
What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day - pepys
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/what-we-lose-by-reading-100000-words-every-day/2018/10/04/72dea000-b212-11e8-a20b-5f4f84429666_story.html
======
dpark
> _“My grafted, spasmodic, online style, while appropriate for much of my
> day’s ordinary reading, had been transferred indiscriminately to all of my
> reading, rending my former immersion in more difficult texts less and less
> satisfying,” she writes. Wolf soon tried again, forcing herself to start
> with 20-minute intervals, and managed to recover her “former reading self.”_

Translation: I stopped reading novels and then found it difficult to start
again.

The problem isn’t the fluff we read online. The problem is that _when you go
long periods without reading novels, it’s harder to pick up a novel and enjoy
it_. Reading fluff online doesn’t make you stop reading novels, though, any
more than watching TV makes you stop reading novels. It’s entirely possible to
do both, with the caveat that everyone’s time is limited. But there’s nothing
about browsing online that intrinsically makes it hard to read novels.

~~~
Taylor_OD
This. I consume books endlessly and almost always have... Unless I stop. A few
times in my life I've started reading a book and when it didnt hold my
interest I stopped picking it up. 3 months to a year later I would come across
an interesting book and then it was back to constantly reading.

To help avoid this situation I've made it part of my morning routine to read
for 15 minutes every morning (keeps the world/story alive in my head) and if I
don't pick up a book for 7 days I move on to another book.

Using this method I'm at 27 books for the year and I've moved on from 2.

~~~
kbenson
I actually limit my exposure to novels because I find it extremely hard to
stop reading once I start. I'll stay up _way_ too late, and sneak reading in
throughout the day, basically doing whatever I have to to continue and finish
the story. I enjoy this process, as it keeps me immersed, but it's not
healthy.

~~~
WalterSear
Someone should create a book that helps us manage this harmful technology! We
should, at least, keep novels out of the reach of children.

~~~
walshemj
Indeed "Is It a Book That You Would Even Wish Your Wife or Your Servants to
Read?"

This is a Quote from the LadyChatterley’sLover Trial in the 60's

------
daveslash
This reminds me of Ray Bradbury's _Fahrenheit 451_. Many people believe the
story to be about censorship, but Bradbury himself (in his later years)
publicly claimed it was about peoples' increasingly short attention spans. In
_Fahrenheit 451_ , people were afraid of books because the stories, thoughts,
and concepts were more than mere sound-bytes and were thus unintelligible to
the masses with shortened attention spans.

 _Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’ .?.?. This sort of
hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included,
to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading
people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people._ ~Bradbury

Source: [https://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-
fahrenheit-451-mi...](https://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-
fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted-2149125)

[Edit] Punctuation & typos.

~~~
tinalumfoil
I tried reading 451 once, since it seemed up my alley. I got about a chapter
in, put it down and never picked it up again. It wasn't that I didn't like the
book (I don't remember if I did), but I just happened to get really busy right
after that and just forgot that I ever started reading.

Maybe if I had read it I would understand the importance of having an
attention long enough to finish the book. Thing is if I had that attention
span the lesson would be lost on me since I'm already reading the book.

In other words, a book teaching the importance of reading books is teaching a
pointless lesson.

