.
I stopped focusing on the book count and purely on maximizing the amount of impact produced by reading something.
I think there are two reasons I read. 1, i need to know something. This may be a pressing work concern, or just a genuine interest in something. A few weeks ago i read 40 pages on cocktail ice. 2, the author is really compelling. I've read quite a few novels that are just hard to put down.
I'd bet, you have no trouble with those cases. You may rifle through tech documentation till you read the paragraph or 10 that are relevant to your problem, but that part you can just breeze through. Because it matters I'd also bet there are a few books or stories you have no trouble with because the author has really drawn you in, and you care about what's happening, and it matters. If not, take a look at hemmingway or maybe chuck palahniuk. they both put a lot of effort into making short powerful stories. Survivor or invisible monsters might be worth a read.
Other stuff, well, my tolerance really depends on my level of curiosity. If i'm feeling particularly curious, i can read some pretty boring stuff, but not for a long time. Sometimes deep insights are hidden in boring words.
Anyway, you're not weird. People have different defaults. Most stuff i kind of grind through, and don't really soak up the full meaning. On the other hand, most writing is pretty bad, and isn't really worth that much effort. The vast majority of stuff is just rehashed restated rewritten copies of copies that contain enough essence of the original to give you a hint of that dopamine rush.
This sometimes happens to me if I am not in the mood, need to be doing something else, or if the book is badly written. Some text books need to be read with concentration.
But if something is good, it is more like a trance - I'll 'come to' hours later and need to be prodded with a stick if you want to interrupt me.
"Whenever I real long-form books, my mind will occasionally wander into other areas, while my eyes keep reading on. I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read."
When that happens to me while reading a book often enough I decide the text is not for me and move to another book.
"The difference is with a website, you can go investigate your immediate thoughts rather than committing to the re-read. "
Funny, I would describe my most engaging readings of a book precisely by this sort of associative experience (unless it's fiction... which I don't actually read that much anymore).
That definitely sounds like a very mild but treatable form of language disorder to me. It might be too mild to be of interest to language disorder clinicians, but maybe you could try 'treat' yourself by setting up a long-term plan of progressively 'harder'/longer reading materials. Check out for instance Pearson's Developmental English series [1]. Might seem arduous and pointless; but if it increases your ability to read long-form comfortably, it could make an enormous difference to your life.
What I'm saying is that my eyes simply scan the words while I think of other things. There's no comprehension there, I'm just losing my place in the text.
"I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read. "
This happens to me sometimes, but its rare and usually means I'm tired or not interested in the subject matter. If I'm interested I'm glued to the page and won't break concentration for hours.
Over the years, I've found myself naturally reading fewer and fewer technology-specific books but more and more books on concepts and fundamentals. I find that the internet has the most up-to-date and well-organized information about specific technologies, but that the "classics" do a much better job of motivating and explaining deeper material than typical internet resources.
Thanks for the trivia about Art Garfunkel! I do much the same thing on Goodreads, but I started fairly recently, so I'm sure I'm missing a few.
People used to read 500 page books on compilers. Would you read an equivalently long blog article on compilers?
With the Internet we've gained the ability to more readily acquire knowledge in little bits at a time, over a lot of areas. But most of us are incapable of reading a really huge article in depth. And thus we get more shallow levels of understanding, but across a wider range of topics. This explains a lot of arguments on the internet.
> But most of us are incapable of reading a really huge article in depth
It's not a "capability", it's a skill. The problem is it's becoming less and less important in everyday life for most people, which in turn makes them abandon its training. As with most skills, without training you become worse at it with time.
I'm not sure if that's good or bad thing that you can now learn without having mastered this skill. Is the understanding you gain via lots of small chunks of knowledge worse than the one you get from reading The Dragon Book? I don't know; looks like a good topic for research in cognitive science.
Personally I do like reading long and involved texts, but I too learned to enjoy it before the Internet became popular. I don't know if I'd be equally interested in such texts had I started just a few years later.
When I was an introverted teenager I read 500 books in one summer. My mom tracked them all in a notebook because she wanted to know just what exactly I was reading.
To this day I have zero difficulty finishing a book. My problem has always been stopping. I'm practically clinically unable to disengage from a book once I've started. Enough so that I have to meter my reading to prevent myself from disappearing for months on end. Not even the internet has made a dent in that. In some ways I wish I were a little more like the author. It would be nice to not feel a little worried when I start a book that I'll go so deep I'll miss something in the world around me.
Well, no, I don't have MUCH else as a point. If you're reading that fast you probably not going to read as well. Obviously we're not going for perfect retention here but still. That's a ridiculous amount of text to go through in such a short span of time. I feel like at that point it starts being less about reading and more about adding numbers to a list. But I digress.
No, I was a huge bookworm as a kid and I read almost as much as that in the summers. It wasn't about racking up points, just pleasure reading. When you are reading for fun and not for learning, you can go for a lot longer without getting tired and skip all the boring parts. It's not that much different than burning through an entire season of your favorite TV show, or through an entire single-player game, in a weekend.
You're assuming zaphar reads/comprehends the same way you do. I can't read that fast period, and if i'm reading fast don't comprehend as much, but I have first hand experience with how good zaphar's comprehension is when he is reading very fast. It has some to do with how deeply he concentrates by nature, something he was born with that I wasn't.
The sizes varied but most of them were fiction. One day I read seven in an evening. It's not that special. It was the result of a highly insular life spent not doing much other than read.
I dunno, I think 4 books per day is do-able if the books are shorter and are an easy read. When I was about 13 I read Red Storm Rising from cover to cover in a day. I checked Amazon just now and it's 830 pages in paperback form.
Years later I spent hours getting through the first few chapters of Godel, Escher, Bach. It was such slow going, and required so much thought, that I ultimately gave up.
It is quite possible to read 500 books over 100 days as a secluded teenager if one is reading mostly 200-300 page books and most of the books do not require perfect attention to detail.
A proficient reader can easily read 2 pages a minute, so lets say 1200 pages/2=600 minutes, so 10 hours a day. Seems quite doable for a bored teenager without a computer/tablet/phone/outside activity.
I don't think I ever did more than 3 books a day, but still possible to do what OP said.
