23 ms·

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction

488 points by wormold 8y ago

KorematsuFred 8y ago
Did a small survey last year on this point and discovered that while technology might sound distracting people are actually spending more time reading/viewing stuff they like more lot more than before. We found that among teens for example very few people read anything from news websites very rarely but almost every single teen had read at least one article in depth on very niche topic that appealed to them. (For example reading about affairs for their favorite pop star). Most teens performed very poorly when they were given 1 hour and asked to prepare a presentation on "any american hero".
- iscrewyou 8y ago
  Do you have a paper or a link to read this study?
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  This article goes into the difference between horizontal and vertical reading.
- duxup 8y ago
  Totally anecdotal story / corner case: I was a terrible reader growing up, I had ADD before the days when they diagnosed that. My son also has ADD and strangely, he is an avid reader. I've caught him reading two books at once (both in his lap) and swapping between them and he was comprehending them (I did some Q&A). At least on the very surface to me that might mean that reading is not necessarily antithetical to someone who is prone to distraction / lack of focus .... or a distraction heavy world. We've seen history full of predictions what the phone, or video games, or computers would do to seemingly related technologies, and not been good at predicting the result.
  - pault 8y ago
    This is called hyperfocusing (AKA the zone) and it's a typical characteristic of people with ADD. I have it pretty bad and I almost flunked out of school because I would spend all day reading enormous serial fantasy novels (wheel of time FTW!).
    - cf498 8y ago
      OT, but is there by any chance a series similar to wheel of time, or that captured you in a similar way, which you would recommend? Havent found anything quite like it, but that might be because of nostalgia and my fond memories of reading it as a teen.
      - pault 8y ago
        When I was a teenager I loved the series that started with sword of shanarra, but going back and reading those novels as an adult mostly makes me cringe. :)
      - ChanderG 8y ago
        If you are looking for sheer scale, can recommend Steven Erikson's Malazan family (around 36 novels set in the same world; starting with the Malazan Book of the Fallen) though the atmosphere is much bleaker. Another recommendation would be Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere multi-series (Mistborn, Stormlight Archive), currently in progress, closer to WoT thematically.
  - skandl 8y ago
    That's impressive! I agree, I think where distraction comes into play is an inhibitor to actually get started reading.
josteink 8y ago
Medium matters. For in-depth, “digital” reading the only thing I have which works for me is my Kindle. It’s distractionfree by design, and that’s why I love it. It’s definitely not just another redundant screen.
- marvindanig 8y ago
  Yeah but Kindle != web. And that is huge bummer for me! I generally prefer reading everything online, or not read at all.
  - checkyoursudo 8y ago
    This is really interesting to me. Do you know why you think (feel?) this way?
    - marvindanig 8y ago
      It is because web is the go-to resource for me, whether it's wikipedia or readings blogs or youtube or netflix——I don't use apps at all. Any hardware that doesn't take me to web is—well it doesn't exist for me.
  - retsibsi 8y ago
    I don't know if this addresses your issue (whether it's about the content, or about e.g. being able to use hyperlinks), but Kobo ereaders come with a version of Pocket preinstalled, so when you see an interesting web page on your computer, you can send it to your ereader with the press of a button. Apparently there's something similar for Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/
    - jmcphers 8y ago
      Instapaper integrates with the Send to Kindle feature and will mail you a "newspaper" with all of the articles you've saved to Instapaper in the last week. It's fantastic.
- 8y ago
cableshaft 8y ago
I joined local book clubs to help combat this. The book clubs help me get motivated to read books. I don't always finish them, and sometimes work or other commitments prevent me from going out and discussing the book, but it does help motivate me to sit down and read a book again (often when I'm in line waiting for things is a good time for me to make progress on the book. I try to do that instead of checking Facebook updates, but I also read before going to bed also). The main problem with this, is they often choose books that I'm not that interested in reading. Sometimes I plow through it anyway and sometimes I just skip that month. That's why I'm in multiple groups, so I can see what each group is reading and pick the one or two books that look the most interesting from those. But sometimes the books I'm really into. Like I got excited when The Devil and the White City was one of them, and one of them is currently reading the Deep Work book, which I'm finding interesting and wanting to incorporate some of its ideas in my own life.
- gerdesj 8y ago
  I joined local book clubs to help combat this. There is no need to be so adversarial! There is absolutely nothing wrong with checking your Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/HN/Register/./G+(lol) feeds. Reading a novel is not mutually exclusive to that, in the same way that your work and home lives are intertwined but still separate (probably). It sounds to me from your comment that you need to break away from your book club and go your own way and do your own thing. They have piqued your interest and pointed out a way but that way is now yours. I have no idea where you are in the world but if you have a local lending library within reach, that might be a good place to consider visiting. I'm from the UK and what little is left of our library system after much cutting of budgets (generally outside Laaaaaandon) is still legendary but sadly being diminished by London/Cardiff/Edinburgh/Belfast focused knob-ends. There is no greater pleasure to be had than from a damn good book and very few books are not damn good. OK, there are one or two other things that are quite fun ...
  - cableshaft 8y ago
    I also read plenty of Facebook/Reddit/HN feeds still, I'm not trying to eliminate them. Combat was kind of a hyperbole I guess. I'm not declaring war against reading articles online. But I have found that for all the interesting articles online, if I reflect back on them after a year, I can remember approximately 0% of what I read, while I can remember at least which books I've read and something interesting about them, so I wonder just how useful reading those articles are. Hasn't stopped me from doing it, but I don't think it's quite so useful (I'm not really counting tutorials in this, where I actually gain tangible skills by following what I read, though). And I still buy and read my own books. I just wish I could finish a book, go someplace for dinner and discuss it with a few people afterwards like I can with the book club books. It is also harder for me to finish books I want to read, though, because I don't have that looming deadline reminding me. I suppose I could set my own deadlines, but I know from past experience that I don't treat those seriously. It's the same thing for me with game design. I do still design game in my spare time, but I get a looot more work done when I know there's a looming game convention or a competition deadline coming up. Same with writing. I get the vast majority of my new writing done during the month of November each year, during Nanowrimo. The rest of the year moves at a crawl. It's that comradery and not-imposed-by-me deadline that helps keep me motivated.
everythingswan 8y ago
I've come to love books intensely. Not only because I enjoy learning--before I read books, I found blogs to be great educators. I love books because they create time and space to be alone with a thought. It gives me time to consider things that I normally have no space for. I remember Seth Godin saying once that every business book can be summarized in just a few pages but the book itself is a story. I think it goes beyond just that idea and is The Exercise in reinforcing ideas. Yes, you don't need to spend 10 hours to memorize an idea: _move fast and break things._ Yea, I get it. But what does that actually mean? How do you actually implement that philosophy? How do you internalize it? How do you navigate situations where you will revert back to your old habit or philosophy? I think you have to spend 10 hours thinking about it and then taking actionable steps to implement it in order to make it useful. Teaching and writing are similar exercises that I have found helpful as a learning tool. I only just stumbled upon why I like to read. It is likely very personal. But I have found that removing the distractions and habit of "horizontal reading" makes me happier. I'm looking forward to reading the referenced book by Birkerts. (Aside: At times, I have found reading to be an excuse for not getting things done on my projects. _I just need to know more about x, y, and z before I start_. Ironically, the quest for knowledge can be distracting itself.)
