6 ms·

We've Adapted Our Reading Habits to Fit Our Screens, but at a Cost

48 points by samclemens 11y ago

bryanlarsen 11y ago
It's much easier to skim a newspaper than even the best feed reader, IMO, so it's not like that style of reading is new. I suppose the big difference now is the proportion of time spent on skimming media like newspapers vs long form media.
- chrisacree 11y ago
  I agree that the biggest difference is that the web simply has people spending more time reading skim-worthy content. News/blog articles, forums, and comment threads make up a significant part of online reading and are naturally much more skim-able than most books. That's not a bad thing. The important question is whether, as our deeper reading also goes digital, our habits of skimming while online will extend to them or not. Habits can be hard to break.
klunger 11y ago
The conclusions of this article closely mirror my own experience. I generally prefer reading a physical book because I am much more likely to remember the contents afterward. Things I read on a screen somehow feel slippery and less valuable. But, how do we reconcile this with the transforming publishing industry? Will they only publish text books and prose that requires "deep reading" and leave everything else to be digitized?
rffn 11y ago
I found the article largely unreadable due to all the movement from the animations. Did the author want to show how bad he can design the screen reading experience?
Gys 11y ago
"In digital, we can link in different media, images, sound, and other text, and people can get overwhelmed," explains Andrew Dillon, a professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas, Austin, "These are disruptive activities that can carry a cost in terms of attention." The way the article is presented gives an unintentional (?) perfect example. Using big gifs dividing the text and serving no other purpose then stop me from reading the whole article... And there are moving ads as well. Point well made ;-)
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
A couple of anecdotes, for what they're worth. - I find that if I only consume digital media, over time my ability to deep-dive into complex works of fiction or non-fiction diminishes. My attention span gets very short. I want to "pop off" and go consume something else. It takes a dedicated bit of effort to switch back into real reading mode - From looking at my server logs, the average web consumer doesn't get 99% of whatever you put on the page. People used to say you should design your page so that somebody driving by in a car could read and understand it. I would go so far as to design it so that a drunken one-eyed near-sighted person who is in an argument with their SO could read and understand it while going by at 100 mph. The numbers are not pretty. - Multi-purpose devices have but one goal: to get you to consume more material. The vendors that make them do not care whether you read that new downloaded book for 5 minutes or 5 hours. They only care that you downloaded it. Books on the other hand? People who make those want you to consume one particular work and then share/talk about it. With a book, you and the author are in this thing together. With a multi-media reader, you're just a demographic
tempodox 11y ago
Those graphic animations make it absolutely impossible for me to read the article. Must have been done by effing greenhorns. Professionals should know better.
- privong 11y ago
  I found it somewhat ironic, trying to read the article, "But this style of reading may come at a cost—Liu noted in his study that sustained attention seems to decline when people read onscreen rather than on paper" while motion in my peripheral vision worked to pull my attention away.
  - noxToken 11y ago
    Perhaps it's done intentionally? You're reading an article that's telling you that digital screen reading leaves the user prone to distractions. If they litter their page with distractions, the user can say, "Yeah, I felt distracted while reading this very article! Maybe there is something to this!" Probably not, but you never know.
  - tempodox 11y ago
    Maybe they wanted to know what a self-fulfilling prophecy feels like.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I don't know. Cynic in me thinks that this may be in fact work of professionals, who don't have time to care about irrelevant things such as quality, that do not affect the bottomline.
  - tempodox 11y ago
    But it does affect the bottom line, I think. I was on that page for maybe 5 seconds. Even if I had had time to click an ad, I was certainly not in the mood. If you torture your users like that, they will just run away (and not come back). This thing (and several other “creative” contemporary blogs) reminds me of the blinking web pages from the 1990s.
tobico 11y ago
Seems like this article makes quite a leap from the study results to their suggestion that everyone reads paper books. Study results: 1. People reading on a screen are more likely to skim 2. Skimming reduces comprehension of the material 3. Reading on paper correlates with better reconstruction of plot It seems like 1 and 2 taken together are as good an explanation as any for 3. Given that, I feel like it would be at least worth an experiment to see if making a conscious effort to avoid skimming would be just as effective as switching to reading on paper. If so, I think that would be a cheaper and easier solution to the issue.
- gonzo41 11y ago
