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When they were surveying readers vs non-readers, does the reading have to occur via books? Does reading text on the internet not count as reading? I've always w
by IAmGraydon 2y ago
When they were surveying readers vs non-readers, does the reading have to occur via books? Does reading text on the internet not count as reading? I've always wondered why this apparent dichotomy exists. I read quite a lot of lengthy texts, but they're often technical documents that exist on the internet. I hardly ever sit down in a quiet place with a book. Am I not a reader?
- tbomb 2y agoI have this conversation with my wife (who is an avid book reader) at least once per month. I read so many technical documents for work, via my computer, that I often don't want to read a book for pleasure.
- ruthmarx 2y agoReading technical docs is closer to reading shop names and street signs than it is to the intention to sit down and consume a work of art.
- mingus88 2y agoI’m “reading” all day long. Code, chats, news, documentation. There’s really all the difference in the world if you can sit still and focus on a good engaging long-form work. I think most folk are losing the discipline to do that, as we all communicate in brief spurts of async messaging and anything published for mass consumption is written at a 4th grade level I try to read novels in chapter length segments. It’s hard to avoid to urge to context switch or get distracted
- graemep 2y agoI agree that the big difference is between short and long form reading. i do not think this is discipline so much as inclination. I never had to discipline myself to read a book I enjoyed (whether fiction or non-fiction). Some books grip me so much it takes discipline to but the down. What this seems to show is that long form reading has significant effects on your brain, developing the ability to read long form. I am not clear on whether they have shown which way the causality runs: maybe having a brain adapted to long form reading just makes you more likely to do it. It could even run both ways?
- amenhotep 2y agoYour wife's right.
- em-bee 2y agomaybe listen to audio books instead. i don't read books because i would forget everything else around me, but with audiobooks i can do other mundane activities (like housework, going for a walk) alongside it, and it feels very different from reading.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- coolThingsFirst 2y agofor some reason experientially is different, when i read on computer it's mainly grab some piece of data that im looking for. i almost never read books on computer, my desire for reading came after i bought a kindle - the difference is absurd. even paper books suck compared to kindle, which saves space, access to billions of books in a comfortable way to read. (can't read brother karamazov laying in bed)
- ruthmarx 2y ago> Does reading text on the internet not count as reading? I guess it depends on intent. Reading a fiction epub in an app is different from reading HN threads with 500+ comments.
- disambiguation 2y agoMy take is that different types of reading affect the brain differently. Reading for facts stimulates the learning parts of the brain, reading comments stimulates the social parts. But Reading books, as in novels, is an act of immersing yourself in storytelling. It's not exactly learning or social, but it's own category.
- okwhateverdude 2y agoVivid hallucination, or dreaming. It is a way to vicariously experience something through the lens of the author's narrative.
- kurthr 2y agoYeah, vivid hallucination or dreaming with open eyes while reading. It's a hypnotic state. How else can you imagine a world while your eyes rapidly scanning pages of words?
- saltcured 2y agoHah, aphantasia enters the arena... I was a voracious reader of fiction as a child, and in a way immersed myself in books too. But, I never really considered whether other readers are having an accompanying visual experience that isn't just pages and pages of typesetting. I also went through a phase of reading a lot of poetry, and was a bit of an outsider because my experience of it is also as text on a page, not some reconstructed audio performance. On the reading speed topic, I don't have any performance metrics for myself but it seemed I was pretty fast and comprehensive compared to peers. I definitely lean towards the gestalt parser side of things, taking in phrases or larger blocks of text rather than scanning one word at a time. As an adult, I've noticed that this ability seems to be more content dependent than I originally understood. If I encounter truly unfamiliar writing styles, or even unfamiliar typesetting conventions, I can find myself getting "disoriented" and having to go back. It's like my visual parsing and lexical parsing pipeline tosses up some kind of "parity" error and I have to go back and try again. I think this reading stall also happens more often with non-fiction, and wonder if that's because I mostly assimilated fiction idioms. So my brain has more trouble predicting and assembling texts that follow other structures. But also, the non-fiction I encounter is more often written by international authors with English as a second language. So that may also shift grammar and prose conventions...
- parasti 2y agoI used to read books with ease but have had to limit my reading to online texts, both short and long form, mostly technical. I know for sure that I am not a reader anymore, because whenever I pick up a book I can't sit through it. It's an entirely different mode of consuming text, for me, one that I would have to relearn.
- johngossman 2y agoI struggled to read books while I was working. When I retired and suddenly stopped getting hundreds of emails every day, my book reading ability--my general ability to focus--came back. I read a lot of books this year, including long novels (1Q84...much longer than it should have been) and histories.
- dingnuts 2y agoThe linked article doesn't make this distinction and only talks about reading comprehension in general.