- marvindanig 8y ago
  > I love books because they create time and space to be alone with a thought. Spot on and cue page turns! Fan open a book and read horizontally. Have intermediate stops between chunks of text on two well-formatted pages and then transition to next. A second to soak in the content in between with time and space makes for a huge difference! Scrolling animation can never achieve or serve this sort of efficiency! I recently wrote an essay on some of the underlying psychophysics and varying outcomes of user interfaces (UX/UI) and how pagination with page turns (codex) helps in reading and forming memories[1]. [1] https://bubblin.io/concerns https://bubblin.io/concerns
  - lemoncucumber 8y ago
    I think you're confused about the meanings of the terms horizontal and vertical reading. The linked piece does not use the term "vertical reading" to mean reading on a vertically scrolling screen vs. reading printed pages in a book. Rather, the author uses "vertical reading" to mean deep reading as compared to shallow/broad reading: > Birkerts coins his own terms: the deep, devotional practice of “vertical” reading has been supplanted by “horizontal” reading, skimming along the surface.
gdubs 8y ago
My wife and I recently embarked on the 'Great Books' list from "How to read a Book" [1]. It's a nice contrast to the more scattershot reading that happens online. If you're interested in how technology might cause self-interruptions that make things like sitting down with a book more difficult, I recommend checking out "The Distracted Mind". [2] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book 2: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/distracted-mind http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/distracted-mind
- davidmr 8y ago
  I spent a year at a “Great Books” college whose program Adler helped found. It was a really amazing luxury to be able to spend so much time on it (I left after freshman year, so I only got through the Greeks). Ultimately, St John’s generates a lot of lawyers and humanities grad students, but not a whole lot else without extra pre-grad school to school to get some of the STEM prereqs out of the way. I love that the school generates humanities scholars, but it’s not my bag, so I moved on. If I had the money, I’d love to go back and finish when I retire, but at 40 I’m already not as smart as I was in college, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be too dumb to be a useful classmate when I retire! If you haven’t gotten to Euclid yet, do yourself a favor and get the Heath translations with his notes. A few of them are really, really hard for people trained in late second-millennia mathematics to be able to get through without some hints.
  - gshubert17 8y ago
    I attended St. John's College's Graduate Institute, spending four summers (8 weeks each) reading and discussing a shorter version of the undergraduate reading list, and took an M.A. degree in the Liberal Arts thirty years after my Computer Science degree. It was well worth it for me, at age 54, and for participants who were retirement age. At 40 you may be feel less smart than when you were younger, but you're very likely more mature and a better reader. St. John's offers week-long Summer Classics sessions, which convey a lot of the same experiences of reading and discussion: https://www.sjc.edu/santa-fe/programs/summer-classics https://www.sjc.edu/santa-fe/programs/summer-classics
- 8y ago
radicalbyte 8y ago
I've largely stopped reading fiction books for the opposite reason. I can't put them down until they're finished or I fall asleep at 4am with book in hand (and alarm set to 6am for work). Long form news articles and technical books consumed in pomodoro-sided is what I have to get by on.
nothrows 8y ago
I recently discovered I score very low on VVIQ. Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. I don't have full on Aphantasia. But listening to how for other people reading a book is like watching a movie in their heads blows my mind. Being able to imagine with any level of depth sounds pretty amazing. As a kid I never really played pretend or was into fiction. But I'm curious that possibly long form reading is on the decline is associated with lower abilities to imagine in the general public?
- tgarv 8y ago
  Oh wow, I didn't know that was a thing but that describes me perfectly. I can sort of picture faces to some extent, but trying to visualize a house or a scene is almost impossible to me. I find it frustrating when trying to think of a "memory palace" because I can't even think about what the front door of the palace would look like, let along intricate places for things within it.
  - leppr 8y ago
    Your "memory palace" could simply be a row of doors where different sounds come from each one. Or a jungle where you have to crawl and climb over obstacles to move around. Imagination isn't just visual. Just because you can't "picture" something in your head doesn't mean you have no imagination.
    - tgarv 8y ago
      That's really interesting! I'm probably just using my lack of visual imagination as a cop out. Do you have any examples of resources for constructing such a "memory palace"?
  - nestorD 8y ago
    A trick with the memory palace is to use place you know well such as your bedroom. Then, with practice, you will learn how to build image that are vivid to your mind and easier to remember (it is perfectly normal if at first you build images that are not easily retained, you will learn from the image you do retain).
lbacaj 8y ago
I think distractions are just the beginning of our issues, a much bigger factor on how much I can read is Time. As we become adults, with responsibilities Time is incredibly hard to find. Big readers tend to be productive people and as such the more active and busy we are the harder it is to sit down and read. This might sound like a straight forward problem but I find myself bookmarking great articles or writing down great books I heard about only to never really find the Time to go back and read them. As a little shameless self promotion this problem of not having enough time to read led me to build an App that lets me listen to any article from the web. It converts the article to Audio using some amazing open advancements in AI/ML. Now when I’m standing on the train with a coffee in my hand and holding a pole with the other I can get through a ton of this content from the web distraction free. You can check the app out here: https://articulu.com https://articulu.com
- Swizec 8y ago
  > but I find myself bookmarking great articles or writing down great books I heard about only to never really find the Time to go back and read them. Try replacing “can’t find time” with “not a priority”. It means the same in practice and makes for a huge shift in perception and your own personal feekings towards stuff. Especially in the guilt department. You have more important things to do and that’s okay. When you come across a book that’s important enough you will magically have time for it. Priorities are fun like that.
  - jm__87 8y ago
    Probably a lot of people just get lured in by social media, video games, Netflix, etc and then spend far more time on these things than they would actually like. I doubt many people are consciously prioritizing their web surfing or video game time, but it just turns out that way since these things are designed to be habit forming.
    - Swizec 8y ago
      I agree and saying "not a priority" instead of "don't have time" helps with that too. "Sorry reading books is not a priority" Wait ... then what is a priority? Social media? Screw that!! And it prompts you to [try to] do better with your time. Remember when we used to read books a few pages at a time on the pooper instead of scrolling through twitter or hackernews? Good times.
axiom92 8y ago
I would finish reading this article, but first let me scroll the Reddit front page once more.
- insickness 8y ago
  Looks like an interesting article. Lemme check out the comments first.
burtonator 8y ago
I'm actually working on an app specifically to address this problem. https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It builds on the idea of 'bookmarks' and we have a new take on them called 'pagemarks' which is basically a box that spans multiple pages. This way you can keep track of the parts of the book you've read and jump around. I like reading multiple textbooks, articles, etc and go back and forth often. This allows me to easily suspend and resume. I worked on a proof of concept about 6 months ago and I've been expanding it in my spare time. You can read about it here: https://getpolarized.io/incremental-reading.html https://getpolarized.io/incremental-reading.html Polar is free and Open Source btw. It blew up on HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960 I'm about to re-announce as we're just in the process of porting it to the web to make it more accessible to people (mobile, tablets, chrome OS, etc.). It goes FAR behind this though and supports document management, offline, and supports capturing web pages for offline usage and archival. Additionally it supports annotation so you can take any page and add highlights, comments and flashcards.
- eigenvalue 8y ago