  When I was younger and reading on the web, (the days of 28k modems) I didn't skim as much as a do now. I would put this to my inexperience of reading then (thinking that everything needed to be read). And that now there is a lot of crap on the internet. Its hard to sort out the good stuff that deserves attention. So i skim a lot. But paper books are king. I tend to move slower through the text and have a more enjoyable time of it.
zhte415 11y ago
I find font size and environment a big thing. Everything I read on a website is from a desk based environment, from home or at work. Every book I currently read is on the same laptop, but I sit at the back of a bus, with the PDF font size blown up to 10 words per line, where I can lose myself without other distractions. I convert every ePub and the like to a PDF with the formatting I like. From the article: >Liu noted in his study that sustained attention seems to decline when people read onscreen rather than on paper, and that people also spend less time on in-depth reading. Sit at the back of bus. No attention towards anywhere else. > The researchers found that when people read short nonfiction onscreen, their understanding of the text suffered because people managed their time poorly compared with when they used paper (although paper’s advantage disappeared when people were given a fixed amount of time to read the text). Manage time. Sit at the back of a bus to read, instead of standing on the subway despite some time saving. > Other studies have also found costs when people multi-task online Again, sit at the back of a bus. No online. Perhaps the public busses where I live are really nice. Actually, they are, albeit overcrowded at intermediate stops. I intentionally take a slower route home to have time sitting on the back of the bus to read. Pumped up font sizes, a touchscreen laptop, and a seat at the back of a bus are great reading environments. Far better than sitting at home with all the distractions that makes. An anecdote: I much prefer pumped up font sizes on an 11" screen than typical typeset in a handily carried book. And cannot concentrate when trying to read on a 6" or 7" phone/small tablet screen.
jotm 11y ago
I agree that we consume more information, probably way too much, but in my experience, attention to detail and deep comprehension of the material depends more on how interested in the topic you are. If I am actually trying to learn something or if I like a story, I'll become extremely focused on it no matter the medium (even the small smartphone screens that I usually hate are fine). But if I'm reading for the sake of reading or to update my knowledge of a topic or stay up to date with the news, then I'll skim like crazy...
kazinator 11y ago
Ironically, I skimmed through this, looking for a key sentence in every paragraph. Didn't find much of value. People need to learn to condense their point, ideally down to one small paragraph or sentence. For instance, "Without any data to back it up, I have a suspicion that people's reading skills are suffering because they are used to being flooded with writing in the digital world, and so they don't read everything from top to bottom." I have another opinion, which is this: People are now reading more than ever (and writing). Thirty years ago, the same types of people wouldn't be reading anything at all, and spend several hours a day in front of a TV. And they wouldn't be writing text messages, but rather using the telephone. The reason people are non-linearly scanning text is not because they are managing their time poorly. They are managing their time well in the face of poorly organized, information-sparse rambling. Most writing out there competing for your attention doesn't deserve it, and in writing that does deserve your attention, there are actually only small "hot spots" which do, not everything. Non-linear reading isn't a degradation in reading skill; it is a valuable skill in it own right. Schools even teach this to kids: how to skim through text to get the gist of the content so that you can focus on what is relevant. (And they taught this before the "digital age".) You need this skill to get through university. When you're doing research, there are just too many books and papers to sit there going word by word. So, skim on, friends! And raise a big TL;DR middle finger to ramblers (like what I'm becoming here with this comment).
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  Most writing out there competing for your attention doesn't deserve it, and in writing that does deserve your attention, there are actually only small "hot spots" which do, not everything. I don't know if digital reading is shrinking my reading attention span, but "long form journalism" sure is. The utility of the journalism in day to day life is already quite low, and the utility is usually correlated with boring and dry. Reading articles written by people who think so highly of their storytelling to waste my time by padding it out made me realize I don't give a fuck. Now I can't help but notice regular news is padded out as well. There is still room in my heart for in depth reporting, but "long form" is a trick to be engaging, just like clickbait but with a fake air of importance.
edgarvaldes 11y ago
Reader View mode on FF, or any other addon/bookmarklet, works great when I really want to focus on an article.
tammer 11y ago
While the difference between skimming and thorough reading is obvious, I think the finding at the bottom has some merit. Thinking back on books I've read on print vs ones I've only read on screens, I can certainly remember the chronology of paper books better. Perhaps that is due to the physicality of pages gradually accumulating on the left side. I feel like this has some definite implications for UI design - is blankness with text really the best way to convey an ebook?