~~~
daveslash
Good point. I enjoyed it, but never picked up on the attention-span lesson at
all; I read it thinking it was about censorship. I know now that the author's
intent was to write a story about attention-span. I now take it to be a social
commentary. Side-note: after reading the book, I rented the movie on DVD. The
DVD had a scratch on it -- a scene faded out, the player hit the scratch and
skipped ahead... it landed on a fade in scene. I didn't even notice. The movie
_I watched_ was only about 20 minutes and I thought " _man, they left out a
lot of stuff_ ".

~~~
bllguo
bradbury's stance on _Fahrenheit 451_ is what convinced me that authorial
intent is irrelevant.

------
sjg007
Hopefully, some aspiring psychologist or neuroscientist will be able to
quantify the effect. My hypothesis is that this is driven by an information
seeking dopamine reward cycle and that for some reason we lose the capacity in
our executive function to regulate it. Much like an addiction. There is so
much digital distraction. Similar to ADD perhaps? You can also see this in
modern movies, shows and cartoons where the pace has quickened. It's hard to
watch old movies or older cartoons etc... Watch old episodes of Sesame St vs
new episodes and you can see the shift. And even then kids get bored of new
episodes with the ultimate addiction being youtube. I actually don't find
youtube too bad in moderation because kids do take ideas and try to play with
them in the real world. You just have to be sure they aren't overexposed and
exposed to ideas that are not healthy. What I am saying is that I do see
imaginative play despite youtube or that incorporates youtube.

So in this hyper digital world it feels like we have less time. Even though
time remains the same. There is always something seeking our attention and for
the most part it is unimportant but we can't ignore it.

------
gdubs
After the 2016 election, during which I spent an inordinate time online,
constantly searching for some 'new' piece of information like a smoker
lighting up a cigarette before the last one had finished burning, I realized
that I was having a harder time than usual getting through the books I was
reading. The effect was two-fold: not only was I spending more time online, I
was fragmenting my attention; when I sat down to read a book, I found my brain
was pausing for interruptions. I was training myself to self-interrupt. The
book, "The Distracted Mind" goes deep into the science behind this phenomena,
and is really worth checking out.

------
Aeolun
It sounds a bit silly to assume that reading a hundred reddit posts a day
would interfere with my reading of a good novel. I haven’t encountered
anuthing even close to it, but I guess it might be different for others?

~~~
bootsz
I've definitely noticed it myself. I have a much harder time reading novels or
any long-form content these days, and I suspect it's due to consuming lots of
very-short-form content on a daily basis. On HN and elsewhere on the internet
you can consume a huge number of distinct ideas in a very short time. This
causes me to now be impatient with long-form pieces where I find myself
wanting to just "get to the point already". It's a quantity vs. quality
problem. The internet tends to favor quantity.

It's something I'm trying to work on because there's obviously immense value
in books and long-form reads (and a lot you get out of them that you can't get
out of little snippets and quick articles).

~~~
jodrellblank
" _there 's obviously immense value in books and long-form reads_"

Is there? Or are you just saying that because it's expected and you'd feel
embarrassed if you said otherwise?

Humans are pattern matchers, what if we see patterns more easily from many
examples, rather than one? What if we extract patterns more easily seeing them
from many points of view instead of just one author?

Is a neural network better trained on one high detail photo, or a dataset of
many photos?

~~~
jodrellblank
Someone's got to have a better comeback than a downvote. You know where
there's "obviously immense value"? Oil fields. People literally kill to
control them.

Nobody kills to take control of a library.

At best you could say people get into massive debt for education. But at the
same time, education is clamouring for online courses, videos, conferencing,
teachers, interaction, and textbooks are widely considered a problem - low
priority, low quality, a racket, going back years since Richard Feynman's
famous story about reviewing them at least.

Books, especially academic books, are increasingly given away for free online
- when people will pay for entertainment.

How many people learn from a teacher, a course, or learn by doing, vs how many
actually learn from books?

People don't treat books the way they treat things they value. There may be
immense value in books, it's not "obvious".

------
jasode
First off, I haven't studied Maryanne Wolf's neuroscientific research on "deep
reading" and its claimed benefits. But, as a person who has read most of the
major thick books like Moby Dick, War & Peace, Les Miserables, Middlemarch,
Proust, and reading _cover-to-cover_ the old computer books like the 3-ring
binders of C Language[1], my lifetime reading experience could offer
counterpoint to why "deep reading" seems to be a lost activity:

 _Most of the text out there is just not good quality that deserves or rewards
deep reading._

My pet theory is that the rampant skimming or "shallow reading" is basically
the brain performing a hidden Bayesian probability that any random text put in
front of us isn't worth the effort of deep reading.[2] This is why many of us
go to HN comments first instead of reading the actual article. The Bayesian
priors told us that the "tldr" in the comments got to the point where the
article all-too-often had a self-indulgent author that meandered all over the
place and wasted our time. Therefore, "shallow reading" isn't bad for us...
it's our way of optimizing against "information overload".

Even college professors who are used to heavy reading workloads skim new work.
I'd argue this is another manifestation of Bayesian priors.