  Very cool! At least for me, so much of my reading is done on my mobile devices (e.g, iPhone, iPad) that not supporting those via an app is pretty much a deal killer for me. But if I could have one place to read PDF files, saved websites (e.g., like Pocket; btw, Pocket integration would seem to make a lot of sense for Polarized) where annotations/highlights are also stored in the cloud (say, in Dropbox), and I could access this on the go on a mobile device, I would certainly use your service.
  - burtonator 8y ago
    Mobile + web is coming... I'm also working on different ways to read while mobile which I think will be amazingly valuable. I'm going to keep these a surprise though. I like to read on my laptop and not mobile though... but maybe that will change.
    - davidtsong 8y ago
yebyen 8y ago
How apt that this is posted today! I've been tracking my reading progress on the Google SRE Workbook via Beeminder, and today I am derailing my goal because I am far behind. [1] I started tracking my progress because I wanted to see how much I can actually read in a day on a regular basis without losing focus and abandoning it, I even got a Kindle because it was on sale. Long story short, 10 pages a day was what I settled on as a reasonable goal, and here I am not keeping up with that. I actually should mention too that there is a person on GitHub[2] who converts texts to epub/mobi as a hobby, and that's how I saved $50 on my copy of the SRE book and workbook, Kindle edition, which are freely available in HTML format, thanks Google[3]! [1]: https://www.beeminder.com/yebyenw/srebook https://www.beeminder.com/yebyenw/srebook [2]: https://github.com/captn3m0/google-sre-ebook https://github.com/captn3m0/google-sre-ebook [3]: https://landing.google.com/sre/books/ https://landing.google.com/sre/books/
- Kluny 8y ago
  Ten pages a day is a lot! I'm an avid for-fun reader, and ten or fifteen pages is about what I manage while reading during breakfast, lunch, and sometimes for a few minutes before bed. That's with pretty lightweight pop-non-fiction as well. Maybe it would be better to reduce the goal to something consistently manageable, and don't beat yourself up!
  - yebyen 8y ago
    I changed the whole strategy today. Kindle reports % done and some bizarre "book location" number which is like an order of magnitude bigger than pages, so it's easier to report on and comprehend my "percent" location in the book. Beeminder is all about beating yourself up. But derailing is not failing. You don't fail if you set a new goal and start again. I decided that I will get from my current location at 32% completed to 100% completed in about 7 weeks. This is conservative to account for the fact that I should be able to read other books in this time, as they strike my fancy! It will probably also help that I no longer have to count the number of pages, now that I've switched to tracking percent. I did the math and the new goal is a little less than 10 pages per day now. Thanks for the encouragement!
good-idea 8y ago
Does anyone have a TL;DR?
- gerdesj 8y ago
  Reading books is good for you (obvs.) The author is easily distracted. Distraction causes less reading of books ... internets ... Facebook ... handwringing. OK, I am being a bit unfair but I've just seen the word: "surficiality" and actually want it to not be a speling mistak. It looks like a word that really should exist on its own merit without "pe". If you can't be arsed with the whole piece, the final para is worth reading and actually does a pretty good job as a precis of the thesis. Give it a couple of goes and roll it around on your mental tongue. A sentence like this is either bollocks or insightful: "We hold in our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times," Anyway the entire article is not too long and worth a few minutes, in my opinion. The penultimate para is stuffed full of sentences designed to get you thinking. The author likes to play with words and sounds (Mairead Small Staid is a poet, critic, and essayist living in Minnesota.) Read it backwards, para by para. It still works.
  - secondtom 8y ago
    I think they were going for irony.
int_19h 8y ago
For me, eInk readers, and especially smartphones, boosted the amounts I've read (which were substantial to begin with). For eInk, it was mostly because I could take it to more places, stuffed with many books. When you can get through a book in 2-3 days, a 2-week vacation needs quite a few! But smartphones were the real gift. Now I have all my books right there in my pocket whenever I go, so in any situation where I have to wait (lines etc), I can just whip it up and continue reading. Even if it's 10-15 minutes at a time, it all adds up. This doesn't work well for technical books because of interruptions, but it's perfect for fiction. Another nice things about phones for reading is OLED screens. Because they're "perfectly black", I find it to be the best low-light reader for night reading in the dark, before sleep.
- m463 8y ago
  Being able to change the font size, the screen brightness and to a lesser extent hue (bluish <-> amber) has led to the death of physical books for me. That and a kickstand phone case.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Oh yes, I totally forgot about that part for low-light reading. Blue light filters are awesome when properly done.
agumonkey 8y ago
Literally have a book in one hand and my phone to type this.
- gerdesj 8y ago
  Literally? (left eyebrow raises slightly/right eye twitches slightly, almost imperceptibly) I presume you mean that you have a book written (a tattoo perhaps) on the palm of your hand. It is either a very short book or you have one of those new fangled micro-fiche-tats. 8)
gravity_123 8y ago
My approach to this is to make peace with the fact that I don't need to nor can read every interesting thing out there. So I choose 2-3 articles which seem promising (mostly based on a hunch and how people here react to them), send them to kindle using this website[1] during work and then reading on my way home. Personally, I have noticed, reading a few articles around topics are also better for retention compared to reading just the discussion around the same topics and 10 more. Still haven't figured out how/when to read books, but we'll get there some day :) [1]:https://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/ https://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/
matt_j 8y ago
I read on the train when I commute to and from work. The train is frightfully busy, rammed full, noisy, uncomfortable, but as soon as I open my book it's just me and the page. It's my favourite part of the day, my own little world. The only problem is the trip seems too short, I lift my head after what seems like a few minutes and I'm already pulling into my station.
kccqzy 8y ago
Last year I cancelled my Audible subscription for much of the same reason: when listening to an audiobook it is too easy to get distracted, but reading a book is different. With an audiobook you feel like since your hands are free, you can go do something else like gym or household chores, and finding yourself no longer catching up with the audiobook. And that's not to mention you don't feel like you are in control: the narrator decides the pace, not you. But with a book, it's much harder to get distracted and thus easier to get into "the realm of duration." Since cancelling Audible, I started buying paper books on Amazon and I have experienced much better focus, and much greater enjoyment from the books I've read.
- the_af 8y ago
  I never understood audiobooks to begin with. To me, reading is an intimate, personal thing. Listening to some narrator is more like being the spectator in some piece of performance art. When I read, I want to be left alone with my thoughts. I don't hear a voice when reading (like some people do, apparently) and I definitely don't want to hear some guy or gal actually speaking the words! More importantly, I want to read at my own pace, not someone else's. I often go back and re-read recent paragraphs, for example.
  - procinct 8y ago
    It’s very interesting to me that you read without hearing a voice in your head reading each word. I tried to read your comment without requiring the voice in my head but I wasn’t able to do so. Can you elaborate a little more on what reading is like for you with no voice in your head?
    - kccqzy 8y ago
      Speed reading is basically reading without hearing a voice (subvocalization). I can do it but personally find it more draining and less enjoyable than regular reading. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization#Comparison_to_speed_reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization#Comparison_to_...
hughes 8y ago
In this case, social media directly makes reading difficult due to the share icons obscuring the left side of the text. Seems a window resize event fixes their positioning.
andrelaszlo 8y ago
This article resonates a lot with me. I have always found great pleasure in reading but lately my computer and phone steals all attention and I genuinely feel less smart because of it. It's a big reason why we're launching https://mypapermag.com/ https://mypapermag.com/ It's an app (web only for now: vue/django) where you select great long reads selected from our partners, but the important thing is that you actually get them in print in your personalized magazine every n weeks. This way you get the distraction free experience of a regular magazine, the freedom of choice of the web, the best articles from our partners and the best tech for reading (paper) in one place. It's what we're trying to achieve at least, still in private beta and only in France for now but please let me know if you want to try it out or if you have any feedback, andre@mypapermag.com </ShamelessSelfPromotion>