I think many/most of us has have read a page turner in one late night session.
Well, I guess you are right. I doubt the speed would be consistent over 10 hours but I can easily imagine a bored teenager could sleep 7-8 hours and read most of the rest of the time. So the number drops from maybe about 500 words per minute to something less than that. And that still allows some great comprehension.
Yep, I had a similar problem and had to deliberately not read more fiction because I had to study engineering and stuff. Now, with the busyness of life, its a lot easier though. Like you said, the introversion may have made it more attractive to just escape into the excitement of a fiction book.
>With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana.
This "unquantifiable intellectual nirvana" was used to be called "civilization".
When I was a teenager, I had time to read constantly. Now that I'm an adult, with a job that demands long hours, a wife and kid, and responsibilities, my entire day is blocked out hour-by-hour in the calendar. I simply have no time to pour through a 1,000 word article let alone a 500 page book. I don't even watch movies anymore. It's quicker to just head to Wikipedia and get the gist of it. Quite honestly with 90% of media out there today, the 2 sentence summary is enough.
I cannot count what I have read. Growing up (6-12) I had no access to digital tech, apart from a BBC micro, no television, no comics, no games other than chess. The only available recreational activities were reading or spending time outdoors.
I did both in droves, often simultaneously, and it was bad enough that I'd often be caught reading a book under my desk in class. Mind, the school library only comprised "literature" - no kids books, Harry Potter was a gleam in jk's eye, it was Tolstoy, Homer, Proust, Euripides, Dickens, whatever a nine year old is supposed to read.
Come to think of it, reading in class was only punishable by the book being confiscated until the end of class. I remember in my miserable year of middle school in the U.S. being caught reading, and they not only confiscated the book but suspended me. It was a serious infraction in their eyes, as you were only allowed to read pre-approved books on school grounds.
Perhaps people don't read because educational systems for the most part actively discourage it. Initiatives which focus on getting kids to read more tend to be about appearances and metrics, not kids reading. They also tend to turn reading into this exotic, "other", task/chore in the minds of most due to shit like "you must read 500 words tonight" - I remember in 7th grade kids bursting into tears in response to that sort of thing, so well had their aversion therapy taken root.
Me, I'd ban kids from all except the most primitive digital technology until their teens, as well as all other sources of manufactured "fun". Reading is fun, but we have forgotten this. Now it has to be loud and sparkling and expensive, or it's just not fun for our crack-addled minds.
I remember along with one or two others being allowed to read on my own as we where so much faster/better at reading than our peers. I had a raeding age of 20 at 10
Thease days we would be forced into the Ofstead approved learning outcomes - or alternatively gotten rid of to game the schools figures
Yeah. Spending a year in the US education system was an eye-opener. Sciath (Science/Math) and Soclish (Social Studies & English) were the two topics. "Elite" school, 7th grade. Mindbleached kids, conformity was king, everything, everything resulted in hysterical breathlessness. Couldn't get out of there soon enough.
They really didn't know what to do with an 11 year old who would sit there reading Aristotle in ancient greek under the desk - apart from suspend me, repeatedly, and breathing a big sigh of relief when I told them to stick it and went back to school in the UK - they admitted that they would have expelled me had I not left... which reflects the American approach to problem solving - if you can't figure it out, pretend it doesn't exist.
> With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana.
Isn't the point is that the author of the article actually does enjoy reading books. And feels it's helpful for him personally? And that despite that he'd not managed to read in a satisfying manner for years; because he'd let him get to "addicted" to short term distractions?
I feel with the author; I still manage to read more than five books, but there's weeks were that's not the case. To a large degree because I let myself get distracted in a similar way. Without it being beneficial to myself or others.
This is a terrible article of the variety "I do something therefore everybody does something": typical mind fallacy on crack, nary an actual numerical statistic to be seen.
I mean, I could play anecdote wars (I read ridiculous numbers of books now I have FBReader on my phone) but that would be feeding the foolishness.
The author also seems to assume that everyone reads like he does, pausing to think about each word, "walking through another's thoughts." This is something I've given a bit of thought to recently, interestingly triggered by an episode of King of the Hill. I don't read in this manner and never really have.
I read fiction for the story. I want to know what happens next. I don't linger on a sentence trying to decipher the subtext. It was a great struggle for me to learn to read in that manner for English courses, and I never really enjoyed it.
Meanwhile today there are great TV shows with interesting things to say. The Wire, The Sopranos, and Black Mirror all have gotten me thinking, trying to see from another perspective much more easily than any book ever has.
I believe that our brains don't all work the same way. What the author gets out of reading, I get out of TV and movies and cannot get naturally out of books.
That is my take as well. Vague allusions to current research but no hard cites. Seems like recycled trope of "modern life is too busy and our brains are rotting".
I read a great excerpt from something published in the 1800s complaining about the same thing... I'll have to dig it up.
This is a difficult problem a lot of us face. I personally have a habit of glancing through hundreds of articles that pop in my RSS reader everyday. Often after reading a handful of those articles, some of them providing certain bits and pieces of knowledge, I feel like it would have been better to focus on a single topic and learn more about it. That's where I miss books. Although I have many of them sitting in the shelf right next to me, it has become more difficult for me in the recent years to pick one up and start reading. I think it's time for a change. Thanks OP for sharing this.
One of the great tests for me personally is can I even remember the last 10 headlines or articles I read? The dopamine hit is in the discovery, not necessarily the comprehension.
Online articles are like junk food - it's more appealing but has little substance. If you can get used to reading real books again then the online stuff is a lot less appealing.
For some time I thought I definitely had a shorter attention span due to the internet - I'd be reading something, and compulsively have to go check my email, facebook, forums I visit, hacker news, my frequented subreddits. Read a bit more. Check everything. Repeat.
But I didn't find it all that hard to just close my laptop and put my phone facedown more than an arm's length away. I thought it would be a titanic struggle - but as soon as I made it slightly inconvenient to distract myself, I found myself once again able to read through hundreds of pages of books.
It's anecdotal, of course. But for me, being able to "read" again was as simple of giving myself the slightest barrier to getting distracted.
Reading takes all of your attention, all of it. I can't have a conversation while reading a book, I can't watch a movie while reading a book, you have to be ready to give everything to that book for whatever period of time you want to read it for.