48 points by samclemens 11y ago

It's much easier to skim a newspaper than even the best feed reader, IMO, so it's not like that style of reading is new. I suppose the big difference now is the proportion of time spent on skimming media like newspapers vs long form media.

chrisacree 11y ago
I agree that the biggest difference is that the web simply has people spending more time reading skim-worthy content. News/blog articles, forums, and comment threads make up a significant part of online reading and are naturally much more skim-able than most books. That's not a bad thing. The important question is whether, as our deeper reading also goes digital, our habits of skimming while online will extend to them or not. Habits can be hard to break.

klunger 11y ago

The conclusions of this article closely mirror my own experience. I generally prefer reading a physical book because I am much more likely to remember the contents afterward. Things I read on a screen somehow feel slippery and less valuable. But, how do we reconcile this with the transforming publishing industry? Will they only publish text books and prose that requires "deep reading" and leave everything else to be digitized?

rffn 11y ago

I found the article largely unreadable due to all the movement from the animations. Did the author want to show how bad he can design the screen reading experience?

Gys 11y ago

"In digital, we can link in different media, images, sound, and other text, and people can get overwhelmed," explains Andrew Dillon, a professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas, Austin, "These are disruptive activities that can carry a cost in terms of attention." The way the article is presented gives an unintentional (?) perfect example. Using big gifs dividing the text and serving no other purpose then stop me from reading the whole article... And there are moving ads as well. Point well made ;-)

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

A couple of anecdotes, for what they're worth. - I find that if I only consume digital media, over time my ability to deep-dive into complex works of fiction or non-fiction diminishes. My attention span gets very short. I want to "pop off" and go consume something else. It takes a dedicated bit of effort to switch back into real reading mode - From looking at my server logs, the average web consumer doesn't get 99% of whatever you put on the page. People used to say you should design your page so that somebody driving by in a car could read and understand it. I would go so far as to design it so that a drunken one-eyed near-sighted person who is in an argument with their SO could read and understand it while going by at 100 mph. The numbers are not pretty. - Multi-purpose devices have but one goal: to get you to consume more material. The vendors that make them do not care whether you read that new downloaded book for 5 minutes or 5 hours. They only care that you downloaded it. Books on the other hand? People who make those want you to consume one particular work and then share/talk about it. With a book, you and the author are in this thing together. With a multi-media reader, you're just a demographic

tempodox 11y ago

Those graphic animations make it absolutely impossible for me to read the article. Must have been done by effing greenhorns. Professionals should know better.

privong 11y ago
I found it somewhat ironic, trying to read the article, "But this style of reading may come at a cost—Liu noted in his study that sustained attention seems to decline when people read onscreen rather than on paper" while motion in my peripheral vision worked to pull my attention away.
- noxToken 11y ago
  Perhaps it's done intentionally? You're reading an article that's telling you that digital screen reading leaves the user prone to distractions. If they litter their page with distractions, the user can say, "Yeah, I felt distracted while reading this very article! Maybe there is something to this!" Probably not, but you never know.
- tempodox 11y ago
  Maybe they wanted to know what a self-fulfilling prophecy feels like.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
I don't know. Cynic in me thinks that this may be in fact work of professionals, who don't have time to care about irrelevant things such as quality, that do not affect the bottomline.
- tempodox 11y ago
  But it does affect the bottom line, I think. I was on that page for maybe 5 seconds. Even if I had had time to click an ad, I was certainly not in the mood. If you torture your users like that, they will just run away (and not come back). This thing (and several other “creative” contemporary blogs) reminds me of the blinking web pages from the 1990s.

tobico 11y ago

Seems like this article makes quite a leap from the study results to their suggestion that everyone reads paper books. Study results: 1. People reading on a screen are more likely to skim 2. Skimming reduces comprehension of the material 3. Reading on paper correlates with better reconstruction of plot It seems like 1 and 2 taken together are as good an explanation as any for 3. Given that, I feel like it would be at least worth an experiment to see if making a conscious effort to avoid skimming would be just as effective as switching to reading on paper. If so, I think that would be a cheaper and easier solution to the issue.