- andrelaszlo 8y ago
  I forgot to add that if you're interested in how our reading is changing, Maryanne Wolf's research is great. Her book 'Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World' gives a great overview of a diverse way of looking at reading. (I haven't read 'Proust and the Squid' yet, by the same author, but I think it touches on similar topics) According to Wolf, our "reading circuits" are changing on a neurological level, affecting reasoning, critical thinking and even empathy. On the other hand were getting better at skim reading, quickly sorting through mountains of lower value information. This article in the Guardian gives a great summary: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-r... Another good article on the topic, if you happen to prefer French, from Usbec & Rica: https://m.usbeketrica.com/article/a-plus-vous-lisez-en-diagonale-plus-votre-cerveau-reclame-de-la-rapidite https://m.usbeketrica.com/article/a-plus-vous-lisez-en-diago... (Disclaimer: Both The Guardian and Usbek & Rica are supplying articles for our platform)
CharlesMerriam2 8y ago
As I read this story, some moving advertisements start along the top and sides. After ten seconds, a floating bar covers the text. After a few more, a modal dialog. Then the 'share me now' buttons, obscuring the text. Then I leave. Too few websites offer an experience for someone to read the content, and so we will see "Reading Online Content in the Age of Constant Distraction" in HackerNews.
- moneywoes 8y ago
  Try ublock origin with a lot of filters.
- LandR 8y ago
  Firefox reader mode kills all of this.
  - geolgau 8y ago
    this! x1000
- r_c_a_d 8y ago
  Yes, I wasn't sure if the distractions were there to prove a point or if it was just ironic that the site was bombarding its own article with distractions.
- geolgau 8y ago
  How can you live in 2019 without an ad blocker? I'm on that page and never got any ads/intrusions.
  - IanSanders 8y ago
    Maybe they are using an iphone or something. Adblockers don't resolve the root of the problem!
jdlyga 8y ago
I love audiobooks. I can do other things while I hear words. No worrying about being distracted, because being distracted is part of it.
logifail 8y ago
Isn't it ironic that an article with this theme should be published on a site that - if you allow scripts - has not one but two horrible animated pop-ups (slide in from right - trying to get you to sign up for their newsletter - and centred overlay trying to sell you their t-shirts). The author certainly appears to have chosen their title well. <sigh>
djohnston 8y ago
i think you can find "deep time" on the internet. the internet is just a medium, and its speed is only one of many factors that make using it distracting. i've read things blogs or wikis that have taken hours of intense focus to grok. my point is that the dichotomy of books and the internet doesn't seem particularly valuable, while "deep time" vs "shallow time" is.
- wilsonnb3 8y ago
  I would argue that while you can find deep works on the internet, it’s still a medium that encourages shallower works than the printing press did.
Bland_Tongue 8y ago
Lately, I have been finding the physicality of reading a book especially pleasing when so much of my daily work, communication, and distraction are spent in front of a screen.
LandR 8y ago
The thing I find is hardest about sitting and reading a book is the quietness and being essentially alone with my own thoughts. If I'm sitting watch a film / netflix etc, there is noise and that seems to distract my brain from going to dark places. It's like I'll be reading a page and then by the end of the page I've taken nothing in and my brain is forcing me to think about stuff I don't want to think about. Intrusive thoughts like you suck as a person,you're fat, you're ugly, why do your friends like you? You suck at your job etc. I think this is the same reason why I struggle to sleep, just being alone with my thoughts trying to sleep ends up putting me in a bad place. It sucks because I used to love reading.
- corv 8y ago
  I know this, You might want to try meditation, it let’s your brain dump these thoughts and then be more present.
- weavie 8y ago
  I would suggest that these are probably not thoughts you should be trying to ignore. What is at the root of your mind telling you that you suck as a person? Do you work with a therapist? It may help.. If you can face into these and change whatever it is you need to then maybe you can start reading and sleeping again, plus your life will be better in just about every way!
- dan00 8y ago
  Yes, this sucks. It can be quite hard to see and understand, that these thoughts are your own activity, you are enabling these thoughts. You can't control if thoughts pop up, but you have control if you are following these thoughts, if you continue them. It might be very difficult to see the difference between the pop up of a thought and its following, because if you always follow a thought you get used to it, it just automatically happens. It can be quite hard to get rid of this habit, it takes time and energy, but the more you try to not automatically follow thoughts - but only if you really want to - the less thoughts will randomly pop up.
- nabnob 8y ago
  I have the same problem. It's definitely the worst effect of information overload - being alone with my own thoughts is anxiety inducing. I've also noticed that on the days I spend too much time scrolling through Reddit and skimming the news, I have this background feeling of restlessness. I'm trying to fix this by resisting the urge to look at my phone whenever I have a spare moment - like waiting in line, or when taking the elevator. Boredom shouldn't feel scary. Meditation and going for walks (without bringing my phone) also help.
miki123211 8y ago
I have different experiences with reading than most. When I'm reading and notifications come in, I ignore them as distractions, much like one would shake off and ignore an annoying fly. I don't know whether the fact that I'm usually listening rather than reading (I use a screenreader) makes any difference.
entropy_ 8y ago
I definitely agree with most of the points in the article. I've always been an avid reader and I find that this has enriched my life and my ability to think and reason about the world around me. However, I find that the dig at amazon and e-books is definitely unwarranted(Or at least overblown). As a denizen of the third world, Amazon and the Kindle have been a lifeline to me. It's pretty much impossible to find anything that isn't bestseller trash in bookstores where I live. The selection is limited only to what might sell to the largest possible audience/lowest common denominator. Being able to get books on demand, electronically and cheap has been the only way I've been able to keep up my reading habit in the face of tightening time and budget constraints(2 kids, a job, etc...)
mapcars 8y ago
Constant distraction happens only if you chose it. Chose it to not happen.
superqwert 8y ago
Something I've found to be exceptionally good at helping with reading (I've been reading ~50 books a year for the past 5 years, on top of a full time job and family) is to use Goodreads - it gives you those short term endorphins when you can mark a book as read and can help it compete with all the other offerings of the world that reward you more hormonally. Alternatively, if you don't want to use the tool, I would recommend getting a nice notepad to write in some short book reviews, which will give you your endorphins as you fill the book up more. And you get the additional benefit of being able to look back through your notes to see what you thought of various books and how your thought x time ago.
sidkhanooja 8y ago
I've been an avid reader since I was seven years old - I stopped in college (almost completely), but it was during my internship and job that I started reading vociferously again. Nowadays after I finish the book, I try to review the books I've read on Instagram in the form of a post or a story - some people go to the extent of unfollowing me (seeing it as a stupid use case for the service), but some people I know IRL have also started reading the same books I finish. Not every distraction is a force for evil.
bmj 8y ago
If this interests you, there is a book-length treatment of the same subject: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9859899-the-pleasures-of-reading-in-an-age-of-distraction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9859899-the-pleasures-of...
divan 8y ago
While it's not what article is about, but amount of distraction you see even just to read this article is insane: https://i.imgur.com/xHRmvuJ.png https://i.imgur.com/xHRmvuJ.png
Isamu 8y ago
I read more books on paper now than I ever did pre-internet. Because of the far greater ease of requesting a library book now. Now anytime I hear of a good book, I look it up on the online catalog and, because all the libraries in the county are linked, the choice is bigger than ever. I just request a few books and have them delivered to my local library.
gasgiant 8y ago
I stopped reading the essay at paragraph four when the boilerplate Marxist horse-hockey kicked in. Does that count as being distracted?