I am watching Chopped, skimming articles like this one, I just stepped up mid-typing that last bit to help my wife with something and finally I'm programming. I was interrupted again after finishing that sentence.
These days, the currency is attention. The amount of attention required for reading of any substance is very high, and with thousands of apps, sites, shows, brands, and everything else pulling at us in a way that's engineered to be ideally visceral and tailored to our animal impulses, the lack of attention left over is no surprise.
Since January I read +-25 books. It's not necessarily a good thing. Every book, no matter how short, is a commitment. It requires time and effort you could spend in other, more productive things. As a matter of fact, reading is how I procrastinate.
The road to mediocrity is paved with good books: I've been reading quite a lot on entrepreneurship... let's say 300 hours worth of reading. I could have spent that time by testing ideas and hustling, but I lacked confidence. It was always "1 more book... and then I'll start doing it".
I am an avid reader. I am part of readers clubs and meetings. I don't see less people today there than 10 years ago, in fact I see way more(probably something to do with the economic crisis).
The world does not end because we can read online and distract ourselves. A person does not need this for distraction, in fact just a fly making noises around you or thinking on your partner-son-mother while looking at the wall is enough.
The same was said about TV decades ago, and radio before it, even about books when it became cheap centuries ago. The Quijote is a book about someone that reads instead of living and wants to live at the end of his life. At the time cheap books were a novelty because of the printing press, remember that before it it took a year to copy a single book.
I'm in your camp. I almost see "hand wringing about attention" as a meme, a common blogger's trope to stir up concern similar to a trashy evening news broadcast about "the new way teens are getting high."
Everyone who I knew liked to read while growing up still likes to read. Some people don't, and thats fine too. What annoys me is people who don't like to read, but feel like they should, and therefore go looking for a scapegoat. And something tells me that some people have struggled to read and felt inadequate about that throughout history.
I read a lot. I just happen to do most of my reading online.
I don't follow the notion that what we read online by default has less value than what is available to us in books. I have learned a lot from what I've read online, whether it's long form articles, Wikipedia articles, piecemeal submissions that make up online forum/community sites or even IRC logs.
The mere fact that something is available in book form is not a guarantee of it's accuracy nor a guarantee of the author's credibility.
I don't think the author is arguing that that books are more accurate or more credible than other forms of writing. What the author is arguing is that books provide a different sort of experience than those other forms of writing.
Or more particularly how the online stuff can surpass the dead tree stuff. I have no desire to go to a bookstore and read "acclaimed authors" works, because once you dig enough you find the sites and the communities of authors that are constantly producing fantastic longform fiction for any genre out of passion. I am also finding (and now backing) a lot of them on things like patreon too.
Its a new medium. Its awkward to talk to some clients I have who do read the old way - because they will never hear of the authors I read, because I read hundreds of "amateur" authors who produce millions of words a year. And of course, online literature is 95% swill and 5% silver lining. It means you do get hit with a lot of underwhelming crap. But you still have the same thing predominantly happen in normal bookstores - maybe the ratio is better, but you still have to find your authors and interests all the same. And something about clicking through pages of writing online seems to beat pouring over isles of heavy tomes seeking satisfaction.
I'm honestly a little surprised at some of the comments here. I thought most people on here would agree that many of us do suffer from this. I mean, how many of you actually read through the entire article, WITHOUT checking your email, or flipping to twitter/fb to tell the world about this good article you just found? I had to really force myself to read the entire article first, and not give in to that urge to get a hit of dopamine. But of course, YMMV.
I think the ability to concentrate and focus on a single task is going to become more and more useful, because it is so easy to give in to that temptation to flip away, just for a quick moment. I've been working on practicing mindfulness through meditation, and have thought of reading a book as a form of meditation (nice to see the author allude to that a little).
So your TL;DR: good article, read more books, re-learn how to focus on single tasking.
> how many of you actually read through the entire article, WITHOUT checking your email, or flipping to twitter/fb to tell the world about this good article you just found?
Err, I don't know, but I was very surprised by reading all the comments (and original blogpost) implying you can't handle reading a 3000ish signs post without any interruption.
Of course, I see that we are "jumping" frequently, like every ten minutes or so, to find "brain fresh-air"; but if you have that much trouble to focus on a so simple thing like reading a simple article, maybe there is something more serious that you have to check without waiting.
(…honestly, I don't know how you can work in any environment with such an extreme rythm of "brain jumping".)
After just reading a book cover to cover yesterday, I'm not really impressed by the article, I read a bit and then all these large bold and italic things started popping out of the text haphazardly in the middle of my flow.
From there i skimmed a bit and stopped realising it was a boring article, if not a little bit whiny.
In other words I can't really blame him for jumping to twitter midway through the author obviously wanted to break the text up in such a way it was easy or encouraged to do so.
> I had to really force myself to read the entire article first, and not give in to that urge to get a hit of dopamine.
It's actually reverse for many of us who like to read. If i read an interesting article, i just cannot get over it. The stimulation from this is so strong, that its difficult to concentrate on anything else. Mostly after the first read, i will think for a while on it and then re-read it again. More slowly this time. I keep the tab open and will come back again to re-read.
Sometimes the thought provoked by the articles lingers for days and i have to write it down somewhere where to get over it.
I'm frequently disappointed when I do finish a web-published article to the point where I don't think there's anything wrong with skipping though most of them.
Most of them are poorly written or written in a way to make money.
That is
* clickbait titles when the bulk of the information in the article could be summarized in the title instead
* lack of introduction / thesis / abstract at the beginning summarizing or outlining the actual content
* meandering content with no clear overarching goal
* content padding – lots of words addling little information
So why should I feel bad about not finishing things I think aren't worth finishing?
I agree here. I began to read the article but the format completely deterred me from finishing it. I assume the format was on purpose to prevent it from becoming the very thing that it was saying the people have a hard time reading. But in the end, at least for me, I had a harder time reading the choppy, repetitive wording than a well thought out set of paragraphs.
I have read many books and also started many and never picked them back up. There is no reason to force yourself to read something that does not capture your attention.
