Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
In other contexts, I think there have been a few slightly negative psychological side effects, such as struggling to watch full TV shows without fast forwarding through the "boring" bits, or choosing to watch other people playing computer games on YouTube rather than playing them myself because I get bored too easily. But in general I seem to thrive on having an impatient, jumpy brain.. for now!
How do you check, how good you are? Do you have other persons reading the texts carefully and compare to your summaries?
Are you reading literature ? Any changes in your reading pattern ?
Could you please elaborate a little bit on this? I'm intrigued - I assumed that actively playing a game would be less boring than passively watching someone else play. I'm not a gamer though so I really have no idea.
Of course, it could just be that I'm getting old, the dopamine hits from gaming aren't there as much anymore and that I'd rather watch skilled people at work ;-)
Source: I watch LPs constantly while working, it's good background noise and gives me an easy outlet to divert my attention.
Where's the evidence that we've developed "traditional deep reading circuitry" over several millennia? That's presented in the article without any justification.
It seems to me unlikely that this is anything other than an individual behavioral difference.
But on great works which an author has spent years thinking about before even committing it to writing; or have gone through several revisions of it, I will devote my time to slow-reading and understanding.
Well, they are. Their field is how humanity understands itself, and what traditions (historical, literary, etc) and values we have.
The results of the "real" scientists are useless when not valued and judged under a humanist interpretation.
E.g, scientific measurable fact: "We're reading less".
OK, so what? Is that good or bad -- not with regards to mere "evolution" (which might not even be applicable to such timespans and matters), but concerning the kind of society we want to build?
That's where the humanities professors come into to play (as does "the man on the street" -- we're all men on the street, after all).
They bring up some startling 'scientific facts', that the internet may be permanently changing our brains and destroying reading ability. There's some confused explanations of evolution (or lack thereof) thrown in. Can we all try to understand this first before we zip to a pleasant concluding paragraph from a mother raising kids?
I built an extension / bookmarklet that allows you to scroll websites in a different way and goes a long way to solving this problem on desktop browsers. I hope no one minds me reposting it, it was very popular on hn a while ago.
Here are a few suggestions for the demo page: Several pages of sample text would make the idea easier to evaluate. The demo would benefit from some simple instructions (show/hide instructions). I stumbled upon the functionality accidentally by using the mouse scroll wheel out of habit. It took a while before I noticed the play buttons in the bottom right. The speed adjuster is tedious to adjust. I was out of sample text before I got it adjusted to a comfortable speed. The arrows on the sides of the page don't seem to fit with the idea. I am not sure what they are for besides going back. Maybe a clickable left to right progress bar would be better. Another idea would be a vertical thumbnail of the whole document highlighting my current position.
There is actually another reason against scrolling, which is judder. Check for example the judder section on http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-virtual-isnt-real-...
I don't know what the solution might be, but this is not it.
I'm not sure if white or black gradient would be better though.
If you want to experiment the source code is at https://github.com/rdwallis/MagicScrollWebReader
The line is an impossible challenge to design because the break between pages should be very obvious but also not distracting to the reader.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/serious-reading-takes-a-...
Edit: Interesting - a down-vote.
It's easy to skip the important bits when they compose just 5% of the whole product.
These days, I want non-fiction articles to get to the damned point. I'm fine with long articles, but I don't want my time wasted. Not long ago I began reading popular coverage of an exciting scientific finding. The article began with something like this: "John grew up in a small Ohio town. His father was a clerk at a hardware store and his mother worked for an optometrist." Close tab. That might have been fine pre-internet, but it's not what I want now. Things have changed, but writers and editors are still operating in the old model. I don't mind humor, style, interesting biographical bits, et al, but I want them to occur in reasonably sized chunks inline with the actual subject matter. But mostly I want the information that was promised in the headline.
For fiction... I still buy books and read them on kindle. I buy and read more new books now than I used to.
I don't think I'm all that unusual among people who habitually read.
As a programmer, I have been reading online my whole adult life, and probably spend online much more than the average (but "civilians" seem to be catching up, fast). I do not feel I am particularly affected by this effects, but I (and I suspect you as well) have do deal on a daily basis with complex, artificial, information dense constructions all the time. Contrast that with the mindless stream of tweets, likes and lolcats that fall on the typical user every day.
Also, I as well as you read fiction but online and in paper. It's hard to measure but I'd say at least a million words per year. This quantity is not typical at all. On the other hand, even amateur fanfiction is authored with an audience in mind and goes to at least an order of magnitude more composition and editing than whatever piece of crap we send/recv over the privacy of out SMS on a daily basis. So yes, I think you are pretty well protected from the debilitating symptoms of these new disease (if you allow me to call it that way).
Also, the fact that Kindle 'pages' for a text file are not fixed is a bit of a problem. For instance, with a real book if it refers to a previous event and I wish to read it again (sometimes climaxes can be great to read again) I can usually remember a page range and a location on the page (top left, right side) that lead to me being able to identify it in seconds, but I've often gone backwards in a Project Gutenberg eBook to find that the location of the words has changed! A very disconcerting effect.
2. E-books don't have a concept of "pages." They're essentially responsive html documents, and should be full of links (both internal and external).
Scanning or skimming can only be optimal with carefully structured texts where you know what to expect, e.g. textbooks where the beginning and end of chapters contain synopses.
In the bad old days, you had fewer alternatives and higher switching costs, so you just read what was in front I you. With the internet, the next best alternative is so available and so good that you might as well spend some time browsing and quickly discarding the fluff so you can find the really good stuff.
That being said, I am a little worried that people (at least myself) aren't getting as "deep" into topics as they might have used to. I try to solve this by (very carefully!) picking books that I can slowly digest, over multiple readings. If nothing else, just reading them at the inspectional and superficial levels can help me decide whether I need to go back for more.
[1] - See "How to Read a Book"