488 points by wormold 8y ago

Did a small survey last year on this point and discovered that while technology might sound distracting people are actually spending more time reading/viewing stuff they like more lot more than before. We found that among teens for example very few people read anything from news websites very rarely but almost every single teen had read at least one article in depth on very niche topic that appealed to them. (For example reading about affairs for their favorite pop star). Most teens performed very poorly when they were given 1 hour and asked to prepare a presentation on "any american hero".

iscrewyou 8y ago
Do you have a paper or a link to read this study?
Apocryphon 8y ago
This article goes into the difference between horizontal and vertical reading.
duxup 8y ago
Totally anecdotal story / corner case: I was a terrible reader growing up, I had ADD before the days when they diagnosed that. My son also has ADD and strangely, he is an avid reader. I've caught him reading two books at once (both in his lap) and swapping between them and he was comprehending them (I did some Q&A). At least on the very surface to me that might mean that reading is not necessarily antithetical to someone who is prone to distraction / lack of focus .... or a distraction heavy world. We've seen history full of predictions what the phone, or video games, or computers would do to seemingly related technologies, and not been good at predicting the result.
- pault 8y ago
  This is called hyperfocusing (AKA the zone) and it's a typical characteristic of people with ADD. I have it pretty bad and I almost flunked out of school because I would spend all day reading enormous serial fantasy novels (wheel of time FTW!).
  - cf498 8y ago
    OT, but is there by any chance a series similar to wheel of time, or that captured you in a similar way, which you would recommend? Havent found anything quite like it, but that might be because of nostalgia and my fond memories of reading it as a teen.
    - pault 8y ago
      When I was a teenager I loved the series that started with sword of shanarra, but going back and reading those novels as an adult mostly makes me cringe. :)
    - ChanderG 8y ago
      If you are looking for sheer scale, can recommend Steven Erikson's Malazan family (around 36 novels set in the same world; starting with the Malazan Book of the Fallen) though the atmosphere is much bleaker. Another recommendation would be Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere multi-series (Mistborn, Stormlight Archive), currently in progress, closer to WoT thematically.
- skandl 8y ago
  That's impressive! I agree, I think where distraction comes into play is an inhibitor to actually get started reading.

josteink 8y ago

Medium matters. For in-depth, “digital” reading the only thing I have which works for me is my Kindle. It’s distractionfree by design, and that’s why I love it. It’s definitely not just another redundant screen.

marvindanig 8y ago
Yeah but Kindle != web. And that is huge bummer for me! I generally prefer reading everything online, or not read at all.
- checkyoursudo 8y ago
  This is really interesting to me. Do you know why you think (feel?) this way?
  - marvindanig 8y ago
    It is because web is the go-to resource for me, whether it's wikipedia or readings blogs or youtube or netflix——I don't use apps at all. Any hardware that doesn't take me to web is—well it doesn't exist for me.
- retsibsi 8y ago
  I don't know if this addresses your issue (whether it's about the content, or about e.g. being able to use hyperlinks), but Kobo ereaders come with a version of Pocket preinstalled, so when you see an interesting web page on your computer, you can send it to your ereader with the press of a button. Apparently there's something similar for Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/
  - jmcphers 8y ago
    Instapaper integrates with the Send to Kindle feature and will mail you a "newspaper" with all of the articles you've saved to Instapaper in the last week. It's fantastic.
8y ago

cableshaft 8y ago

I joined local book clubs to help combat this. The book clubs help me get motivated to read books. I don't always finish them, and sometimes work or other commitments prevent me from going out and discussing the book, but it does help motivate me to sit down and read a book again (often when I'm in line waiting for things is a good time for me to make progress on the book. I try to do that instead of checking Facebook updates, but I also read before going to bed also). The main problem with this, is they often choose books that I'm not that interested in reading. Sometimes I plow through it anyway and sometimes I just skip that month. That's why I'm in multiple groups, so I can see what each group is reading and pick the one or two books that look the most interesting from those. But sometimes the books I'm really into. Like I got excited when The Devil and the White City was one of them, and one of them is currently reading the Deep Work book, which I'm finding interesting and wanting to incorporate some of its ideas in my own life.

gerdesj 8y ago
I joined local book clubs to help combat this. There is no need to be so adversarial! There is absolutely nothing wrong with checking your Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/HN/Register/./G+(lol) feeds. Reading a novel is not mutually exclusive to that, in the same way that your work and home lives are intertwined but still separate (probably). It sounds to me from your comment that you need to break away from your book club and go your own way and do your own thing. They have piqued your interest and pointed out a way but that way is now yours. I have no idea where you are in the world but if you have a local lending library within reach, that might be a good place to consider visiting. I'm from the UK and what little is left of our library system after much cutting of budgets (generally outside Laaaaaandon) is still legendary but sadly being diminished by London/Cardiff/Edinburgh/Belfast focused knob-ends. There is no greater pleasure to be had than from a damn good book and very few books are not damn good. OK, there are one or two other things that are quite fun ...
- cableshaft 8y ago
  I also read plenty of Facebook/Reddit/HN feeds still, I'm not trying to eliminate them. Combat was kind of a hyperbole I guess. I'm not declaring war against reading articles online. But I have found that for all the interesting articles online, if I reflect back on them after a year, I can remember approximately 0% of what I read, while I can remember at least which books I've read and something interesting about them, so I wonder just how useful reading those articles are. Hasn't stopped me from doing it, but I don't think it's quite so useful (I'm not really counting tutorials in this, where I actually gain tangible skills by following what I read, though). And I still buy and read my own books. I just wish I could finish a book, go someplace for dinner and discuss it with a few people afterwards like I can with the book club books. It is also harder for me to finish books I want to read, though, because I don't have that looming deadline reminding me. I suppose I could set my own deadlines, but I know from past experience that I don't treat those seriously. It's the same thing for me with game design. I do still design game in my spare time, but I get a looot more work done when I know there's a looming game convention or a competition deadline coming up. Same with writing. I get the vast majority of my new writing done during the month of November each year, during Nanowrimo. The rest of the year moves at a crawl. It's that comradery and not-imposed-by-me deadline that helps keep me motivated.

everythingswan 8y ago

I've come to love books intensely. Not only because I enjoy learning--before I read books, I found blogs to be great educators. I love books because they create time and space to be alone with a thought. It gives me time to consider things that I normally have no space for. I remember Seth Godin saying once that every business book can be summarized in just a few pages but the book itself is a story. I think it goes beyond just that idea and is The Exercise in reinforcing ideas. Yes, you don't need to spend 10 hours to memorize an idea: _move fast and break things._ Yea, I get it. But what does that actually mean? How do you actually implement that philosophy? How do you internalize it? How do you navigate situations where you will revert back to your old habit or philosophy? I think you have to spend 10 hours thinking about it and then taking actionable steps to implement it in order to make it useful. Teaching and writing are similar exercises that I have found helpful as a learning tool. I only just stumbled upon why I like to read. It is likely very personal. But I have found that removing the distractions and habit of "horizontal reading" makes me happier. I'm looking forward to reading the referenced book by Birkerts. (Aside: At times, I have found reading to be an excuse for not getting things done on my projects. _I just need to know more about x, y, and z before I start_. Ironically, the quest for knowledge can be distracting itself.)