To add some followup thoughts, I am often incredibly frustrated when I have to spend 5 minutes reading two thousand words to find information that could have been contained in fifty.
In a similar vein are youtube howto videos which spend 2+ minutes with bad animations, awkward greetings, begging for likes, and rambling irrelevant introductions followed by the actually useful 15 seconds of content.
I have similar problems with university lectures, textbooks, and, professionally, finding any information in documentation. It might be specific to my style of brain wiring; I find low-information-density media to be at times almost debilitatingly frustrating.
"I mean, how many of you actually read through the entire article, WITHOUT checking your email, or flipping to twitter/fb to tell the world about this good article you just found?"
This is precisely the reason I don't actively participate in Twitter or Facebook :)
It probably helped that the men's room at work seems to be some kind of Faraday cage, so whatever is cached in your mobile browser when you lock the cubicle door is your reading for the duration.
>> I mean, how many of you actually read through the entire article, WITHOUT checking your email, or flipping to twitter/fb to tell the world about this good article you just found?
Like you it really took me some effort, I had to force myself to stay engaged, not skip over whole paragraphs and not flip to something else.
I don't have a problem reading when it is properly paginated like a book or ebook. But when i read a online article it becomes something else because it is just a very long scroll of text. Perhaps the one thing the web really need is a pagination API...
I prefer a long scroll of text. Less distraction. Books are paginated arbitrarily, and it's quite a large aspect of the experience to be left up to random chance.
I agree. Having a scrollbar as a percentage completion indicator is a very nice thing. I can also highlight the text on the page where I was at in the likely event I get distracted and have to move on to something else. At this point, I do this out of habit on any article longer than a few paragraphs.
Side note, if your site pops up a stupid SHARE THIS ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER when someone highlights text, I most likely won't read your articles. I didn't read this one because Medium does this; SBNation articles do this, too and my browser now loads custom Javascript on their pages to remove it. It's distracting and serves no real purpose, except to take me out of my flow of reading.
Because the layout on medium.com, which purports to be a "long form" site for people who read, is for short-attention-span people. Scroll through the article linked. It's painful.
This is an amazing article, if you get to the heart of it (though be warned, that requires actually reading it).
One of the amazing insights: new information is a drug. It causes a dopamine rush. The influx of all this new information, alerts, everything tugging at us every day is the new legal high, and we're all addicted, with thousands of external entities profiting off the act, dealing out notifications.
And you know, it's interesting to think about why that is, and how that helps anybody.
Have you ever gone onto a blogpost about procrastination and found the "I'll read this later" comment, and the "I'm here reading this instead of working" comment? Are those comments ever valuable?
It makes sense to downvote them to the bottom, so that people who go looking for them can find them, but the discussion is kept as fresh and relevant as possible.
we are getting meta but I think these type of comments are of a different breed. These do not provide any meaningful (or value) to the conversation nor are related to the subject, on the other hand the "tl;dr" was totally related to the context of the article, and a nice pun intended for the sense of humor.
Also it was how this whole conversation started, although really tangential to the OP; which encouraged a conversation.
HN is not Reddit. Plenty of people make humorous or entertaining comments, but distracting joke threads full of obvious one-liners and no real content aren't generally welcome.
There's actually a really interesting discussion on Quora, I think, about why they had something along the lines of a no-humor policy.
The problem isn't that people are humorless– it's that when you reward people for humor (often resulting in puns and pithy one liners), after a while, people start competing to be as funny as possible– and that's all that ever rises to the top. It crowds out more deliberate, thoughtful discussion.
I love humor and comedy myself, but it makes sense to me why a discussion forum might deliberately choose to discourage it.
It's probably quite a compliment to the author that I did actually read the whole thing -- about 2,500 words in a little under 15 minutes -- without switching away, other than a short pause when an e-mail arrived and a notification message popped up that I had to clear to carry on reading. Normally these days I find much over 1,000 words or 5 minutes on a screen and I'm losing concentration.
I don't even use things like Facebook and Twitter, but I do have a habit of reading the front page of HN/Reddit/whatever and opening a dozen different interesting-looking discussions and their corresponding articles all at once. Perhaps this attempt to be a bit more organised is actually more like the example mentioned in the article, where you're reading something but know you have a new mail waiting and it knocks 10 points off your effective IQ.
The author conflates two things that are only half related. This sentence is a big hint to why he's not reading books:
> "And it’s exhausting. I was usually asleep halfway through sentence number five."
Reading books isn't exhausting, you can read books 16 hours per day. If you fall asleep after reading 5 lines, that means you are dead tired and shouldn't even have opened that book in the first place.
And maybe the reason why you're too weak to keep yourself from checking your information sources every 5 seconds during all the other activities you (or your boss) care about is because you're tired during the day as well.
The author suggests 5 solutions, I think that's a bit extreme. If you just do 3 and 4, you'll get more sleep and everything will probably be better. Coincidentally that advice is what you'll find everywhere for sleep related issues: "No computers 2 hours before sleep".
All my life, within a chapter of text, I'm either falling asleep or lulling at the cusp of it.
Moving my body or locations temporarily wards it off like a snooze button, but the struggle also keeps me from losing myself in a novel. To this day, if you fast-forwarded a video of me reading on my couch, I'd like look a fish flopping out of water to stay awake until the next chapter.
My best solution so far has been to read more in the morning with my coffee before I begin my work, which also happens to be a good time to read in general: it's before the barrage.
I don't get this either, I think if you're finding it really difficult to read a book then maybe you're not reading the right book. A book should suck you in and not let go until you are finished. I love reading, and I just finished The Stand which was a long book at ~1300 pages but I just could barely put it down over the week or so that I was reading it, even with full time programming work, commutes, and caring for a child with my partner.
Shallows is a great book about this and "what the internet does to our brains". This chrome extension is supposed to combat the internet's unquestionable ability to mess with our work focus: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/focusr/fgdcnfgmneb...
Well, I simply find that concentration takes practice. And we simply don't practice it much anymore.
I also think that we have forgotten that the point of email and text messaging was so that we could be asynchronous, rather than interrupt driven like a phone call.
There's a thousand and one problems one could be solving in his/her life. Checking twitter/facebook less often and reading words printed on paper is priority number 356 for me. I don't know why it ranks so high for the author to warrant a blog post.