gonzo41 11y ago
When I was younger and reading on the web, (the days of 28k modems) I didn't skim as much as a do now. I would put this to my inexperience of reading then (thinking that everything needed to be read). And that now there is a lot of crap on the internet. Its hard to sort out the good stuff that deserves attention. So i skim a lot. But paper books are king. I tend to move slower through the text and have a more enjoyable time of it.

zhte415 11y ago

I find font size and environment a big thing. Everything I read on a website is from a desk based environment, from home or at work. Every book I currently read is on the same laptop, but I sit at the back of a bus, with the PDF font size blown up to 10 words per line, where I can lose myself without other distractions. I convert every ePub and the like to a PDF with the formatting I like. From the article: >Liu noted in his study that sustained attention seems to decline when people read onscreen rather than on paper, and that people also spend less time on in-depth reading. Sit at the back of bus. No attention towards anywhere else. > The researchers found that when people read short nonfiction onscreen, their understanding of the text suffered because people managed their time poorly compared with when they used paper (although paper’s advantage disappeared when people were given a fixed amount of time to read the text). Manage time. Sit at the back of a bus to read, instead of standing on the subway despite some time saving. > Other studies have also found costs when people multi-task online Again, sit at the back of a bus. No online. Perhaps the public busses where I live are really nice. Actually, they are, albeit overcrowded at intermediate stops. I intentionally take a slower route home to have time sitting on the back of the bus to read. Pumped up font sizes, a touchscreen laptop, and a seat at the back of a bus are great reading environments. Far better than sitting at home with all the distractions that makes. An anecdote: I much prefer pumped up font sizes on an 11" screen than typical typeset in a handily carried book. And cannot concentrate when trying to read on a 6" or 7" phone/small tablet screen.

jotm 11y ago

I agree that we consume more information, probably way too much, but in my experience, attention to detail and deep comprehension of the material depends more on how interested in the topic you are. If I am actually trying to learn something or if I like a story, I'll become extremely focused on it no matter the medium (even the small smartphone screens that I usually hate are fine). But if I'm reading for the sake of reading or to update my knowledge of a topic or stay up to date with the news, then I'll skim like crazy...

kazinator 11y ago

Ironically, I skimmed through this, looking for a key sentence in every paragraph. Didn't find much of value. People need to learn to condense their point, ideally down to one small paragraph or sentence. For instance, "Without any data to back it up, I have a suspicion that people's reading skills are suffering because they are used to being flooded with writing in the digital world, and so they don't read everything from top to bottom." I have another opinion, which is this: People are now reading more than ever (and writing). Thirty years ago, the same types of people wouldn't be reading anything at all, and spend several hours a day in front of a TV. And they wouldn't be writing text messages, but rather using the telephone. The reason people are non-linearly scanning text is not because they are managing their time poorly. They are managing their time well in the face of poorly organized, information-sparse rambling. Most writing out there competing for your attention doesn't deserve it, and in writing that does deserve your attention, there are actually only small "hot spots" which do, not everything. Non-linear reading isn't a degradation in reading skill; it is a valuable skill in it own right. Schools even teach this to kids: how to skim through text to get the gist of the content so that you can focus on what is relevant. (And they taught this before the "digital age".) You need this skill to get through university. When you're doing research, there are just too many books and papers to sit there going word by word. So, skim on, friends! And raise a big TL;DR middle finger to ramblers (like what I'm becoming here with this comment).

forgottenpass 11y ago
Most writing out there competing for your attention doesn't deserve it, and in writing that does deserve your attention, there are actually only small "hot spots" which do, not everything. I don't know if digital reading is shrinking my reading attention span, but "long form journalism" sure is. The utility of the journalism in day to day life is already quite low, and the utility is usually correlated with boring and dry. Reading articles written by people who think so highly of their storytelling to waste my time by padding it out made me realize I don't give a fuck. Now I can't help but notice regular news is padded out as well. There is still room in my heart for in depth reporting, but "long form" is a trick to be engaging, just like clickbait but with a fake air of importance.

edgarvaldes 11y ago

Reader View mode on FF, or any other addon/bookmarklet, works great when I really want to focus on an article.

tammer 11y ago

While the difference between skimming and thorough reading is obvious, I think the finding at the bottom has some merit. Thinking back on books I've read on print vs ones I've only read on screens, I can certainly remember the chronology of paper books better. Perhaps that is due to the physicality of pages gradually accumulating on the left side. I feel like this has some definite implications for UI design - is blankness with text really the best way to convey an ebook?