marvindanig 8y ago
> I love books because they create time and space to be alone with a thought. Spot on and cue page turns! Fan open a book and read horizontally. Have intermediate stops between chunks of text on two well-formatted pages and then transition to next. A second to soak in the content in between with time and space makes for a huge difference! Scrolling animation can never achieve or serve this sort of efficiency! I recently wrote an essay on some of the underlying psychophysics and varying outcomes of user interfaces (UX/UI) and how pagination with page turns (codex) helps in reading and forming memories[1]. [1] https://bubblin.io/concerns https://bubblin.io/concerns
- lemoncucumber 8y ago
  I think you're confused about the meanings of the terms horizontal and vertical reading. The linked piece does not use the term "vertical reading" to mean reading on a vertically scrolling screen vs. reading printed pages in a book. Rather, the author uses "vertical reading" to mean deep reading as compared to shallow/broad reading: > Birkerts coins his own terms: the deep, devotional practice of “vertical” reading has been supplanted by “horizontal” reading, skimming along the surface.

gdubs 8y ago

My wife and I recently embarked on the 'Great Books' list from "How to read a Book" [1]. It's a nice contrast to the more scattershot reading that happens online. If you're interested in how technology might cause self-interruptions that make things like sitting down with a book more difficult, I recommend checking out "The Distracted Mind". [2] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book 2: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/distracted-mind http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/distracted-mind

davidmr 8y ago
I spent a year at a “Great Books” college whose program Adler helped found. It was a really amazing luxury to be able to spend so much time on it (I left after freshman year, so I only got through the Greeks). Ultimately, St John’s generates a lot of lawyers and humanities grad students, but not a whole lot else without extra pre-grad school to school to get some of the STEM prereqs out of the way. I love that the school generates humanities scholars, but it’s not my bag, so I moved on. If I had the money, I’d love to go back and finish when I retire, but at 40 I’m already not as smart as I was in college, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be too dumb to be a useful classmate when I retire! If you haven’t gotten to Euclid yet, do yourself a favor and get the Heath translations with his notes. A few of them are really, really hard for people trained in late second-millennia mathematics to be able to get through without some hints.
- gshubert17 8y ago
  I attended St. John's College's Graduate Institute, spending four summers (8 weeks each) reading and discussing a shorter version of the undergraduate reading list, and took an M.A. degree in the Liberal Arts thirty years after my Computer Science degree. It was well worth it for me, at age 54, and for participants who were retirement age. At 40 you may be feel less smart than when you were younger, but you're very likely more mature and a better reader. St. John's offers week-long Summer Classics sessions, which convey a lot of the same experiences of reading and discussion: https://www.sjc.edu/santa-fe/programs/summer-classics https://www.sjc.edu/santa-fe/programs/summer-classics
8y ago

radicalbyte 8y ago

I've largely stopped reading fiction books for the opposite reason. I can't put them down until they're finished or I fall asleep at 4am with book in hand (and alarm set to 6am for work). Long form news articles and technical books consumed in pomodoro-sided is what I have to get by on.

nothrows 8y ago

I recently discovered I score very low on VVIQ. Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. I don't have full on Aphantasia. But listening to how for other people reading a book is like watching a movie in their heads blows my mind. Being able to imagine with any level of depth sounds pretty amazing. As a kid I never really played pretend or was into fiction. But I'm curious that possibly long form reading is on the decline is associated with lower abilities to imagine in the general public?

tgarv 8y ago
Oh wow, I didn't know that was a thing but that describes me perfectly. I can sort of picture faces to some extent, but trying to visualize a house or a scene is almost impossible to me. I find it frustrating when trying to think of a "memory palace" because I can't even think about what the front door of the palace would look like, let along intricate places for things within it.
- leppr 8y ago
  Your "memory palace" could simply be a row of doors where different sounds come from each one. Or a jungle where you have to crawl and climb over obstacles to move around. Imagination isn't just visual. Just because you can't "picture" something in your head doesn't mean you have no imagination.
  - tgarv 8y ago
    That's really interesting! I'm probably just using my lack of visual imagination as a cop out. Do you have any examples of resources for constructing such a "memory palace"?
- nestorD 8y ago
  A trick with the memory palace is to use place you know well such as your bedroom. Then, with practice, you will learn how to build image that are vivid to your mind and easier to remember (it is perfectly normal if at first you build images that are not easily retained, you will learn from the image you do retain).

lbacaj 8y ago

I think distractions are just the beginning of our issues, a much bigger factor on how much I can read is Time. As we become adults, with responsibilities Time is incredibly hard to find. Big readers tend to be productive people and as such the more active and busy we are the harder it is to sit down and read. This might sound like a straight forward problem but I find myself bookmarking great articles or writing down great books I heard about only to never really find the Time to go back and read them. As a little shameless self promotion this problem of not having enough time to read led me to build an App that lets me listen to any article from the web. It converts the article to Audio using some amazing open advancements in AI/ML. Now when I’m standing on the train with a coffee in my hand and holding a pole with the other I can get through a ton of this content from the web distraction free. You can check the app out here: https://articulu.com https://articulu.com

Swizec 8y ago
> but I find myself bookmarking great articles or writing down great books I heard about only to never really find the Time to go back and read them. Try replacing “can’t find time” with “not a priority”. It means the same in practice and makes for a huge shift in perception and your own personal feekings towards stuff. Especially in the guilt department. You have more important things to do and that’s okay. When you come across a book that’s important enough you will magically have time for it. Priorities are fun like that.
- jm__87 8y ago
  Probably a lot of people just get lured in by social media, video games, Netflix, etc and then spend far more time on these things than they would actually like. I doubt many people are consciously prioritizing their web surfing or video game time, but it just turns out that way since these things are designed to be habit forming.
  - Swizec 8y ago
    I agree and saying "not a priority" instead of "don't have time" helps with that too. "Sorry reading books is not a priority" Wait ... then what is a priority? Social media? Screw that!! And it prompts you to [try to] do better with your time. Remember when we used to read books a few pages at a time on the pooper instead of scrolling through twitter or hackernews? Good times.

axiom92 8y ago

I would finish reading this article, but first let me scroll the Reddit front page once more.

insickness 8y ago
Looks like an interesting article. Lemme check out the comments first.

burtonator 8y ago

I'm actually working on an app specifically to address this problem. https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It builds on the idea of 'bookmarks' and we have a new take on them called 'pagemarks' which is basically a box that spans multiple pages. This way you can keep track of the parts of the book you've read and jump around. I like reading multiple textbooks, articles, etc and go back and forth often. This allows me to easily suspend and resume. I worked on a proof of concept about 6 months ago and I've been expanding it in my spare time. You can read about it here: https://getpolarized.io/incremental-reading.html https://getpolarized.io/incremental-reading.html Polar is free and Open Source btw. It blew up on HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960 I'm about to re-announce as we're just in the process of porting it to the web to make it more accessible to people (mobile, tablets, chrome OS, etc.). It goes FAR behind this though and supports document management, offline, and supports capturing web pages for offline usage and archival. Additionally it supports annotation so you can take any page and add highlights, comments and flashcards.