The real issue is not having your priorities straight that you are worrying about your allocation of time/resources. Surely there's bigger fish to fry in your own life - where's the blog post on that?
I have "better" (to me) things to do. I want to read about boost. I want to study LLVM. I want to write code. I want to set up a Linux server running node.js. I want to compare some NoSQL datastores to an RDBMS or two.
When I want distraction or to rest my brain, I'll take entertainment in short spans. I really don't want to invest weeks of two-hour nights reading a work of fiction. I'm not terribly interested in reading someone's biography. And unless a non-fiction topic is currently meaningful to me (for example, books about the human mind when I was in my early 20s), then I'm not likely to Just Read.
I feel like if I Just Read for reading's sake, I'm not honing the craft that's important to me. I feel like it makes me a "jack of all trades" and therefore "master of none."
I read maybe one book in the last half of 2014. I wasn't proud of this number. Then I took a trip with only a kindle, no hotspots.
I read nine books in two weeks.
I felt so energized and accomplished. I vowed to keep it up when I returned to a world with internet.
I have not.
An Internet fast is an interesting experience. People might drop off the grid for backpacking trips, or trips to monasteries... I think it's legitimate to drop off and take anything you think might be your hobby but for internet. Take books, like I did, or maybe a typewriter. Or a musical instrument. Canvases and paint. A sharp knife and some pieces of wood. Yarn. Give your mind some idle stretches, a few days without constant distraction. See what happens, you'll probably be amazed.
197 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadI've also read Nick Carr's "The Shallows"[2] and other authors about about the web's effect on attention span, distractions, etc.
With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana.
I also enjoy getting lost in Wikipedia articles and jumping around hyperlinks without fully finishing the wiki article I was reading. (Wiki articles are not ever "finished" anyway so there's no guilt trip in leaving the page to head down another rabbit hole.)
15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? I think so. I don't hold my traditional reading method for C++ to be superior; it's simply what I did before the internet was available in 1995. I certainly did not learn Golang by reading a book cover-to-cover.
Books certainly have benefits but I think they are overstated in relation to non-book forms of consuming words.
[1]http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/list1.html
[2]http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp...
Not saying it's better or worse, but I'm willing to say that the understanding you'll get from blogs is going to be be different than from a long-form book.
Books get the benefit of knowing where they left off one chapter, and picking it up on the next. Unless you're reading a long series of posts on the same blog (which, in the limit, approaches reading a book), reading blog posts will lack that continuity, and I find them inferior for building up a basic understanding of a topic. What blogs do really well, IMO, is for teaching you well-isolated techniques, or other such limited-scope ideas.
Your experience with C++ And Golang are in no way, shape or form comparable. If you've been doing C++ for 15 years, Golang is a comparatively small learning curve. You just need to pick up on a few syntactic differences and you'll be at that basic level of competence that books will give you, and you're ready for the single-topic, specialized learning that you'll get from blogs.
Chapter 1: Simple types (um, could have done this in a page)
Chapter 2: Complex types (this too)
Chapter 3: How you can compile from the command line (even though no-one in their sane mind does this in this language)
Chapter 4: Inheritance (oh god, please stop)
Chapter 5: Conditional statements (no, for the love of god stop)
Chapter 6: Loops (right, I'm skipping some chapters)
Chapter 15: Trangonian Complex Pulsar boofs and why you should use them for everything (even though no-one does and never will because they suck)
Chapter 16: How to make a program (this chapter should have been the entire book)
Chapter 17: How to debug (lots of hand waving and no actual details on how to actually debug the program)
Appendix: Listing every word used in the book in alphabetical order and on which pages each was mentioned.
CD: With a 3 year out of date IDE, possibly abandoned, and if you're really lucky some fairly benign malware
That's the Index. The Appendix is where they list FTP and web sites that are long defunct, sample code for interfacing with a discontinued piece of hardware, and of course an ASCII table.
Not this one: http://www.stroustrup.com/3rd_tbl.html Or this one: http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/index.html Or this one: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/toc/toc.html Or this one: http://jonaquino.blogspot.com/2010/04/table-of-contents-for-...
In general, once you know a few different languages and want to learn a new one, read the language spec or a good book on the language.
Good blog posts are an option, too, but those are hard to discriminate from bad ones, and run a greater risk of being incomplete (hm: here's and idea for a new product: a service that ranks blogs for accuracy, completeness and timeliness (K&R C is accurate and complete, but if you want to learn C now, it shouldn't be the only thing you read, and possibly not even a thing you read))
http://learnxinyminutes.com/ - the Java article is 1500 words :) and, I gather, sufficient to get started.
I once tried to give somebody my C# 4.0 In a Nutshell book when I upgrade to the 5.0 book. "Why do I need that, I can just look at MSDN?". Hrmm.
MSDN has all of it, everything that should be documented. It is easy to get lost, not knowing what and how much should be taken first. The value of a book in such case is to have its author as your guide (as in a tutorial, if you will, but a little bit more than that).
That's a real problem. You can't write and sell a book for a fast-changing language. (Go may have stabilized enough for a printed book. A useful Rust book is impossible right now.) A writer and publisher can't invest the time and effort to produce a book that will be obsolete when it ships.
The difference is with a website, you can go investigate your immediate thoughts rather than committing to the re-read. It is lazier, maybe. It's probably not great if you want to learn something in depth and stay focused on it for long periods of time.
If you haven't cultivated the habit of reading, it's not effortless (like most things). When things aren't effortless (or close thereto), its easy for an undisciplined mind to wander.
If it's something that you value, you will do it enough that it becomes effortless. Perhaps the author missed that point?
This is me.
"and how I image most people read most of the time."
I wish I knew if this were true. I've always felt that I have some sort of "disorder" or some form of ADHD or something that causes my mind to wander anytime I try to read a book. I'm a terribly slow reader for this reason (at least when it comes to books -- internet articles, for some reason, don't seem to have this same effect on me), and as a result, I've not read too many books at all. I mostly get my information in smaller bursts.