To back to my C Language example. I didn't really learn C by reading those
binders cover to cover. (Deep reading.) I _really_ learned it when I did
_shallow reading_ across fragmented sources like USENET comp.lang.c forum and
playing around with toy programs. So maybe deep reading isn't the answer but
the attention restriction from not being distracted with Twitter and Instagram
notifications. In other words, maybe we're conflating benefits "uninterrupted
study" with "deep reading".

[1]
[https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33794](https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33794)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

~~~
EGreg
For anyone who found the above too long, basically she means that deep reading
often wastes too much time and you don’t know ahead of time what to read. She
didn’t mention that you can check other shorter sources before you commit to
reading, like reading this comment before hers.

~~~
jasode
_> , basically she means that deep reading often wastes too much time _

I apologize that you found my text length was too long but I thought the extra
background was necessary to state _why_ deep reading is often a waste of time.

If I _only_ state a 1 sentence punchline in my original post, it can seem like
a cheap hit-and-run comment and therefore not really engaging with the
article's arguments. (Or the extreme brevity would just invite snark such as
_" you probably don't have deep reading skill"_. Therefore, a writer's reflex
is to defensively preempt that with extra words that try to establish street
cred.)

I thought it would be interesting to share that many of us can do "deep
reading" and yet we don't bother with the effort -- _and that behavior is not
a contradiction_. Instead, it's an optimization of limited reading time. This
tradeoff doesn't seem to be reflected in Maryanne Wolf's research.

 _> She didn’t mention that you can check other shorter sources before you
commit to reading,_

I actually did and I specifically used "HN comments" as an example of readers
trying to find a tldr summary and why it's a rational strategy.

~~~
StevenRayOrr
> _I apologize that you found my text length was too long but I thought the
> extra background was necessary to get state why deep reading is often a
> waste of time._

I read @EGreg as poking a bit of fun, rather than raising a legitimate
complaint: simultaneously supporting your point, but also gently pushing at
the limits of shallow reading.

~~~
ninju
<sarcasm> We need a digest of HN comments for people don't have _time_ to read
the comments about an article regarding people not having time to read
everything that they come across </sarcasm>

------
mapcars
answer is: time :)

~~~
trukterious
It's more like 'thinkjuice'. The act of making all the perceptual
discriminations required to consume 100,000 words cuts into the cognitive
budget.

------
casper345
Also might just be easier and more convenient to read the articles online. We
have laptops, phones, tablets, emails as mediums to read "100,000" words but a
novel (preferably on canvas) is physical and limited by nature. I can read
hacker news at work but I cannot just whip out Oliver Twist when I'm
'sneaking' a break.

------
hyko
_the average person “consumes about 34 gigabytes across varied devices each
day” — some 100,000 words’ worth of information_ \- seems like an odd and
misleading statistic.

~~~
tw1010
The precise number doesn't really matter. The strongman interpretation is that
we just read and skim too much each day.

~~~
jgtrosh
If so, the title of the article is meaningless clickbait. From reading the
article it seems to me the author takes the phrase at face value as they
imagine skim reading a third of Middlemarch in a day. I'm surprised they
describe different modes of reading as a skill future people will have, since
afaik it's normal for most people to approach different types of texts at
different speeds and paying attention in different ways. I can skim quickly
over comments and articles just building an understanding of the context and
basic information and conclusions people are using, while I will read a
scientific article anywhere between ½ and 3 pages per hour if I'm actually
trying to understand a difficult concept.

------
jillav
Reading that "online content destroys the old way we used to consume
information" kind of observation always remind me of that :
[https://xkcd.com/1601/](https://xkcd.com/1601/)

------
neonate
[https://outline.com/HRfAnU](https://outline.com/HRfAnU)

~~~
sbr464
I was just thinking a service like this would be useful, and the large sum I
would pay to not be inundated with animated ads when reading articles.

~~~
Cthulhu_
If it's just the articles, ad blockers work, as does reader mode(s). Even AMP
would if they offer it, but AMP is an evil hostile takeover attempt from
Google.

If it's the subscription paywall, just get the subscription. Else, don't read
it on a site infringing on copyright - you're not entitled to the content.

~~~
kd5bjo
How about illegally charging more if you don’t want to consent to their
tracking regime?

~~~
heyyyouu
How is it illegal to charge?

~~~
kd5bjo
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199132)
.