eigenvalue 8y ago
Very cool! At least for me, so much of my reading is done on my mobile devices (e.g, iPhone, iPad) that not supporting those via an app is pretty much a deal killer for me. But if I could have one place to read PDF files, saved websites (e.g., like Pocket; btw, Pocket integration would seem to make a lot of sense for Polarized) where annotations/highlights are also stored in the cloud (say, in Dropbox), and I could access this on the go on a mobile device, I would certainly use your service.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Mobile + web is coming... I'm also working on different ways to read while mobile which I think will be amazingly valuable. I'm going to keep these a surprise though. I like to read on my laptop and not mobile though... but maybe that will change.
  - davidtsong 8y ago

yebyen 8y ago

How apt that this is posted today! I've been tracking my reading progress on the Google SRE Workbook via Beeminder, and today I am derailing my goal because I am far behind. [1] I started tracking my progress because I wanted to see how much I can actually read in a day on a regular basis without losing focus and abandoning it, I even got a Kindle because it was on sale. Long story short, 10 pages a day was what I settled on as a reasonable goal, and here I am not keeping up with that. I actually should mention too that there is a person on GitHub[2] who converts texts to epub/mobi as a hobby, and that's how I saved $50 on my copy of the SRE book and workbook, Kindle edition, which are freely available in HTML format, thanks Google[3]! [1]: https://www.beeminder.com/yebyenw/srebook https://www.beeminder.com/yebyenw/srebook [2]: https://github.com/captn3m0/google-sre-ebook https://github.com/captn3m0/google-sre-ebook [3]: https://landing.google.com/sre/books/ https://landing.google.com/sre/books/

Kluny 8y ago
Ten pages a day is a lot! I'm an avid for-fun reader, and ten or fifteen pages is about what I manage while reading during breakfast, lunch, and sometimes for a few minutes before bed. That's with pretty lightweight pop-non-fiction as well. Maybe it would be better to reduce the goal to something consistently manageable, and don't beat yourself up!
- yebyen 8y ago
  I changed the whole strategy today. Kindle reports % done and some bizarre "book location" number which is like an order of magnitude bigger than pages, so it's easier to report on and comprehend my "percent" location in the book. Beeminder is all about beating yourself up. But derailing is not failing. You don't fail if you set a new goal and start again. I decided that I will get from my current location at 32% completed to 100% completed in about 7 weeks. This is conservative to account for the fact that I should be able to read other books in this time, as they strike my fancy! It will probably also help that I no longer have to count the number of pages, now that I've switched to tracking percent. I did the math and the new goal is a little less than 10 pages per day now. Thanks for the encouragement!

good-idea 8y ago

Does anyone have a TL;DR?

gerdesj 8y ago
Reading books is good for you (obvs.) The author is easily distracted. Distraction causes less reading of books ... internets ... Facebook ... handwringing. OK, I am being a bit unfair but I've just seen the word: "surficiality" and actually want it to not be a speling mistak. It looks like a word that really should exist on its own merit without "pe". If you can't be arsed with the whole piece, the final para is worth reading and actually does a pretty good job as a precis of the thesis. Give it a couple of goes and roll it around on your mental tongue. A sentence like this is either bollocks or insightful: "We hold in our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times," Anyway the entire article is not too long and worth a few minutes, in my opinion. The penultimate para is stuffed full of sentences designed to get you thinking. The author likes to play with words and sounds (Mairead Small Staid is a poet, critic, and essayist living in Minnesota.) Read it backwards, para by para. It still works.
- secondtom 8y ago
  I think they were going for irony.

int_19h 8y ago

For me, eInk readers, and especially smartphones, boosted the amounts I've read (which were substantial to begin with). For eInk, it was mostly because I could take it to more places, stuffed with many books. When you can get through a book in 2-3 days, a 2-week vacation needs quite a few! But smartphones were the real gift. Now I have all my books right there in my pocket whenever I go, so in any situation where I have to wait (lines etc), I can just whip it up and continue reading. Even if it's 10-15 minutes at a time, it all adds up. This doesn't work well for technical books because of interruptions, but it's perfect for fiction. Another nice things about phones for reading is OLED screens. Because they're "perfectly black", I find it to be the best low-light reader for night reading in the dark, before sleep.

m463 8y ago
Being able to change the font size, the screen brightness and to a lesser extent hue (bluish <-> amber) has led to the death of physical books for me. That and a kickstand phone case.
- int_19h 8y ago
  Oh yes, I totally forgot about that part for low-light reading. Blue light filters are awesome when properly done.

agumonkey 8y ago

Literally have a book in one hand and my phone to type this.

gerdesj 8y ago
Literally? (left eyebrow raises slightly/right eye twitches slightly, almost imperceptibly) I presume you mean that you have a book written (a tattoo perhaps) on the palm of your hand. It is either a very short book or you have one of those new fangled micro-fiche-tats. 8)

gravity_123 8y ago

My approach to this is to make peace with the fact that I don't need to nor can read every interesting thing out there. So I choose 2-3 articles which seem promising (mostly based on a hunch and how people here react to them), send them to kindle using this website[1] during work and then reading on my way home. Personally, I have noticed, reading a few articles around topics are also better for retention compared to reading just the discussion around the same topics and 10 more. Still haven't figured out how/when to read books, but we'll get there some day :) [1]:https://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/ https://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/

matt_j 8y ago

I read on the train when I commute to and from work. The train is frightfully busy, rammed full, noisy, uncomfortable, but as soon as I open my book it's just me and the page. It's my favourite part of the day, my own little world. The only problem is the trip seems too short, I lift my head after what seems like a few minutes and I'm already pulling into my station.

kccqzy 8y ago

Last year I cancelled my Audible subscription for much of the same reason: when listening to an audiobook it is too easy to get distracted, but reading a book is different. With an audiobook you feel like since your hands are free, you can go do something else like gym or household chores, and finding yourself no longer catching up with the audiobook. And that's not to mention you don't feel like you are in control: the narrator decides the pace, not you. But with a book, it's much harder to get distracted and thus easier to get into "the realm of duration." Since cancelling Audible, I started buying paper books on Amazon and I have experienced much better focus, and much greater enjoyment from the books I've read.

the_af 8y ago
I never understood audiobooks to begin with. To me, reading is an intimate, personal thing. Listening to some narrator is more like being the spectator in some piece of performance art. When I read, I want to be left alone with my thoughts. I don't hear a voice when reading (like some people do, apparently) and I definitely don't want to hear some guy or gal actually speaking the words! More importantly, I want to read at my own pace, not someone else's. I often go back and re-read recent paragraphs, for example.
- procinct 8y ago
  It’s very interesting to me that you read without hearing a voice in your head reading each word. I tried to read your comment without requiring the voice in my head but I wasn’t able to do so. Can you elaborate a little more on what reading is like for you with no voice in your head?
  - kccqzy 8y ago
    Speed reading is basically reading without hearing a voice (subvocalization). I can do it but personally find it more draining and less enjoyable than regular reading. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization#Comparison_to_speed_reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization#Comparison_to_...

hughes 8y ago

In this case, social media directly makes reading difficult due to the share icons obscuring the left side of the text. Seems a window resize event fixes their positioning.