Come to think of it, whenever I see what I consider super long articles posted on HN, and a ton of discussion about how great the article was, I feel terribly inadequate that I can't read said article in less than an hour (or more). Short articles I'm fine with, it's the longer ones -- and books -- that I struggle with.
And it's certainly not the result of any "conditioning" from reading short internet articles all the time -- I've been like this since long before the era of blogs and HN.
Would love it if someone could shed some light on this.
It's a sense of peace I get from few other things in life.
I'm more worried about my time being spoiled than the plot being spoiled, and after all a good movie/book is even better the 2nd time around. This has allowed me to commit to watching or reading things I never would have before as I'd get bored (read: worried this is a waste of my time) 10 minutes into a slow moving movie.
> I wish I knew if this were true.
I think it really depends on the book (or part of the book) you are reading. Often the start of a book will be designed to grab your attention, but its possible to lose interest part way through the book, or have to concentrate harder to finish chapters.
Its common - my high school English teacher told us about it way back many years ago.
It's a very popular structure. But now that everyone seems to have ADHD, it's being replaced by episodic structures which end each chapter with a cliff hanger.
Episodic structure isn't new, but quite a few savvy writers have discovered it's a better fit for ebook publishing than traditional long form.
I have tried reading long novels and I have rarely been able to read them efficiently with concentration the whole way, at first I would well up with a lot of self hatred when my friends could read the same books in lesser amounts of time, remembering a lot of interesting details and hold very insightful discussions about it later. I blamed myself for not having better concentration, for feigning interest in books and hundred other accusation that were only partly true.
But, I persevered and found that I could read short texts, remember them pretty well, think about them for some days and largely absorb the idea. I changed my reading habits. I started reading short stories, essays, academic papers and smaller technical books, but providing a lot of to time to reflect upon the material just read.
I stopped focusing on the book count and purely on maximizing the amount of impact produced by reading something.
I'd bet, you have no trouble with those cases. You may rifle through tech documentation till you read the paragraph or 10 that are relevant to your problem, but that part you can just breeze through. Because it matters I'd also bet there are a few books or stories you have no trouble with because the author has really drawn you in, and you care about what's happening, and it matters. If not, take a look at hemmingway or maybe chuck palahniuk. they both put a lot of effort into making short powerful stories. Survivor or invisible monsters might be worth a read.
Other stuff, well, my tolerance really depends on my level of curiosity. If i'm feeling particularly curious, i can read some pretty boring stuff, but not for a long time. Sometimes deep insights are hidden in boring words.
Anyway, you're not weird. People have different defaults. Most stuff i kind of grind through, and don't really soak up the full meaning. On the other hand, most writing is pretty bad, and isn't really worth that much effort. The vast majority of stuff is just rehashed restated rewritten copies of copies that contain enough essence of the original to give you a hint of that dopamine rush.
But if something is good, it is more like a trance - I'll 'come to' hours later and need to be prodded with a stick if you want to interrupt me.
When that happens to me while reading a book often enough I decide the text is not for me and move to another book.
"The difference is with a website, you can go investigate your immediate thoughts rather than committing to the re-read. "
Funny, I would describe my most engaging readings of a book precisely by this sort of associative experience (unless it's fiction... which I don't actually read that much anymore).
[1] http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/course/Advanced-Read...
That's a feature, not a bug.
Limit your first reading to basic understanding of the plot and setting; ignore exploration of "deeper" themes until subsequent re-reads.
I'd recommend the book Driven to Distraction, it's pretty informative!
This happens to me sometimes, but its rare and usually means I'm tired or not interested in the subject matter. If I'm interested I'm glued to the page and won't break concentration for hours.
Thanks for the trivia about Art Garfunkel! I do much the same thing on Goodreads, but I started fairly recently, so I'm sure I'm missing a few.
People used to read 500 page books on compilers. Would you read an equivalently long blog article on compilers?
With the Internet we've gained the ability to more readily acquire knowledge in little bits at a time, over a lot of areas. But most of us are incapable of reading a really huge article in depth. And thus we get more shallow levels of understanding, but across a wider range of topics. This explains a lot of arguments on the internet.
It's not a "capability", it's a skill. The problem is it's becoming less and less important in everyday life for most people, which in turn makes them abandon its training. As with most skills, without training you become worse at it with time.
I'm not sure if that's good or bad thing that you can now learn without having mastered this skill. Is the understanding you gain via lots of small chunks of knowledge worse than the one you get from reading The Dragon Book? I don't know; looks like a good topic for research in cognitive science.
Personally I do like reading long and involved texts, but I too learned to enjoy it before the Internet became popular. I don't know if I'd be equally interested in such texts had I started just a few years later.
To this day I have zero difficulty finishing a book. My problem has always been stopping. I'm practically clinically unable to disengage from a book once I've started. Enough so that I have to meter my reading to prevent myself from disappearing for months on end. Not even the internet has made a dent in that. In some ways I wish I were a little more like the author. It would be nice to not feel a little worried when I start a book that I'll go so deep I'll miss something in the world around me.
Years later I spent hours getting through the first few chapters of Godel, Escher, Bach. It was such slow going, and required so much thought, that I ultimately gave up.
A proficient reader can easily read 2 pages a minute, so lets say 1200 pages/2=600 minutes, so 10 hours a day. Seems quite doable for a bored teenager without a computer/tablet/phone/outside activity.
I don't think I ever did more than 3 books a day, but still possible to do what OP said.
I think many/most of us has have read a page turner in one late night session.
This "unquantifiable intellectual nirvana" was used to be called "civilization".
I did both in droves, often simultaneously, and it was bad enough that I'd often be caught reading a book under my desk in class. Mind, the school library only comprised "literature" - no kids books, Harry Potter was a gleam in jk's eye, it was Tolstoy, Homer, Proust, Euripides, Dickens, whatever a nine year old is supposed to read.
Come to think of it, reading in class was only punishable by the book being confiscated until the end of class. I remember in my miserable year of middle school in the U.S. being caught reading, and they not only confiscated the book but suspended me. It was a serious infraction in their eyes, as you were only allowed to read pre-approved books on school grounds.
Perhaps people don't read because educational systems for the most part actively discourage it. Initiatives which focus on getting kids to read more tend to be about appearances and metrics, not kids reading. They also tend to turn reading into this exotic, "other", task/chore in the minds of most due to shit like "you must read 500 words tonight" - I remember in 7th grade kids bursting into tears in response to that sort of thing, so well had their aversion therapy taken root.
Me, I'd ban kids from all except the most primitive digital technology until their teens, as well as all other sources of manufactured "fun". Reading is fun, but we have forgotten this. Now it has to be loud and sparkling and expensive, or it's just not fun for our crack-addled minds.
Thease days we would be forced into the Ofstead approved learning outcomes - or alternatively gotten rid of to game the schools figures
Wow, that is just horrendous.
They really didn't know what to do with an 11 year old who would sit there reading Aristotle in ancient greek under the desk - apart from suspend me, repeatedly, and breathing a big sigh of relief when I told them to stick it and went back to school in the UK - they admitted that they would have expelled me had I not left... which reflects the American approach to problem solving - if you can't figure it out, pretend it doesn't exist.
Isn't the point is that the author of the article actually does enjoy reading books. And feels it's helpful for him personally? And that despite that he'd not managed to read in a satisfying manner for years; because he'd let him get to "addicted" to short term distractions?
I feel with the author; I still manage to read more than five books, but there's weeks were that's not the case. To a large degree because I let myself get distracted in a similar way. Without it being beneficial to myself or others.
I mean, I could play anecdote wars (I read ridiculous numbers of books now I have FBReader on my phone) but that would be feeding the foolishness.
The author also seems to assume that everyone reads like he does, pausing to think about each word, "walking through another's thoughts." This is something I've given a bit of thought to recently, interestingly triggered by an episode of King of the Hill. I don't read in this manner and never really have.
I read fiction for the story. I want to know what happens next. I don't linger on a sentence trying to decipher the subtext. It was a great struggle for me to learn to read in that manner for English courses, and I never really enjoyed it.
Meanwhile today there are great TV shows with interesting things to say. The Wire, The Sopranos, and Black Mirror all have gotten me thinking, trying to see from another perspective much more easily than any book ever has.
I believe that our brains don't all work the same way. What the author gets out of reading, I get out of TV and movies and cannot get naturally out of books.
I read a great excerpt from something published in the 1800s complaining about the same thing... I'll have to dig it up.
There they are... see 1894 and 1895 in particular.
But I didn't find it all that hard to just close my laptop and put my phone facedown more than an arm's length away. I thought it would be a titanic struggle - but as soon as I made it slightly inconvenient to distract myself, I found myself once again able to read through hundreds of pages of books.
It's anecdotal, of course. But for me, being able to "read" again was as simple of giving myself the slightest barrier to getting distracted.
In a blog post, a tweet, or email I can quickly decide if it's worth my time -- does it pique interest, make me feel more connected to the world.
With a book, the investment of time and energy is much greater for an uncertain (but perhaps marvelously more meaningful) payoff.
I am watching Chopped, skimming articles like this one, I just stepped up mid-typing that last bit to help my wife with something and finally I'm programming. I was interrupted again after finishing that sentence.
Reading is a luxury.
These days, the currency is attention. The amount of attention required for reading of any substance is very high, and with thousands of apps, sites, shows, brands, and everything else pulling at us in a way that's engineered to be ideally visceral and tailored to our animal impulses, the lack of attention left over is no surprise.
Since January I read +-25 books. It's not necessarily a good thing. Every book, no matter how short, is a commitment. It requires time and effort you could spend in other, more productive things. As a matter of fact, reading is how I procrastinate.
The road to mediocrity is paved with good books: I've been reading quite a lot on entrepreneurship... let's say 300 hours worth of reading. I could have spent that time by testing ideas and hustling, but I lacked confidence. It was always "1 more book... and then I'll start doing it".
I am an avid reader. I am part of readers clubs and meetings. I don't see less people today there than 10 years ago, in fact I see way more(probably something to do with the economic crisis).
The world does not end because we can read online and distract ourselves. A person does not need this for distraction, in fact just a fly making noises around you or thinking on your partner-son-mother while looking at the wall is enough.
The same was said about TV decades ago, and radio before it, even about books when it became cheap centuries ago. The Quijote is a book about someone that reads instead of living and wants to live at the end of his life. At the time cheap books were a novelty because of the printing press, remember that before it it took a year to copy a single book.
Everyone who I knew liked to read while growing up still likes to read. Some people don't, and thats fine too. What annoys me is people who don't like to read, but feel like they should, and therefore go looking for a scapegoat. And something tells me that some people have struggled to read and felt inadequate about that throughout history.
I don't follow the notion that what we read online by default has less value than what is available to us in books. I have learned a lot from what I've read online, whether it's long form articles, Wikipedia articles, piecemeal submissions that make up online forum/community sites or even IRC logs.
The mere fact that something is available in book form is not a guarantee of it's accuracy nor a guarantee of the author's credibility.
Its a new medium. Its awkward to talk to some clients I have who do read the old way - because they will never hear of the authors I read, because I read hundreds of "amateur" authors who produce millions of words a year. And of course, online literature is 95% swill and 5% silver lining. It means you do get hit with a lot of underwhelming crap. But you still have the same thing predominantly happen in normal bookstores - maybe the ratio is better, but you still have to find your authors and interests all the same. And something about clicking through pages of writing online seems to beat pouring over isles of heavy tomes seeking satisfaction.
I think the ability to concentrate and focus on a single task is going to become more and more useful, because it is so easy to give in to that temptation to flip away, just for a quick moment. I've been working on practicing mindfulness through meditation, and have thought of reading a book as a form of meditation (nice to see the author allude to that a little).
So your TL;DR: good article, read more books, re-learn how to focus on single tasking.
Err, I don't know, but I was very surprised by reading all the comments (and original blogpost) implying you can't handle reading a 3000ish signs post without any interruption.
Of course, I see that we are "jumping" frequently, like every ten minutes or so, to find "brain fresh-air"; but if you have that much trouble to focus on a so simple thing like reading a simple article, maybe there is something more serious that you have to check without waiting.
(…honestly, I don't know how you can work in any environment with such an extreme rythm of "brain jumping".)
From there i skimmed a bit and stopped realising it was a boring article, if not a little bit whiny.