andrelaszlo 8y ago

This article resonates a lot with me. I have always found great pleasure in reading but lately my computer and phone steals all attention and I genuinely feel less smart because of it. It's a big reason why we're launching https://mypapermag.com/ https://mypapermag.com/ It's an app (web only for now: vue/django) where you select great long reads selected from our partners, but the important thing is that you actually get them in print in your personalized magazine every n weeks. This way you get the distraction free experience of a regular magazine, the freedom of choice of the web, the best articles from our partners and the best tech for reading (paper) in one place. It's what we're trying to achieve at least, still in private beta and only in France for now but please let me know if you want to try it out or if you have any feedback, andre@mypapermag.com </ShamelessSelfPromotion>

andrelaszlo 8y ago
I forgot to add that if you're interested in how our reading is changing, Maryanne Wolf's research is great. Her book 'Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World' gives a great overview of a diverse way of looking at reading. (I haven't read 'Proust and the Squid' yet, by the same author, but I think it touches on similar topics) According to Wolf, our "reading circuits" are changing on a neurological level, affecting reasoning, critical thinking and even empathy. On the other hand were getting better at skim reading, quickly sorting through mountains of lower value information. This article in the Guardian gives a great summary: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-r... Another good article on the topic, if you happen to prefer French, from Usbec & Rica: https://m.usbeketrica.com/article/a-plus-vous-lisez-en-diagonale-plus-votre-cerveau-reclame-de-la-rapidite https://m.usbeketrica.com/article/a-plus-vous-lisez-en-diago... (Disclaimer: Both The Guardian and Usbek & Rica are supplying articles for our platform)

CharlesMerriam2 8y ago

As I read this story, some moving advertisements start along the top and sides. After ten seconds, a floating bar covers the text. After a few more, a modal dialog. Then the 'share me now' buttons, obscuring the text. Then I leave. Too few websites offer an experience for someone to read the content, and so we will see "Reading Online Content in the Age of Constant Distraction" in HackerNews.

moneywoes 8y ago
Try ublock origin with a lot of filters.
LandR 8y ago
Firefox reader mode kills all of this.
- geolgau 8y ago
  this! x1000
r_c_a_d 8y ago
Yes, I wasn't sure if the distractions were there to prove a point or if it was just ironic that the site was bombarding its own article with distractions.
geolgau 8y ago
How can you live in 2019 without an ad blocker? I'm on that page and never got any ads/intrusions.
- IanSanders 8y ago
  Maybe they are using an iphone or something. Adblockers don't resolve the root of the problem!

jdlyga 8y ago

I love audiobooks. I can do other things while I hear words. No worrying about being distracted, because being distracted is part of it.

logifail 8y ago

Isn't it ironic that an article with this theme should be published on a site that - if you allow scripts - has not one but two horrible animated pop-ups (slide in from right - trying to get you to sign up for their newsletter - and centred overlay trying to sell you their t-shirts). The author certainly appears to have chosen their title well. <sigh>

djohnston 8y ago

i think you can find "deep time" on the internet. the internet is just a medium, and its speed is only one of many factors that make using it distracting. i've read things blogs or wikis that have taken hours of intense focus to grok. my point is that the dichotomy of books and the internet doesn't seem particularly valuable, while "deep time" vs "shallow time" is.

wilsonnb3 8y ago
I would argue that while you can find deep works on the internet, it’s still a medium that encourages shallower works than the printing press did.

Bland_Tongue 8y ago

Lately, I have been finding the physicality of reading a book especially pleasing when so much of my daily work, communication, and distraction are spent in front of a screen.

LandR 8y ago

The thing I find is hardest about sitting and reading a book is the quietness and being essentially alone with my own thoughts. If I'm sitting watch a film / netflix etc, there is noise and that seems to distract my brain from going to dark places. It's like I'll be reading a page and then by the end of the page I've taken nothing in and my brain is forcing me to think about stuff I don't want to think about. Intrusive thoughts like you suck as a person,you're fat, you're ugly, why do your friends like you? You suck at your job etc. I think this is the same reason why I struggle to sleep, just being alone with my thoughts trying to sleep ends up putting me in a bad place. It sucks because I used to love reading.

corv 8y ago
I know this, You might want to try meditation, it let’s your brain dump these thoughts and then be more present.
weavie 8y ago
I would suggest that these are probably not thoughts you should be trying to ignore. What is at the root of your mind telling you that you suck as a person? Do you work with a therapist? It may help.. If you can face into these and change whatever it is you need to then maybe you can start reading and sleeping again, plus your life will be better in just about every way!
dan00 8y ago
Yes, this sucks. It can be quite hard to see and understand, that these thoughts are your own activity, you are enabling these thoughts. You can't control if thoughts pop up, but you have control if you are following these thoughts, if you continue them. It might be very difficult to see the difference between the pop up of a thought and its following, because if you always follow a thought you get used to it, it just automatically happens. It can be quite hard to get rid of this habit, it takes time and energy, but the more you try to not automatically follow thoughts - but only if you really want to - the less thoughts will randomly pop up.
nabnob 8y ago
I have the same problem. It's definitely the worst effect of information overload - being alone with my own thoughts is anxiety inducing. I've also noticed that on the days I spend too much time scrolling through Reddit and skimming the news, I have this background feeling of restlessness. I'm trying to fix this by resisting the urge to look at my phone whenever I have a spare moment - like waiting in line, or when taking the elevator. Boredom shouldn't feel scary. Meditation and going for walks (without bringing my phone) also help.

miki123211 8y ago

I have different experiences with reading than most. When I'm reading and notifications come in, I ignore them as distractions, much like one would shake off and ignore an annoying fly. I don't know whether the fact that I'm usually listening rather than reading (I use a screenreader) makes any difference.

entropy_ 8y ago

I definitely agree with most of the points in the article. I've always been an avid reader and I find that this has enriched my life and my ability to think and reason about the world around me. However, I find that the dig at amazon and e-books is definitely unwarranted(Or at least overblown). As a denizen of the third world, Amazon and the Kindle have been a lifeline to me. It's pretty much impossible to find anything that isn't bestseller trash in bookstores where I live. The selection is limited only to what might sell to the largest possible audience/lowest common denominator. Being able to get books on demand, electronically and cheap has been the only way I've been able to keep up my reading habit in the face of tightening time and budget constraints(2 kids, a job, etc...)

mapcars 8y ago

Constant distraction happens only if you chose it. Chose it to not happen.

superqwert 8y ago

Something I've found to be exceptionally good at helping with reading (I've been reading ~50 books a year for the past 5 years, on top of a full time job and family) is to use Goodreads - it gives you those short term endorphins when you can mark a book as read and can help it compete with all the other offerings of the world that reward you more hormonally. Alternatively, if you don't want to use the tool, I would recommend getting a nice notepad to write in some short book reviews, which will give you your endorphins as you fill the book up more. And you get the additional benefit of being able to look back through your notes to see what you thought of various books and how your thought x time ago.

sidkhanooja 8y ago

I've been an avid reader since I was seven years old - I stopped in college (almost completely), but it was during my internship and job that I started reading vociferously again. Nowadays after I finish the book, I try to review the books I've read on Instagram in the form of a post or a story - some people go to the extent of unfollowing me (seeing it as a stupid use case for the service), but some people I know IRL have also started reading the same books I finish. Not every distraction is a force for evil.

bmj 8y ago

If this interests you, there is a book-length treatment of the same subject: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9859899-the-pleasures-of-reading-in-an-age-of-distraction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9859899-the-pleasures-of...

divan 8y ago

While it's not what article is about, but amount of distraction you see even just to read this article is insane: https://i.imgur.com/xHRmvuJ.png https://i.imgur.com/xHRmvuJ.png

Isamu 8y ago

I read more books on paper now than I ever did pre-internet. Because of the far greater ease of requesting a library book now. Now anytime I hear of a good book, I look it up on the online catalog and, because all the libraries in the county are linked, the choice is bigger than ever. I just request a few books and have them delivered to my local library.

gasgiant 8y ago

I stopped reading the essay at paragraph four when the boilerplate Marxist horse-hockey kicked in. Does that count as being distracted?