In other words I can't really blame him for jumping to twitter midway through the author obviously wanted to break the text up in such a way it was easy or encouraged to do so.
It's actually reverse for many of us who like to read. If i read an interesting article, i just cannot get over it. The stimulation from this is so strong, that its difficult to concentrate on anything else. Mostly after the first read, i will think for a while on it and then re-read it again. More slowly this time. I keep the tab open and will come back again to re-read. Sometimes the thought provoked by the articles lingers for days and i have to write it down somewhere where to get over it.
Most of them are poorly written or written in a way to make money.
That is
* clickbait titles when the bulk of the information in the article could be summarized in the title instead
* lack of introduction / thesis / abstract at the beginning summarizing or outlining the actual content
* meandering content with no clear overarching goal
* content padding – lots of words addling little information
So why should I feel bad about not finishing things I think aren't worth finishing?
In a similar vein are youtube howto videos which spend 2+ minutes with bad animations, awkward greetings, begging for likes, and rambling irrelevant introductions followed by the actually useful 15 seconds of content.
I have similar problems with university lectures, textbooks, and, professionally, finding any information in documentation. It might be specific to my style of brain wiring; I find low-information-density media to be at times almost debilitatingly frustrating.
This is precisely the reason I don't actively participate in Twitter or Facebook :)
It probably helped that the men's room at work seems to be some kind of Faraday cage, so whatever is cached in your mobile browser when you lock the cubicle door is your reading for the duration.
Like you it really took me some effort, I had to force myself to stay engaged, not skip over whole paragraphs and not flip to something else.
But I got there!
Side note, if your site pops up a stupid SHARE THIS ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER when someone highlights text, I most likely won't read your articles. I didn't read this one because Medium does this; SBNation articles do this, too and my browser now loads custom Javascript on their pages to remove it. It's distracting and serves no real purpose, except to take me out of my flow of reading.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/column-reader...
It allows me to single out the main text of a site, and break it into screen height sized columns. These can then be paged through much like a book.
Seems to make it much easier for me at least to get through a long article without jumping between paragraphs.
One of the amazing insights: new information is a drug. It causes a dopamine rush. The influx of all this new information, alerts, everything tugging at us every day is the new legal high, and we're all addicted, with thousands of external entities profiting off the act, dealing out notifications.
I highly recommend reading it fully!
Have you ever gone onto a blogpost about procrastination and found the "I'll read this later" comment, and the "I'm here reading this instead of working" comment? Are those comments ever valuable?
It makes sense to downvote them to the bottom, so that people who go looking for them can find them, but the discussion is kept as fresh and relevant as possible.
Also it was how this whole conversation started, although really tangential to the OP; which encouraged a conversation.
The problem isn't that people are humorless– it's that when you reward people for humor (often resulting in puns and pithy one liners), after a while, people start competing to be as funny as possible– and that's all that ever rises to the top. It crowds out more deliberate, thoughtful discussion.
I love humor and comedy myself, but it makes sense to me why a discussion forum might deliberately choose to discourage it.
I don't even use things like Facebook and Twitter, but I do have a habit of reading the front page of HN/Reddit/whatever and opening a dozen different interesting-looking discussions and their corresponding articles all at once. Perhaps this attempt to be a bit more organised is actually more like the example mentioned in the article, where you're reading something but know you have a new mail waiting and it knocks 10 points off your effective IQ.
Instead, I check my email or certain websites for substantial updates to my favorite fanfic or web serial.
3K words is heavenly.
10K words even more so.
The more words the better. If you can update faster than I can read, that'll be awesome.
> "And it’s exhausting. I was usually asleep halfway through sentence number five."
Reading books isn't exhausting, you can read books 16 hours per day. If you fall asleep after reading 5 lines, that means you are dead tired and shouldn't even have opened that book in the first place.
And maybe the reason why you're too weak to keep yourself from checking your information sources every 5 seconds during all the other activities you (or your boss) care about is because you're tired during the day as well.
The author suggests 5 solutions, I think that's a bit extreme. If you just do 3 and 4, you'll get more sleep and everything will probably be better. Coincidentally that advice is what you'll find everywhere for sleep related issues: "No computers 2 hours before sleep".
Moving my body or locations temporarily wards it off like a snooze button, but the struggle also keeps me from losing myself in a novel. To this day, if you fast-forwarded a video of me reading on my couch, I'd like look a fish flopping out of water to stay awake until the next chapter.
My best solution so far has been to read more in the morning with my coffee before I begin my work, which also happens to be a good time to read in general: it's before the barrage.
I also think that we have forgotten that the point of email and text messaging was so that we could be asynchronous, rather than interrupt driven like a phone call.
What is he/she really saying?
There's a thousand and one problems one could be solving in his/her life. Checking twitter/facebook less often and reading words printed on paper is priority number 356 for me. I don't know why it ranks so high for the author to warrant a blog post.
The real issue is not having your priorities straight that you are worrying about your allocation of time/resources. Surely there's bigger fish to fry in your own life - where's the blog post on that?
I have "better" (to me) things to do. I want to read about boost. I want to study LLVM. I want to write code. I want to set up a Linux server running node.js. I want to compare some NoSQL datastores to an RDBMS or two.
When I want distraction or to rest my brain, I'll take entertainment in short spans. I really don't want to invest weeks of two-hour nights reading a work of fiction. I'm not terribly interested in reading someone's biography. And unless a non-fiction topic is currently meaningful to me (for example, books about the human mind when I was in my early 20s), then I'm not likely to Just Read.
I feel like if I Just Read for reading's sake, I'm not honing the craft that's important to me. I feel like it makes me a "jack of all trades" and therefore "master of none."
I read nine books in two weeks.
I felt so energized and accomplished. I vowed to keep it up when I returned to a world with internet.
I have not.
An Internet fast is an interesting experience. People might drop off the grid for backpacking trips, or trips to monasteries... I think it's legitimate to drop off and take anything you think might be your hobby but for internet. Take books, like I did, or maybe a typewriter. Or a musical instrument. Canvases and paint. A sharp knife and some pieces of wood. Yarn. Give your mind some idle stretches, a few days without constant distraction. See what happens, you'll probably be amazed.